The Biohackers Will See You Now

The next generation of DIYBio tools are coming, and this time they mean business.

The DIYBio (or Do-It-Yourself Biology or Biohacking) Revolution is upon us. The Maker Movement — the combination of new digital fabrication tools, low-cost sensors, and an open-source ethos — opened the doors for the creation of scientific tools at fractions of the cost of their commercial counterparts. The next generation of these machines are about to hit the market (well, Kickstarter) and their makers are expecting a much bigger wave of interest and involvement.

The idea of a suburban garage turned into an amateur biology lab was once the realm of science fiction. That moment has come and, to some extent, already passed. In its place, we’ve seen a quick rise in the community lab spaces, like BioCurious in Sunnyvale and Genspace in Brooklyn, as well as the continued development of lower-cost tools for this type of makerspace. Just this year, the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) Jamboree began accepting DIYBio entrants. There’s even a new synthetic biology accelerator opening up down the street from my office in Berkeley called Indie Bio. If you’re looking for them, the signs of the DIYBio Revolution are everywhere.

Christmas lights hang in Brooklyn’s Genspace lab. Photo: Nick Normal / Flickr.

For some reason, even as many of the wisest oracles of the technology world (Bill Gates, Stewart Brand, Chris Anderson, etc.) concede the next wave of major innovation will come from this direction, the players and milestones move largely under the radar. I have a theory about why this trend has been so underrated, and it stems from the fact that it’s being overshadowed by three more powerful narratives:

“GMOs are dangerous.”

Biotechnology and synthetic biology have been vilified by activists. Although largely a criticism of genetically modified foods and the business practices of Monsanto, DIYBio tools and labs have not escaped this wrath. Regardless of the actual underlying science, this debate still grabs the majority of the media headlines on biotechnology. “Woohoo! Biohacking is cool! Next stop on the Singularity express.”

A reading from the gospel according to Ray Kurzweil. In reality, the future unfolds in fits and starts, milestones and moments. The “Singularity is Near” narrative is an intellectually incomplete way to think about (and make) the future. The real DIYBio story has been stuck behind the polarizing headlines that go along with the trans-humanist rhetoric. “DIYBio is trailing edge technology — it doesn’t matter.”

This usually comes from the scientific establishment. It’s largely true, but it also ignores history. DIYBio is a textbook case of a disruptive innovation from Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, where a newcomer creates a technology that is only good enough for a small segment of the market. The incumbents don’t act or care because the markets are small and the margins thin. Over time, the performance and capabilities of the newcomer product begin to improve, displacing incumbents as they go. The model is so common and understood that it’s taught in business schools around the world. It’s the closest we have come to entrepreneurial fact.

In this case, the DIYBio tools have been serving the smallest of markets: community biolab spaces, grad students who can’t afford more expensive equipment, and labs in the developing world. With the availability of used professional equipment consistently showing up on eBay, these tools and their makers have barely made a subsistence living (see: small markets and thin margins). If it wasn’t for the sheer amateur enthusiasm and “because we can” attitude, many of these efforts would have folded long ago. But in true Christensen form, here come the next generation of machines (see: improving performance).

The team at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Synthetic Biology assemble the openPCR machine. Photo: Medical Museion / Flickr.

The work of Josh Perfetto is a perfect example. Perfetto and Tito Jankowski grabbed headlines in 2011 when they successfully crowdfunded their open-source polymerase chain reaction (PCR) device, OpenPCR. A PCR machine, or thermal cycler, amplifies segments of DNA by raising and lowering temperatures along a pre-programmed set. It’s not the only biology tool you would need for a lab, but it’s an important one.

At the time, hardly anyone outside the science community knew what a PCR machine was, but the project received a modest amount of attention because it was one of the first open-source hardware projects on Kickstarter and served as a far-out example of just how versatile the Arduino microcontroller was becoming. It made news, but it also carved a path for others to follow: DIY scientific tools could be made for much less than their commercial counterparts. Open source hardware and software, along with a community of co-developers could make just about anything more accessible. It showed that a DIYBio future could be prototyped on Kickstarter (which is currently playing out in a handful of campaigns: OpenTrons, miniPCR, and Bento Lab).