The Grassroots Future of Biohacking

An anonymous reader writes Forget about some kid engineering a virulent microbe in their bedroom. As the assistant director of the Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering, Oliver Medvedik, puts it, "It's extremely difficult to 'improve' on the lethality of nature. The pathogens that already exist are more legitimate cause for worry.” If anything, you're better off putting energy into wrenching away your desire for McDonalds, and making sure the government doesn't impose draconian laws about DIY-bio. Here's a look at the grassroots future of biohacking and the problems with government overreach.

Comments

Freeman Dyson

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I attended a talk given by Freeman Dyson roughly a decade ago. His opinion on the future of technology was clear: grassroots biohacking (I doubt that he called it that verbatim, but the concept was the same) would be the next Wild West of technology. Increasingly accessible tools would open up the world of genetic engineering to an entire generation just like the desktop computer opened up software development to curious kids. His opinion, if I remember correctly, was that the "government overreach" thing was a non-issue because of the inevitable ubiquity of such tools (much like "government overreach" limiting the availability of software development tools today seems impossible).