DIYbio, a new group of researchers and others in Boston, hopes to offer amateur biologists some of the same resources available in academia and industry.
Corie Lok
Earlier this spring, at a pub near MIT, about 25 to 30 people, some of them researchers from MIT and Harvard, gathered to talk about what they can do to build a community of backyard biologists. The group, which calls itself DIYbio, is exploring ways to make biology more of an amateur-friendly, do-it-yourself activity. Such activities could include culturing microorganisms and building low-cost equipment for DNA amplification. The group began meeting last month. One of their first exercises was to extract DNA from oatmeal, apples, and saliva.
One of the organizers of the group, Jason Bobe, the director of community for the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, recently spoke with Nature Network Boston about the idea behind DIYbio and the group’s plans for the future.
What’s the aim of DIYbio?
There is already a disparate set of activities and protocols on the Web for people to do biology at home. We’d like to collect these resources and to build a community around that.
Another view of DIYbio is for it to be “an institute for the amateur.” This would be a place where individuals can get resources such as access to experts, literature, and kits for doing experiments at home.
And there’s another area that’s related to policy, ethics, and best practices for biohackers. There are a lot questions about what types of things are permissible for amateurs to do. What kind of access to reagents should they have? Should they be allowed to have sensing devices? That is one area where there really is a need for “thought leadership” and work. That’s something DIYbio can do.
Another driving force is to encourage public understanding of biology, not just through educational content on the Web, but through participatory projects.
What are some potential DIYbio projects?
One of the proposed projects is to develop a biotech workshop here in Boston. It would be a physical space, where we would have shared hardware and resources, like a laboratory for amateurs.
There’s also the idea of developing kits and projects for the public. I’ve been working with a few grad students from the area on a backyard microbiomics project. That could be a model. This would be a backyard biology project, where you would collect a sample of soil or pond water and isolate DNA, send it off for sequencing, and identify which microorganisms are living in that sample.
Another project we’re pursuing is building an extremely low-cost experimental biology starter kit. This kit would include low-end but functional equipment, like a $10 thermocycler for PCR [polymerase chain reaction—a technique to make many copies of a piece of DNA], and reagents that would enable a user to perform 10 or more experiments. Each of these experiments would tackle fundamental concepts in molecular biology, techniques, and safety.
If we could make the starter kit cheap enough, every high school biology class would have access to the resources necessary to educate students about the molecular world. We think this is a fantastic opportunity to get more young people excited about biology and the sciences generally.
What are some of the ethical issues with backyard biology? Should amateurs be encouraged to engineer bacteria in their garage?
I think there is a perceived difference between doing exploratory biology [e.g. extracting DNA, culturing microbes from nature] and doing biological engineering. Many people, I think, want to do synthetic biology in their kitchens: why not engineer E. coli to fluoresce in your kitchen? There are issues, such as safety, we need to explore first before promoting this. One question is: Should we promote amateur biological engineering at all? Under what circumstances?
Having some organization of people interested in doing these things is a great way to address some of these public policy issues. My feeling is that there is a need for thought leadership, and DIYbio might be able to provide a forum for that.