Synthetic: How Life Got Made by Sophia Roosth
Author:Sophia Roosth [Roosth, Sophia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226440637
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-02-28T22:00:00+00:00
The Institution for the Amateur
Alongside Mac Cowell, Jason Morrison and Jason Bobe cofounded DIYbio. As an undergraduate at Davidson College in North Carolina, Cowell joined his school’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition team in 2005. A few years later, he moved to Cambridge, where he talked his way into a job with the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and helped to organize subsequent iGEM competitions. What riveted Cowell was iGEM’s promise of democratizing the experience of biological experimentation by helping undergraduates learn how to engineer biological systems, which is work typically done only by scientists who have already completed at least a year or two of graduate school. Cowell quit working for the registry in 2008, claiming that he “wasn’t learning new things” anymore, and sold his car to bankroll a new start-up community of amateur bioengineers.
Morrison studied computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology before beginning a string of jobs as a software developer. He soon met Cowell and Bobe, and he proposed developing with them something he named “SmartLab,” an interactive multitouch software technology that would automate lab protocols, annotate data, and manage multiple lab equipment at once.
Bobe had earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, ten years earlier, and at the time worked for George Church as director of community outreach for his Personal Genome Project at Harvard, which was then enrolling a thousand volunteers willing to have their genomes published online, alongside medical histories and other personal data.8 Bobe’s goal for DIYbio was building a “biological weather map,” which he described as a sort of “flashmob” or “Improv Everywhere” approach to tracking diseases. The idea was as follows: clusters of biohackers would converge upon an urban street, swab crosswalks, lampposts, and noses, sequence the resulting samples, and overlay the data onto an online map that would show which disease outbreaks might be brewing in major cities.
To return to DIYbio’s formal inauguration in May 2008: in the brief speech that followed his astonishing question as to whether molecular biology might be a hobby, Cowell identified 1970s-era electronics hobbyists as kin, declaring that he wanted DIYbio to be “the Homebrew Computer Club of biology today.” The Homebrew Computer Club (HCC) was an amateur group started in Menlo Park, California, in 1975, whose members included Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.9 Piggybacking on breakthroughs in computer programming and electrical engineering, the HCC ushered in home or personal computing (the club was not, despite the way the folktale is narrated, just young guys with big ideas tinkering in garages). The concept of personal computing, as it was forged by amateur groups like the HCC, was a direct response to the monstrously big computing machines built during World War II and the following decades. Its proponents sought to make computing an accessible, user-friendly, even domesticated technology.10
So too, biohackers in 2008 were reacting to biotechnology’s project to mass-produce biological systems. The comparison to the HCC, which has proven astoundingly resilient, is of course
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