Do It Yourself Biohacking | Hacker News Reader

Do It Yourself Biohacking

singularityhub.com

24 pointskkleiner14 comments

While this is sort of interesting, it strikes me as largely price constrained. Really, the physical act DNA transfection is a menial lab task that is essentially glorified mixing where the major challenge is ensuring correctness and sterility (neither of which seem to be a concern in biohacking). At my college they'll let any enthusiastic freshman do that week one after just a couple hours of training (mostly concerned with correctness, sterility, and what drawer the pipets are hidden in).

The more interesting thing would be if they could biohack PCR, sequencing, or even cDNA creation but all of those run into intense price barriers rather fast as you start to need enzymes and machinery. Some of the basic assays could be purchased for rather cheaply if the cost (in the several hundreds for the materials to do around 100 tests) was split.

Not to say that all of this might become possible on the cheap in the future (PCR wouldn't be that hard if you purchase Taq polymerase, ~$100/100 rxns) but it amused me to read a comic excitedly proclaiming a DIY kit for unsterile, inconsistent transfection.

They're actively working on building cheaper, open source implementations of the common tools of the trade in the ethos of the Homebrew Computer Club.

See, e.g., http://openwetware.org/wiki/DIYbio:Notebook/Open_Gel_Box_2.0

What? You say you’ve never had a day of genetic engineering lessons? You don’t remember anything from high school biology? Well luckily for you,joining the DIYbio community is as simple as going to DIYbio.org and reading the forums.

So now I can become a bio script kiddie?

I don't see the point of following some instructions and congratulating myself on the results. Should I feel cool by association with the practicing biologists who figure out the principles, design the gear, and write up the instructions? What's the point unless you understand what you're doing and create something novel, with unique value?

There are plenty of hobbies where you don't have to be accomplished or original to give pleasure to yourself and your friends. Cooking and baking, for example. I can't imagine spending my time on DIY biology unless I decide to go hard-core into the subject.

I would love tweaking with some stuff, but I guess it would be an extension of my current hobby of growing tropical plants. Making mango's purple, or kiwis caffeinated...

I would put some serious time into a hobby like that if the resources were available.

A different way to think of it is that you're reading someone else's source code in order to learn from it. Just because that's where you start, doesn't mean you can progress beyond that point.

The problem is that in a biology lab, there's a lot more behind the materials and the tools than there is behind source code, and stuff isn't as neatly parameterized. Just from high school biology I can name three different ways to create a vaccine for a virus, and checking my knowledge on Wikipedia reveals a bunch more. Yet there are still many viruses we can't vaccinate against. Stuff in biology is incredibly complex and specific. Adapting a successful technique to a very slightly different situation can be straightforward, or it can be a major research project. You could easily pick, as your first "original" project, something that would require a scientific breakthrough to accomplish, and it would take you years to advance to the point of even realizing it. If that sounds rewarding to you, you're probably already professionally involved in an intellectual field deeply enough that you want your hobbies to have entirely different rewards and challenges.

Feynman's memoirs are some of the most intellectually macho posturing I've ever read, and even he stuck mostly to physics when he was doing physics. He favored hobbies like safecracking, drumming, and drawing, all of which could be summed up as showing off and getting laid. People looking for a professional-level intellectual challenge from their hobbies are in the wrong line of work.

it's worth pointing out that all of the protocols i've found on this site after a brief search are essentially late middle school/early high school science fair projects. i'm not a computer person but i assume that this is not what you would call 'hacking.'

With science fair level tools today you can splice some foreign genes into e.coli

i guess my issue is (and perhaps this is because i haven't read up enough on the biohacking movement) that transforming e. coli shouldn't be sold as 'hacking,' which to me implies that you'll be free to kind of build and design whatever you can imagine. in reality, you are 'splicing' nothing (as transformation does not require recombination, and the bacteria will rapidly lose whatever plasmid was introduced if they are taken out of the appropriate media), and you are limited by whatever plasmids you have the good fortune of borrowing from someone--maybe GFP to make your bugs glow or something. i suppose there might be an analogy to be made here to the early days of computer science, when one could do very little with computers, but i still think that this technology, which will be great for getting people excited about science, should not yet be advertised quite so breathlessly.

You're absolutely right, even the earliest days of computer hacking were much more predictable. The difference is like bottom up (electronics) and gray box top down (life).

I remember making bacteria glow in the dark in high school biology.

I would be scared to death of tweaking my own genome. The prospects seem fascinating and attractive (I could make my hand glow in the dark or something) but what if I screw up? It's not like you restore from a backup.

Anything safe and useful will be available commercially. You might have to take an international flight, but that's a small price to pay to have it done by somebody who knows what he's doing and has done it before.

I wouldn't mess with your own body. Use your saliva to play with your genes OUTSIDE of your body, but don't go inject stuff into yourself.

A real life doctor Frankenstein character died after drinking indigo in attempt to achieve immortality.

This is great... and it's gong to get regulated out of existence any day now. That's sad, but I just can't imagine the powers that be being cool about this.

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