Outlaw Biology: Outlaws, Hackers and Victorian Gentlemen

The life sciences are alive with possibility—and not only in the laboratories of universities and boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies. Cheap and easy to use technologies, massive amounts of publicly available data, dynamic collaborative possibilities, changing hopes for old problems and beautiful new things for making—all these are arrayed around the life sciences. But does Big Bio still set the agenda? Just past the frontiers of law and order biology, a handful of outsiders, ranging from gentlemen scientists and visionaries to bio-artists and designers to high school students and hackers are tinkering with life as they find it.