Hacking goes squishy

Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Biotechnology: The falling cost of equipment capable of manipulating DNA is opening up a new field of “biohacking” to enthusiasts
Illustration by Brett Ryder

MANY of the world’s great innovators started out as hackers—people who like to tinker with technology—and some of the largest technology companies started in garages. Thomas Edison built General Electric on the foundation of an improved way to transmit messages down telegraph wires, which he cooked up himself. Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage in California (now a national landmark), as was Google, many years later. And, in addition to computer hardware and software, garage hackers and home-build enthusiasts are now merrily cooking up electric cars, drone aircraft and rockets. But what about biology? Might biohacking—tinkering with the DNA of existing organisms to create new ones—lead to innovations of a biological nature?

The potential is certainly there. The cost of sequencing DNA has fallen from about $1 per base pair in the mid-1990s to a tenth of a cent today, and the cost of synthesising the molecule has also fallen. Rob Carlson, the founder of a firm called Biodesic, started tracking the price of synthesis a decade ago. He found a remarkably steady decline, from over $10 per base pair to, lately, well under $1 (see chart). This decline recalls Moore’s law, which, when promulgated in 1965, predicted the exponential rise of computing power. Someday history may remember drops in the cost of DNA synthesis as Carlson’s curve.

A growing culture

And as the price falls, amateurs are wasting little time getting started. Several groups are already hard at work finding ways to duplicate at home the techniques used by government laboratories and large corporations. One place for them to learn about biohacking is DIYbio, a group that holds meetings in America and Britain and has about 800 people signed up for its newsletter. DIYbio plans to perform experiments such as sending out its members in different cities to swab public objects. The DNA thus collected could be used to make a map showing the spread of micro-organisms.

Strictly, that is not really biohacking. But attempts to construct micro-organisms that make biofuels efficiently certainly are—though it will be impressive if a group of amateurs can succeed in cracking a problem that is confounding many established companies. Amateur innovation, nevertheless, is happening. When a science blog called io9 ran a competition for biohackers, it received entries for modified microorganisms that, among other things, help rice plants process nitrogen fertiliser more efficiently, measure the alcohol content of a person’s breath and respond to commands from a computer.

The template for biohacking’s future may be the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition, held annually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This challenges undergraduates to spend a summer building an organism from a “kit” provided by a gene bank called the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Their work is possible because the kit is made up of standardised chunks of DNA called BioBricks.

As Jason Kelly, the co-founder of a gene-synthesis firm called Ginkgo BioWorks, observes, there is no equivalent of an electrical engineer’s diagram to help unravel what is going on in a cell. As he puts it, “what the professionals can do in terms of engineering an organism is really rudimentary. It’s really a tinkering art more than a predictable engineering system.” BioBricks are, nevertheless, an attempt to provide the equivalent of electronic components with known properties to the field—and using them is part of Ginkgo’s business plan. Information on BioBricks is kept public, helping the students understand which work together best.

Illustration by Brett RyderWhat the students actually create, however, is left to their imaginations. And the results are often unexpected. A team from National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan conceived a bacterium that can do the work of a failed kidney; another, from Imperial College, London, worked on a “biofabricator” capable of building other biological materials.

From relatively simple beginnings in 2003, iGem has grown to a competition involving 84 teams and 1,200 participants, most of whom leave with enough knowledge to do work at home. They are limited mainly by the novelty of the pursuit. Although there are no laws banning the sale of DNA, reagents or equipment, such items are usually priced for sale to large institutions. Indeed, it is this problem of finding ways to manage without expensive equipment, rather than a desire to work on “wetware”, or living organisms, that motivates many biohackers.

Tito Jankowski, now a member of DIYbio, became interested in toolmaking for biohackers after taking part in iGem with a team from Brown University that had set itself the goal of modifying bacteria to detect lead in water. After graduating, Mr Jankowski was interested in doing more, but found his access to equipment restricted. He decided to create a cheaper version of the gel-electrophoresis box, a basic tool used in a wide range of experiments. Despite its simple construction, which can be as spare as a few panes of coloured plastic over a heating element, a gel box can sell for over $1,000. But according to Mr Jankowski, “this equipment is only expensive because it has never been used for personal stuff before.”

Mr Jankowski likens the current state of biohacking to the years in which amateurs first began working with personal computers, a metaphor that Dr Kelly also uses. Computers were once both expensive and arcane. Today, they are built mostly from off-the-shelf components, and even a relatively non-technical person can assemble one. If hobbyists like Mr Jankowski can help reduce the cost of equipment, say, tenfold, while BioBricks or something similar become cheaper and more predictable, then the stage will be set for a bioscience version of Apple or Google to be born in a dormitory room or garage.

But what about viruses?

The computer metaphor, though, is a reminder that there is no shortage of fools and criminals ready to construct viruses and other harmful computer programs. If such people got interested in the biological world, the consequences might be even more serious—because in biology, there is no rebooting the machine.

More than any other detail of biohacking, this is the one that laymen grasp. And the resulting fear can have unpleasant effects, as Steve Kurtz, a professor of art at the State University of New York in Buffalo who works with biological material, found out. In May 2004 he awoke to find that his wife, Hope, was not breathing. The police who accompanied paramedics to his home found Petri dishes used in his art displays, and notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which brought in the Department of Homeland Security and charged him with bioterrorism. The authorities claimed the body of his wife, who had died of congenital heart failure, for examination. This took place over the protestations of Mr Kurtz, his colleagues and the local commissioner of public health, all of whom insisted that nothing in the exhibit could be harmful.

The right way to regulate biohacking may not become apparent for some time.The initial reaction of the local police was hardly surprising. The motives of the FBI, which has experts capable of examining Mr Kurtz’s art scientifically, are harder to decode. After a grand jury refused to indict Mr Kurtz, the bureau then pursued him with a mail-fraud charge carrying a sentence of up to 20 years, which a judge dismissed this year. Mr Kurtz, known for his anti-establishment art, may simply have become the target of harassment for his views. But the FBI may genuinely be wary of biohackers; rumour suggests it has followed up the case by discreetly instructing reagent suppliers not to sell to individuals, despite the lack of any law against their doing so.

So far legislators have shown little interest in regulating individuals. When they choose to do so, it will not be easy. If groups such as DIYbio are successful, the basic tools of biohacking will be both cheap to buy and easy to construct at home. Many DNA sequences, including those for harmful diseases, are already widely published, and can hardly be retracted. The falling cost of DNA synthesis suggests that there will be automated “printers” for the molecule before long. There are some substances that can be controlled, like the reagents used to modify DNA. But a strict government policy regulating the chemical components of biohacking might have much the same effect as laws banning gun ownership—ordinary citizens will be discouraged, while criminals will still find what they want on black markets.

In all likelihood, the right way to regulate biohacking will not become apparent for some time. But some people think that any regulation at all could be harmful. Dr Carlson, who has a book on biohacking coming out later this year, is a proponent of light regulation at most. “If you look at our ability to respond to infectious diseases at this point in time, we’re essentially helpless,” he says. “The quandary we face is that we need the garage hackers, because that’s where innovation comes from.” Freeman Dyson, a venerable and polymathic physicist who has been thinking about the problem, is also a believer in biological innovation. He has written about a variety of futuristic possibilities, including modified trees that are better than natural ones at absorbing carbon dioxide, and termites that can eat old cars. If regulation of biohacking is too tight, such innovations—or, at least, things like them—might never come to pass.