KATHERINE AULLâs laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. âDown here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks,â she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. âThe rest is just home brew,â she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums.
In fact, Aullâs lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism.
Aull, who works as a synthetic biologist for a biotech company by day, created her home lab after hearing about a for âmad scientists with homebrew closet labs, grassroots geneticists, and garage genome hackersâ.
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After two months of tinkering, she engineered a microbe that she says is capable of performing simple logic operations, which could be the forerunner to basic biological computers. âBiology is wet, squishy and imprecise. It drives engineers insane,â Aull says. âThis would allow us to take the noise out of biology.â
âOne amateur biologist engineered a microbe she says is capable of simple logic operationsâ
Despite her success, Aull was edged out of first place in the competition by Vijaykumar Meli, a graduate student at the in New Delhi, India, who designed bacteria that could help rice plants process nitrogen more efficiently, reducing fertiliser use.
The competition is part of a do-it-yourself movement that hopes to spark a revolution in biotechnology. It is based on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which uses genes and other cell components as the building blocks for new organisms or devices. The movement is trying to open up this field to anyone with a passion for tweaking DNA in their spare time â from biologists to software engineers to people who just like it as a hobby. The hope is that encouraging a wider mix of people to take part could lead to advances that would not happen otherwise, just as tinkering by the Homebrew Computer Club hackers of the 1970s spawned the first personal computers.
âBiology is becoming less of a science and more of a technology,â says Mackenzie Cowell, co-founder of the group , which aims to be an âInstitution for the Amateurâ, providing scientists with resources akin to those found in academia or industry. âThere will be more opportunity for people who didnât spend up to seven years getting a PhD in the field,â he says.
Meredith Patterson, a software engineer in San Francisco, is one such amateur. She is engineering fluorescent yoghurt by zapping bacteria with a $40 ultrasonic jewellery cleaner she set up in her kitchen. The sound waves create pores in the bacteriaâs cell walls which stay open for long enough for Patterson to insert genes that code for green fluorescent proteins she bought from a biological supply company.
You might say that making glow-in-the-dark yoghurt is an end in itself, but Patterson has a serious goal in mind: to engineer bacteria that light up in the presence of melamine, the industrial chemical recently found in infant formula in China, which injured hundreds of children and killed at least six. At present, the principal test for the toxin is chromatography, an expensive laboratory procedure. âHere is a problem that was difficult to solve by conventional means,â Patterson says. âPeople should have an inexpensive and portable test to make sure their food is safe, but no lab was working on this, so I said letâs do it ourselves.â
Patterson took up DIY biology as a hobby after doing some bioinformatics work for a biotech company. âBiology is an interesting puzzle. I learned the informatics tools to solve those puzzles, now Iâm interested in taking that to the next level and producing novel organisms to solve problems,â she says.
Itâs not hard to get in on the act either. Patterson uses resources such as openwetware.org for research, and found the best growth medium for yoghurt bacteria in a 1950s edition of a dairy science journal. âKnowing how to do research helps, but the barrier for entry is pretty low,â she says.
DIYbio, which so far has around 20 active participants, held its first meeting in Cambridge, MA, in May 2008. Amateurs were invited to extract DNA for analysis from apples, oatmeal and their own saliva, and learned how to make gel boxes and dyes â essential tools for genetic fingerprinting.
Is it a good idea, though, to encourage âfreelanceâ researchers to experiment with DNA, however well-intentioned they may be? Not everyone thinks so. Inexperienced hackers could pose a significant public health threat, warns Richard Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. âWithout any oversight from an institution, colleagues or peers, the probability that a cataclysmic entity might be constructed by someone unaware of known cautions is significant,â he says.
The greatest potential danger, he says, is that someone might intentionally synthesise or recreate deadly pathogens like the 1918 flu strain, which killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. âThat is on the edge of being within the technical capabilities of someone working outside the laboratory environment.â
In response to such fears and in anticipation of calls for the group to be shut down, DIYbio has begun policing itself. Cowell says there is now âa self-imposed moratorium on âwetwork'â, or all synthetic biology experiments, until researchers can show that what they are doing is safe. For the moment, the group is focusing on DNA fingerprinting projects, with the analysis carried out by commercial labs, rather than manipulating genetic information themselves.
The first such project is BioWeatherMap, a plot of the different microbes, or âbioweatherâ, to be found on street crossing buttons. Over the next few months DIYbio hopes to mobilise amateur scientists in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and other cities to send in swab samples from their nearest street corner. A commercial lab will then sequence the microbes they find and DIYbio will post the results online with the help of mapping software such as Google Maps.
âI think this is a perfect opportunity for high-school biology classes to get exposed to genomics, sequencing and microbiology,â says DIYbio co-founder Jason Bobe, who expects to find hundreds or even thousands of different species living on each crosswalk button.
Ultimately, Cowell hopes to set up a public lab where group members can safely conduct experiments of the kind Aull managed in her closet. In this he has the surprising support of George Church, a synthetic biology researcher at Harvard University who in 2004 published a paper claiming that the consequences of synthetic DNA misuse could be more severe than chemical and nuclear weapons. He now says: âThe world has an energy crisis and a healthcare crisis that synthetic biology can help solve; we need to go out and do it and the more people working on this, the better.â
Church argues that licensing and monitoring would-be DIY biologists is better than alienating them. âItâs going to happen anyway; you can make it go underground or you can try to shape it,â he says.
Church has agreed to act as an adviser to DIYbio, which will give the group greater academic oversight and could allow it to resume experimental work with less fear of being shut down.
As for Aull, she is coming out of the closet with plans to help DIYbio set up protocols for safe lab practices. She says she will donate her thermocycler to the group if it is able to secure a public lab and sheâs also planning to carry out further work on her microbe to confirm it really is performing logic operations.
Based on her own experiences of DIY biology, including its limitations, she says warnings of the dangers are overblown. âItâs like a baby that just rolled over for the first time and his aunt is crying because she doesnât have anything to wear to his wedding.â
