Talking With A DIY Biohacker

In case you didn’t realize, biotechnology—using living organisms to make useful products—is not the elite, hidden art practiced only by boffins in white coats that some imagine it to be. There has been a boom in the industry in past few years thanks to backyard scientists gathering together and playing around with DNA using equipment you’d find in your kitchen. The heart of this “DIY Bio” movement is in the Bay Area, which doesn’t come as a huge surprise. But what they can do very likely will come as a surprise. They’re already transforming CD drives and inkjet printers into machines that can “print” 3D living organisms that glow in the dark, and some day hope they might be able to print out a liver or kidney, should you need one of those. Which would be pretty fucking amazing.

We spoke with Patrik D’Haeseleer, a very clever man who helps other people get into DIY Bi” in his spare time. He’s also part of BioCurious, which is one of the biggest collaborative groups of its kind to have built its own laboratory that people can use instead of breaking stuff in their garages.

VICE: Hey, so can you explain a bit about BioCurious and what you do?

Patrik D’Haeseleer:Sure. I’m one of the members of BioCurious and I help co-ordinate community projects that we have running. It’s simply a project we started up to get more people involved, as an easy way in. You don’t have to be a member, you can just walk in and participate.

Sounds easy. And what do people do when they “participate”?

Well, let me go through two community projects we have running right now. One of them focuses on bioluminescence—anything glow-in the dark, essentially. There are a number of bioluminescent organisms in nature and we’re working with a couple of different ones. There’s one set of single-cell algae that causes bioluminescent waves in the oceans. We’re also engineering E. coli bacteria to glow in the dark using bioluminescent pathways from another type of bacteria. And we’re planning on doing the same with plants.

The only time I’ve heard of E. coli is in food poisoning.

There are a lot of different types. We’re hosting thousands in our gut right now, mainly harmless,  and there are lab strains of E. coli that have been working safely for over 50 years and are entirely harmless. It’s probably the best understood organism on the planet right now, in terms of what we know about it and our ability to engineer it as well.

So, what do you do with bioluminescence?

We’d like to have full control over bioluminescence. To be able to turn on those certain pathways whenever we want to. That’s DIY Bio—you find something in nature, you simplify it, put it somewhere you have control over it, and start tinkering with it.

So how is this different from university or commercial work?

Funding. When working anywhere else, you need funding for anything and then you become locked into a very specific topic. With DIY Bio you have a lot more opportunity to play around with ideas, do things for the heck of it. There are people working here with a very wide range of backgrounds and we really benefit from that. We have people out of Silicon Valley who’ve never done biology before, but they might have been doing software engineering their whole career, so that’s a very helpful to a group like us.

This system of “open science” is said to be a likely source of breakthroughs that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Are there any success stories already?

Let me back up—we have a community project running which is focused on building a “bioprinter.” Essentially, we’re billing a printing platform that could print bio-materials, which could be things like printing live cells on the surface. There’s technology that companies are developing to print human tissues and organs. We decided we want to play around with it, as the basic technology is so accessible. It’s based on basic inkjet printing, or 3D printing technologies which we can easily get our hands on. We built our own bioprinter with an HP inkjet cartridge, controlled by a platform that someone built through a Kickstarter campaign, all driven by some hardware scavenged from old CD drives! That wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago, so it’s a good example of something that draws upon all these ideas from hacker spaces, open hardware, and so on. Now we’re pulling together an instruction guide to help other people make one, too.

Wow—so anyone could print her own life forms?

You empty out the inkjet cartridge, put subcultures in there, and print with those cells. It’s a platform where you can position cells a fraction of a millimeter apart, or even put scaffolding between them. All of a sudden, you can create 3D structures built out of cells.

So you could print a liver or kidney?

It’s still somewhat in the future, but it’s what the big academic labs are working on. Animal and human cell cultures are very difficult to use for printing, they require constant supervision to make sure that they don’t get infected and are way too much hassle for DIY. But plant cells are much easier to handle and to replicate, so printing with plant cells is more accessible.

Using a particular type of sugar, we’ve managed to print our logo, layered with E. coli on top, so it could glow in the dark. We’re trying to use yeast cells too, but we’re just trying to troubleshoot that a bit. I think our inkjet cartridge is blocked right now.

That’s a pretty snazzy letterhead.

I’d like to print our logo and have the plant cells transform into shoots; I think that would be cool.

What would be next?

A lot of people have been focused on the whole glow-in-the-dark thing, not just with what we’re doing, but with yogurt for example. If you could engineer yogurt material as well as E. coli, not only would that be safer, but it would also be more amenable to DIY efforts if you could just buy a carton of yogurt and get started. I’m not sure anyone has managed to do it yet.

Is this all San Francisco based, with people nearby, or do you create this with people online? 

The DIY Bio community is spread all over the world. BioCurious was really one of the first community groups in the space, together with Genspace in New York, but there are other groups being formed all over the place right now. And there are lots of individual hackers who want to play around with things. With things like biology and needing so much equipment, it’s always easier to band together with a few people and gather resources as opposed to doing it by yourself. There’s a guy, Cathal Garvey in Ireland, who’s trying to build a biolab in his garage. There’s a lot of activity going on right now, putting together groups all over the world.

I can imagine people could get easily scared by the idea of someone creating a life form in their garage.

Only from people who don’t know the movement   or anything about it. The analogy I like to make is it’s as if fire had just been invented and we are having the conversation about whether we only allow the village chief to make fire or whether we should train everybody to do it safely. People come up with all kinds of scare stories, but to be honest, I think they’re overestimating what can currently be done with bioengineering, even in professional labs.

One criticism is that amateurs doing this work for free might start cutting off funding for academics.

No, no! There’s no chance of that ever happening.

So you’re not going to be the Napster of science and  kill the science industry? 

Well, that might be fun if we could! One thing we’d like to do is be more of an incubator for these ideas, encourage people who maybe have ideas but don’t have the funding to get it started. BioCurious is a non-profit group, but maybe in a few years’ time we will have people who started off with help here later go on to create a multimillion dollar company.

Carolina is a good example of a company that sells all kinds of kits: organs for dissecting, kits to do DNA forensics or for engineering E. coli. They sell the full kit which has pretty much everything you need including a good manual on how to do the experiment. It’s also online.

Does anything surprise you about the movement?

We’ve had lots of contact with the FBI. You’d expect biohackers to be an anarchic group, but our contact with the FBI has been extremely positive. It was a little bit strange talking to the FBI at first, but they were very good in terms of championing the cause of DIY Bio and being an intermediary.  When a new group starts up and talks to the FBI, they’ll contact the local government to reassure them that everything is above board, you know? It’s great. These kinds of hackerspaces, just like with computer hacking 20 years ago, are where a lot of creativity and innovation comes out of.

For more Not Normal stories like this head over to: www.vice.com/notnormal

Don't have a DIY Bio lab in your garage? Well, a MINI is the next best thing. www.miniusa.com