Comments on: Household biohacking coming to a neighborhood near you!

By: DIY BIO: clone at home but kill them later [Discovering Biology in a Digital World]

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:19:43 +0000

[...] some people, who call themselves DIY biologists, have started cloning GFP for fun in their kitchens. Other people find this [...]

By: JonathanCline

JonathanCline — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:39:46 +0000

I would like to meet these diybio guys and see what they are really doing. Based solely on what I have seen online, the “DIY biology in the garage” is far, far, far from being close to real. The hype is interesting however.. I think the need to secure funding and venture capital has created quite an exaggerated momentum in biology.

“”"It is also worth noting that the concept of opensource technology/science is fundamental to any significant vision of a DIY future.”"”

I don’t see how that can be the case, at all. Historically, DIY kits are proprietary! They are not open source. In fact, it can be shown that open sourcing such as “GNU viral license” actually slows things down because the possibility of capitalist profits are removed.. so the hobby industry is hampered from lack of storefronts & vendors.

Look back at the DIY movement in amateur radio, for example (HAM operators, etc). All those radio kits were proprietary and sometimes incompatible with each other. i.e. You couldn’t take the schematic from a Radio Shack (or whomever) ham radio and connect it arbitrarily to a Fisher schematic..

And the DIY movement in personal data telecommunications, back in the 80′s, was based on proprietary modems and BBS’s.. not standard at all! It flourished quite well, too. The old “modem baudrate wars” actually spurred innovation, because the vendors could attempt to differentiate their designs — and win consumer / hobbyist dollars.

So anyway. Home hobbyist beer-making isn’t standardized, and there’s no reason why synthetic biology home hobbyist labs would be either..

By: Sung W Lim

Sung W Lim — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:14:37 +0000

DIY biology is a natural outcome of the technology itself. There will be some version of DIY biology in the near future, whether it happens behind closed doors or within supervised mid/high school labs.

It’s all the more reason to speed up the study into the nature of DIY technology. We need more abstractions that make it easy for people to approach the science and technology of the DIY biology (to certain extent, at least). We need broad range of tools and tutorials that are designed to be ‘safe’ (not leak out randomly into the environment and propagate, through combination of protocols and prefabricated tools) and easy enough for the laymen to do their version of the ‘hello world’ programming within a week or two of experience. Despite the relative immaturity and complexity of the field of synthetic biology itself, I believe these things will be possible to achieve with a dedicated effort of a coordinated group of people…

It is also worth noting that the concept of opensource technology/science is fundamental to any significant vision of a DIY future.