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."

Comments

Science is already open source

[Vesvvi]

It's true that it's possible to accomplish a great deal of biology/biochemistry research using just basic tools: I would say that the single greatest analytical tool in biochemistry is the polyacrylamide gel, which can be produced and used with no real specialized training or tools.

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.

Re:DIY, meet DEA

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Really? I didn't know chemistry was illegal. I know certain chemicals are highly regulated, but not any kind of chemistry itself.

I wonder how all those science fair projects and high school chemistry labs sneek by under the nose of these government watchdogs?

See sig. I've been getting good use out of it lately.
--
"So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard. God bless." - ShakaUVM

High school chemistry labs: the lab equipment is kept, you know, in the high school, not in the students' homes. And in fact high school chemistry has been getting steadily watered down for years. If you're anywhere around my age (40) or older, you may remember in high school working with some fairly dangerous chemicals, staying in the lab after class to finish up an experiment, etc. That doesn't happen any more, as my kid can tell you. High-schoolers are treated like third-graders in chemistry class. Granted, most of this is due to the Think Of The Chiiildren crowd rather than the drug warriors, but the mentality is really much the same.

Science fair projects: again, you may be remembering chemistry sets you could get as a kid that made it possible to do some pretty cool stuff. Try getting comparable sets these days. You can't. Oh, they still sell things called "chemistry sets," but both the chemicals and the equipment are carefully designed to be as useless as possible.

And yes, damn it, if you buy more than a minimal amount of utterly trivial lab equipment for personal use, there is a very good chance that the DEA (or its equivalent in your home country, if you're outside the US) will break down your door and use the presence of the equipment by itself (without having to find any actual drugs or drug precursors) as an excuse to arrest you, seize your property, and make your life hell for years to come.

So in other words ... well, really, your .sig says it all. I suggest you sit down, read it carefully several times, burn the words into your brain, and consider carefully how it might apply to you the next time you're planning to make such an aggressively ignorant post.