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Open Source Software Meets Do-It-Yourself Biology
destinyland writes "This article profiles a growing movement — DIY biology — that's made possible in part by open source tools. Using programs like BioPerl and BioPython, DIY biologists write their own code (computer and genetic), designing their own biological systems and altering the genome. A protein-folding simulator, Folding@home, is now the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, and as the movement evolves, cooperatives are also springing up where hobbyists pool resources and create 'hacker spaces' to reduce costs and share knowledge. 'As the shift to open source software continues, computational biology will become even more accessible, and even more powerful,' this article argues — while intellectual property and other bureaucracies continue to hobble traditional forms of research."
DIY Biology sounds pretty dangerous.
As long as the instructions it comes with are better than Ikea's...
Do it yourself biology??
I prefer "do it with someone else" biology...
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Any progress since the last time this was on slashdot? No? Thought so.
Downloading computational biology software, that you have no idea how to use, makes you a molecular biologist, the same way that downloading finite element analysis software that you don't know how to use, makes you a mechanical engineer, downloading a SPICE simulator that you don't know how to use, makes you an electrical engineer, or downloading Pr0n that you can't re-enact makes you a sex expert. At least the Pr0n is easier to apply than a FEM or SPICE package, it being a "pictorial diagram", the disadvantage being that it requires a member of the appropriate sex (and species!) to re-enact.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This concept of DIY biology is far, far older than science, itself. People have been manipulating livestock, crops, even our own genome, for a long time now. But the author of this article is right about new tools making the process that much more accessible and powerful.
The build-out of world trade over the last century has wrought some damaging changes to the world ecology. Invasive species, pernicious plant diseases, and the like are spreading world-wide. Government efforts in this realm have been sporadic and often do more harm than good. The ability of smaller, private organizations to conduct sophisticated science on a smaller budget will be a boon to the restoration of endangered species, for example.
But, I tagged this article with the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag. Danger ahead.
Best regards.
Vijay Pande is a Stanford professor and funded primarily by the same agencies that fund most of the biomedical research in this country - most importantly, the NIH. (Disclaimer: they fund my work too.) He has full-time scientists (i.e. people who spent most of their 20s in school) and computer engineers writing code and assistance from hardware vendors (ATI/AMD and NVIDIA, at least). FAH is a great example of how to leverage distributed computing resources and volunteer effort, and it's an excellent technical solution to what is potentially a very expensive problem, but the intellectual effort is *not* distributed. I don't mean any of this as a criticism (I wish I had five petaflops at my disposal too), but this is not an example of "hobbyists" performing research free of bureaucracy. (In fact, the umbrella project for much of Pande's work now has a relatively large bureaucracy at Stanford, which surely wasn't suffering from a lack of bureaucracy to begin with.)
The article makes some vague statements that IP limits traditional biotech research. In fact, empirical studies do not back up such claims. John Walsh, Charlene Cho, Wesley Cohen, View from the Bench: Patents and Material Transfers , 309 Science 2002-2003 (2005). Some highlights:
"Thus, of 381 academic scientists, even including the 10% who claimed to be doing drug development or related downstream work, none were stopped by the existence of third-party patents, and even modifications or delays were rare, each affecting around 1% of our sample."
"In addition, 22 of the 23 respondents to our question about costs reported that there was no fee for the patented technology, and the 23rd respondent said the fee was in the range of $1 to $100."
19% of the respondents reported that other scientists had not complied with material transfer requests (i.e. requests for data or samples), but analysis found that "The patent status of the requested material had no significant effect on noncompliance."
An additional, more focused case study of a highly-commercialized area of research with a lot of patent activity found that "only 3% of respondents reported stopping a project in the past 2 years because of a patent."
Sure some of the more exotic equipment will, probably, still be out of the hands of DIYers. However, one of the things that this movement is known for is designing home-made versions of some of the expensive lab-grade equipment (such as 30k+ rpm centerfuges from Dremels; digital optical microscopes from an optical scope and a webcam; home built electron microscopes; etc.) which, actually, work. Pair that with their willingness to publish their, individual, projects as step-by-step instructions and share all their info as a community and I think it's completely possible that their communal capabilities will ramp up, relatively, quickly. A similar effect can be seen in the, long existing, amateur astronomy community and the DIY CNC community.
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