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DIY Biologists To Open Source Research
destinyland writes "Falling costs and garage tinkering are creating a grass roots movement of amateur biologists whose research is more transparent than that of academia. They are building lab equipment using common household items and even synthesizing new organisms, and their transparency also allows the social pressure which creates more ethical research. DIY Bio.org fosters lab co-ops for large equipment and provokes important discussions. (Would it be ethical to release a homegrown symbiote that cures scurvy in hundreds of thousands of people?) This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease, fuel-generating microbes, or even a social-networked disease-tracking epidemiology. 'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves,' argues h+ magazine, which featured the article in their summer issue."
Really, if they are THAT good at research, then why not at a university?
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
No, it appears to be someone named "Anonymous Cowardon."
Takes me back to the early eighties when you could form your band before you learned how to play your instruments, only with punk biology you can learn to play on somebody else's liver.
Love it.
I think if the technology becomes cheap, garage biology will be something to deal with whether we like it or not.
OMG! Genetically modified organisms! KILL STABBITY STAB STAB DIE DIE DIE DIE! burnthewitch
really, um, exactly what sort of "social pressures" do they propose exist which will lead to more "ethical research"?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
h+: There has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of people doing this sort of research at home. Do you think this is over-exaggerated?
MP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment outside a laboratory are vanishingly low.
Rudy Rucker has a great quote on that, "I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology research. When we design a transgenic organism, we're deliberately adding one specific piece of new functionality, maybe a small pathway that leads to a new piece of functionality -- and the organism has to expend energy on producing the new proteins that those new genes code for. Because of this, the synthetic organism is necessarily less competitive than its wild-type relatives who are much better suited for the niche they already occupy in the environment.
So any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations, because itâ(TM)s just not competitive enough.
That's right. When rabbits were introduced in Australia, they died off right away because they were less competitive than their wild-type relatives who were much better suited to the niche they already occupied.
I wouldn't worry about "DIY biologists" cooking up some terrible superbug that wipes us all out. I would, however, worry about these biologists' personal safety. If they want to crunch data at home, no problem, but if they're trying to set up actual home labs, then there is a pretty good chance that at some point they will find their doors being broken down by armed men who are notorious for their lack of willingness to listen to reasonable explanations as to why there's all this glassware lying around.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I read this yesterday. The 5 minute DNA extraction guide mentioned is awesome. It's incredibly simple. I think I might give it a try sometime this week.
http://www.instructables.com/id/5_minute_DNA_Extraction_in_a_Shot_Glass/
Hopefully we're on the cusp of big breakthroughs in biology that will eventually (and soon) give us the science to stay healthy for much longer than we have been able to in the past.
That's right. When rabbits were introduced in Australia, they died off right away because they were less competitive than their wild-type relatives who were much better suited to the niche they already occupied.
The correct comparison would be more wild rabbits vs the same species which have had a gene introduced which makes them glow in the dark, or somesuch.
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Of course organisms wouldn't be created with malicious intent. Just like computer viruses are just mistakes, right?
Oh well, I'm sure the first plague created by these lonesome nerds will be a highly contagious but harmless disease that makes chicks really horny...
Cure disease
Provide clean water
Provide better food
All increase the world population.
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Am I the only one having visions of Frank Herbert's the White Plague?
There is nothing wrong with researching at home, but how does one ensure the integrity of a bio filter system at home? The concept of someone 'releasing' a 'cure' for ANYTHING from their basement no matter how well intended simply scares the feces out of me. Can you seriously see a point at which somthing would NOT need WIDE peer review and independent recreation before be 'released into the wild' ?
As for why someone would not be at a college/univiersity or government level, I can think of 2 good reasons - bureaucracy and politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You don't like what 6.5 billion people are doing to the world now? Wait and see how badly we'd treat it if we were all starving to death.
However, we're moving away from such "crude" techniques towards more sophisticated analytical tools, since in many ways biochemistry is now technology-limited. Single-molecule work, such as that pioneered by Carlos Bustamante provide insights that would never be possible with classical methods, and on the other end of the spectrum, we're now working on characterizing the entire network of small metabolite molecules simultaneously and quantitatively. This kind of work just isn't easily carried out by amateur enthusiasts.
That said, there is certainly quite a bit of research that DIY biologists would be capable of performing, especially considering that they could have access to the same kind of resources that professionals do. For example, after amplifying a gene, no researcher will sequence it themselves: it's shipped of to a specialized lab that will do it, for a fee. That sequencing step requires equipment and expertise that's at a higher level than even the pros don't have.
But regardless of theoretical ability, the professionals retain the advantage that it is their job to work on these projects. The time they can dedicate to their work will be far greater than someone who does it as a hobby.
Back to the subject of "openness", the professional scientific world isn't nearly as closed-off as the article would have you believe. It is true that there is a persistent fear of being "scooped", but the standards are changing for staking your claim on a particular piece of research.
It used to be that a full manuscript in a scientific journal was the only thing sufficient to get credit for something. Now, people are gradually embracing online resources are a valid way to communicate, and by extension, to prove that they were the source of any particular bit of publicized material. Even non-finalized material is now more common to make public: Nature has a pre-publication online source for publishing findings, and there are journals devoted entirely to negative results, which was previously unheard-of.
The walls are coming down, it's just a question of finalizing the transition, and winning over the old guard.
Disclosure: I am a professional research scientist, one of the younger ones. I have a substantial hardware/software project in the works, which will likely be simultaneously published via classic journal, online website, and software via SourceForge.
http://www.metasploit.com/
Not generally malicious, but it is malware lego.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You could throw in some extra metabolism and weight loss too
Knowing that was sci-fi and everything, still amazed me how people (even childs) in his future vision were able to "self repair" themselves, at the point that medics were treated like car repairmen.
This DIY Bio looks like going in that direction.
I foresee a whole army of self-deluded crackpots peddling "cures" that they discovered in their basements. No doubt, the establishment will ignore them and their ingenious remedies which are sure to shake-up the entire medical industry. Or, at least, that's how they will interpret things.
> "This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease"
Let's hope they aren't doing any actual testing on humans or animals.
why is it that anyone who does anything that the public can see gets tagged open source around here? do you fucking idiots even know what the word source means? have you fuckers ever heard of public domain?
I think you may be drawing too direct a comparison. It used to be that cloning a gene responsibly for a known phenotype was enough for a significant publication. (That was before my time). Now to get prestige in academia you need to map out the surrounding regulatory networks or at least do a lot more work to characterize WHY gene X is creating phenotype Y. I assume the level of complexity required to publish has expanded similarly in biochemistry
I see the benefits of this DIY work as twofold. First, a huge fraction of genes (in my field, plant biology) are still annotated only as unknown function. Figuring out those functions may not be the path to a career of academic fame and fortune, but I'd really appreciate any group of people who start making a dent in them. But I doubt they'll do a lot of this, they sound a lot more like synthetic biologists. So secondly, in the field of synthetic biology right now a lot of the work being done is very conservative. For example reconstituting a photosystem from an algae in another microbe. If that works it'll be really cool, and tell us a lot about the genetic regulation involved in the process, but it's not as risky as a lot of things these garage biologists are doing. Not risky in a threat-to-human-life-as-we-know-it way obviously, but risky in a this-probably-won't-work way. You try telling a grad student "here's your thesis project, there's a 90% chance it won't work and after four years in the lab you'll have nothing to show for it, you won't publish, you won't graduate, but good luck with that."
People in garages can afford to fail, and that means they'll potential develop a few useful things that would have been easy to do in a professional lab, but appeared so improbable no one would want to gamble on them.
This is more like worrying about toy poodles going feral... in an area that's already got a coyote problem.
Every field has its crackpots. Genetic already has some of our own, check out dnaperfection.com sometime if you don't believe me.
People who want to survive in the world have to be able to distinguish reality from a crazy persons fantasy. If you can't you'll end up going to homeopathic healers, or installing magnets that make the water in your irrigation system "more evenly polarized," or investing billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities.
The signal-to-noise ratio is already pretty bad, and this isn't going to appreciable worsen the ratio.
Don't know much about history Don't know much of biology But I do know I'll infect you With a new strain Of homebrewed flu What a wonderful world This will be
'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves
The homebrew era of the PC lasted a little more than two years.
By 1977 Apple and Microsoft are in place -
and the PC is a clearly defined and easily recognizable commercial product no later than the mid-eighties.
I don't know where the notion of a homebrewed computer science comes from. The clearly dominant players here are the military, the big university and corporate research giants like Bell Labs and IBM.
Quite cute the whole thing, interesting and not unexpected in the long run.
But then,
this guy is talking about generating modified bacteria producing "vitamin c" and releasing them into the guts of people. And ethical discussions don't start to cover the problems there!
For starters,
1) Some newer studies indicate that high intake of vitamin C have/could have a negative effect on health in the long run (maybe kills you afer 20-30 years, just speculation, but what do we know, that's statistics and really hard to check). So, releasing a bug into the wild (meaning us humans) that is constantly producing vitamin C could be a little, hmmm, unhealthy when your old and your retirement is up. That's a real-life-experiment :-)
2) Introducing genes is fun (I agree), but did you get rid of all the antibiotic-resistence markers (yep, that's how it normally works). Who checks that? Your bugs will meet the bad guys in the gut (no way around) and then they have a little sharing-your-mine-DNA-party!
3) Considering the loads of experiments and clinical trials you have to do before you let people eat modified bacteria (and they make sense, what do we know about what it will do in us humans, I mean we never developed a vitamin C production ourselves, maybe there is a reason for that) any hobby-biologist needs quite a lot of stuff and money! Consider selling your new Ferrarri, you will need that money for the tests and the first clinical trial (a handful of people) alone. The 2nd+3rd clinical trials, maybe best to sell your mansion :-(
In my opinion playing biologist at home is fun, on certain levels. But there are good reasons for lab-safety protocols and releasing stuff into the wild. And that's expensive. And releasing stuff into the human population is a gamble with potential dangerous results.
Oh, and the idea that biological science is not open, is laughable. Yes all scientists do it up to publication. And you do that as fast as possible. Then its practically open source (except the industry). Any supermarket manager hides his internal data better :-)
Have fun, let's play:-)
So just from reading the summary I want to say that I have grown somewhat tired of the attitude towards academia on here. It is not a place of suppressed ideas, incompetent people, publish or perish, and faked results to get more funding. While publish or perish can be very true at the most elite universities, it ain't true everywhere. There are plenty of profs doing good research at upper tier liberal arts schools, teaching only a bit more than they would at UC San whereever. Hell, you can even go to a decent sized research school and not feel like you are in hell. As an UNDERGRAD I worked 60-80 hours a week on classes, grad school applications/related stuff (like the GREs) and working in a lab. It sucked, but I worked longer hours than the majority of professors. I think anyone that earned a decent Ph.D. to get tenure shouldn't complain when they are working less than their students.
Lack of transparency? The biomedical research industry is far worse on this issue. "Getting scooped" (idea stealing) is only a problem when you are working on a project. Once it is done and sent off for publication or discussed at a conference (or brown bag seminar in your own department) everything is way more open than it would ever be in the corporate world.
Can't get access to an article? Try scholar.google.com. Many journals allow researchers to post PDFs on their personal webpages, and such documents come up in this search. I went to a liberal arts college with a shit library, and google scholar was how I got work done (That and a zippy interlibrary loan service). No one actually pays $30 to read some article, and if you think that is how the system works then you have been completely duped.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
Anyone can do it.
Spit into a beaker, find some keen organisms, move some DNA around (kits available online), and then flush it down the sink.
Or maybe insert some plasmids you got from your cat.
If it turns out interesting you can mail it to your congress critter!
----
Bioethanol Feed @ Feed Distiller
While I understand the DIY biologists argument about how wild varieties are inherently more robust than organisms created via engineering, I find it incredibly naive to assume that since something is generally true that it will always be true. With the dangers so potentially devastating, even an extremely low probably event must be accounted for. Advocating less regulation than ham radio is the height of stupidity.
While it is true that encoding for new introduced proteins is probably going to be energy wasteful and therefore put the organism at a selective disadvantage, there is always some remote chance the new process could confer some sort of unintended selective advantage, allowing it to flourish. Adding to this danger is that many microorganisms swap genetic code via non-sexual methods as well, allowing for even more chance of unintended conference of advantage. All this ignores the possibility of malicious intent as well, and while it would be rare it isn't impossible.
This kind of danger needs to be approached much like how risk assessment is done on nuclear facilities. Biology is as or more powerful a tool than nuclear science is, and needs to be approached with similar standards of safety. I don't want to sound like jurassic park here, but having due respect for the power of nature should be pre-requisite to tinkering with it.
*Car analogy* This is like giving a bunch of 20 somethings with a 300hp imports formula one racecars and then having them race around the city. Leave it to the racers on the racetracks please.
It's more like, "What could possibly _grow_ wrong..." DIY Biology/Chemistry isn't like it was when I was a kid, that's for sure. And, it is kinda scary to think about someone making a mistake, or even cognitively do on purpose.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Oh stop it.
You might as well store all of your feces and the spit after you brush your teeth instead of flushing them out into the world. They're both chock full of bits of your DNA and bacteria and virus happily attempting to recombine into the next Plague using all sorts of neat biochemical tricks (do the math). It just doesn't happen. If you're that worried about things you'd best not leave the basement - it's a big, bad world out there.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When it comes to research, I hate that phrase: do-it-yourself. Who else is going to think your thoughts for you?
Frankly, just like with astronomy, if you can do the research, you're part of the club. Period. I don't think there needs to be any distinction between DIY hobbyist science, academic research and industrial science. There's good research and there's not-so-good research. If you can purify a protein in your garage that no one else has been able to, then the NIH should be happy to post your procedure and contact information somewhere.
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/5233c6cac0.jpg
They've confused everything because when you live in a backwards society you have to get freedom by working backwards in terms of regulations spurned in character Case sensitivty; as-in Free is not free, GPL is not public, and Opensource is open as long as you read between the lions.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If they were ordinary biologists researching at home people here would scorn them for potential dangerous experimenting at home environment
I bet if Hitler had open sourced nazism, people here would accept it with cheers.
Hitler mentioned, thread end
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I'd like to point out that there are large numbers of untrained people engaging in largely unsupervised DIY Bio that is FAR more advanced than anything done in any professional laboratory.
Further, this activity has resulted in the release of extremely dangerous organisms being released into the wild.
Oh. Wait. This is Slashdot. No worries about anyone here doing that.
I run one of such social-network based disease tracking system. It' the only such site in the southern hemisphere. and will be fundamental in understanding the global dynamic of the swine-flu pandemic. For the Brazilian readers out there, check it out: http://www.gripenet.com.br/