In GenSpace, a new do-it-yourself biology lab carved out of an old office building in downtown Brooklyn, New York, a group of “garage biologists,” or “biohackers,” is trying to do for modern biology what hackers did for computers: turngeek into chic.
Aided by sites like OpenWetWare. org, which give laypeople access to the same information as Ph.D. candidates, biohackers are reinventing Frankenstein for the modern age.
Their pursuits are anything but amateur. They are cloning E. coli strains to become resistant to radiation, genetically engineering bacteria to prevent malaria and, in one case, seeking a cure for cancer using common items like saltwater and radio waves.
Such experiments are typical of today’s do-it-yourself biology movement, or DIYbio, a motley crew that includes artists, bankers, baristas and freelance writers, many of whom haven’t opened a science textbook since high school.
DIYbio is part of a wider movement of amateur scientists who, empowered by online resource sharing, are pursuing high-level scientific research . Their ilk made headlines this summer when Mark Suppes, a 32-year-old Web developer in Brooklyn, built a nuclear reactor in his studio, making him the 38th amateur physicist to fuse atoms successfully.
Biohackers have built centrifuges from commercial eggbeaters, powerful microscopes from cheap webcams and photobioreactors from soda bottles and fish-tank pumps.
GenSpace, which opened on December 10, is calling itself the first nonprofit community bio lab in the United States. Situated in a former bank , it resembles a makeshift garage lab transported to a light-filled Brooklyn artist’s loft.
GenSpace’s seven members, who split the $750 a month rent, hail from wildly divergent backgrounds, which encourages creative crosspollination. Nurit Bar-Shai, an artist in her late 30s, said that her lack of science degrees frees her to ask “stupid questions” like “Why does an agar dish have to be flat?” Chetan Taralekar, 30, an options trader at Barclays Capital and a former videogame programmer, said he saw a parallel between writing computer code and manipulating genetic code. “But with genetics, the medium is reality,” he said. “You’re programming life.”
A primary goal of GenSpace is to promote science as a viable hobby for children and adults. “The more people get their hands dirty in a lab, the less likely they’ll be to have knee-jerk reactions to things like stem-cell research and genetically modified organisms,” said Daniel Grushkin, 33, a freelance science writer and an unofficial spokesman for the group.
Biohobbyists have had problems with the law. In 2004, Steve Kurtz, a professor of art in Buffalo, New York, ordered bacteria from a Pittsburgh geneticist to use in an exhibit, only to find his house surrounded by F.B.I. agents in Hazmat suits. Mr. Kurtz was arrested and charged with mail fraud, which took him four years to clear.
So when GenSpace members began building their lab, they worked with the F.B.I. to write biosafety guidelines.
“We don’t regard the GenSpace people as dangerous at all,” said Ed You, a special agent in the F.B.I.’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
More DIYbio labs are under way. DIYbio.org, an open-source discussion board , has 1,557 members, with groups in Boston; Seattle; Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; and San Francisco, as well as in London, Paris and Bangalore, India. And GenSpace is recruiting more members to help share the rent.
Ellen Jorgensen, 55, a founding member who is an assistant professor of clinical research at New York Medical College, recently made some bacteria glow by splicing it with green fluorescent protein. Mr. Taralekar learned how to separate DNA in a gel. And Ms. Bar-Shai held a pipette for the first time.
“The school I went to in Queens didn’t even have a lab,” said Sung Won Lim, 22, who works the overnight shift at a 24-hour grocery . “I’d eventually like to see students walk out of GenSpace with their own genetically engineered organisms.
That, for me, would be really cool.”
By JED LIPINSKI
