DIY BioHacking

Hackers are everywhere.  We are also finding that the Universe is information theoretic, that if we can build a big enough or fast enough machine that we can simulate any physical process.  A lot of folks will tell you this isn't so, they're wrong.

We're also finding that Nature is highly programmable and hackable as well.  For the longest time you had to be in a well-funded lab in order to hack biology.  But with the advent of The Internet giving humanity the ability to form fora without having to leave their living room, or garage.

"No one needs a PCR machine at home, and the accoutrements to biological research are expensive, even if their prices fall daily..." from a Nature article that seems eerily familiar.  Maybe something about there being a need for only five of them on the planet or needing only 640K of RAM.

The thing that most folks who work in industry or a lab forget is that for most of human history the folks doing the heavy lifting of discovery and pushing the boundaries did not work in industry or academia... but their basements or garages.  Granted, some of the more esoteric discoveries pushing the boundaries of human knowledge today will require the infrastructure provided by industry or academia.  However, don't dismiss the lone gun hacker that has that one moment of brilliant insight.

Later in the article...


'Jim Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University, says that the costs of doing molecular-biology research make the comparison between amateur biologists and the hackers who drove the personal-computer revolution inappropriate. There's a vast chasm between these tinkerers and those with access to a traditional lab. Faculty members, Collins says, typically ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars from a university to start a molecular-biology lab. Smart amateurs might be able to bring fresh perspective, he says, but they face an uphill battle. "I'm not saying you need to be appropriately pedigreed. I'm saying you need to be appropriately resourced."'

Jim is wrong.  Reason #1 is that he is pedigreed and deems those not pedigreed but doing this work in their lab-garages as a threat to his funding.  The reason his faculty members as for hundreds of thousands of dollars is because the system they operate under has allowed, and indeed expects those kinds of requests.

The same was true in the early days of computing.  There were folks tinkering away in their "shacks", chipping away at the hard problems of information theory and computing... and the big boys in the big labs of those days looked down upon those tinkerers in the same way.

Reason #2 that Jim is wrong is that the fundamental appropriate resource is human ingenuity and brainpower.  Having all the tools in the world at your disposal means squat if you don't have the first clue.  The hacker idea of 'clue' is more useful than the most powerful tool.  Tools are only force multipliers, there must be force applied before the tool works.

We are in the early stages of BioHacking.  However, I expect this field to take off as quickly as the computing industry did.  Stay tuned as it will be interesting.

What Hollywood shoud fear

I have a friend who is a writer.  Over twenty years ago I sat with him, late one nite, on a bridge over the canals of Las Colinas talking about various things.  One of those things was story and how I envied his ability to put mere (ha!) words together to tell a story.  I also, that nite or soon thereafter, claimed that copyright was dead.  His rebuttal was that this is how he hoped to make part of his living, selling books.  I responded that I believed the system to be out of whack.  That his skill, and therefore value, is the ability to build a story using only words.  That all the other stuff is extraneous and middle-man fluff.

In so many words.

Copyright is dead.  Creators will create.  Nothing will stop them.  Consumers will consume.  Nothing will stop them.

This is what Hollywood should fear, this is what any industry that is essentially a middle-man or broker role should fear.

Sintel is a short movie that was created entirely on commodity hardware using open-source tools.  The story is compelling and moving.  From a technical standpoint everything works, beautifully.  If this is what a talented team can do outside of Hollywood now... wait a few years!

Then wait another couple of decades (a very short time, really) and see what humanity will be doing with atoms instead of bits.