They found that most work together, and only 8 percent of the respondents worked alone in their own home labs. Biohackers are very interested in idea sharing, open-sourcing techniques, and transparency. Community labs are sprouting up all over the country, and most cooperate with authorities to ensure that they have no accidents and that their facilities aren’t abused.[20] However, biohackers have a large variety of motivations. Medical doctors and biochemists want to examine diseases that are of personal importance to them or their families; retired scientists want to continue their research; and bankers and software engineers switch careers to being transgenic artists, cyberpunks, and anarchic biohackers.
Biohacking provides a research space for high-risk projects that aren’t always designed to lead to tenure or new products. Furthermore, it has allowed wannabe scientists, graduate students, transgenic artists, doctors, teachers, and industrial researchers to try out their own ideas in their own spaces. In garages and scientific maker spaces, individuals are altering their own genetic codes, building things, making cells glow, and democratizing science.
Biohacking
Josiah Zayner, age 38, is a biohacker interested in pushing boundaries. He has a PhD in molecular biophysics and his own company, The ODIN, which sells kits and instruments for home scientists. Zayner sees himself as a scientific adventurer and rebel researcher. He is willing to experiment on himself, to try new and experimental techniques, and to circumvent the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to improve his own body. “I want to live in a world where people are genetically modifying themselves,” he says.[21] In 2016, he released a YouTube video titled “How to Genetically Engineer a Human in Your Garage,” showing his attempt to genetically modify himself so that cells in his arm would express GFP.[22] The self-experiments were a partial success. While Zayner was never able to observe any fluorescent skin cells when he biopsied his skin, he and an independent lab were able to show that his cells expressed some GFP in the sites he had injected with the virus. There just wasn’t enough GFP for its fluorescence to be visible.
Not satisfied with the results of his attempts at fluorescent self-modification, Zayner upped the ante by trying to use CRISPR to suppress the myostatin production in his arm. Myostatin is a muscle-growth-inhibiting protein (discussed in chapter 9) that leads to double-muscled animals. Always the showman, Zayner’s self-hack was performed in front of the audience of the SynBioBeta workshop held in October 2017 in San Francisco. His “experiment” was the first attempt at human CRISPR-mediated genetic modification. It was both a show and a proof-of-concept experiment. Some of Josiah Zayner’s muscle cells were probably modified by his CRISPR myostatin inhibitor system, but the CRISPR delivery systems he used were not sophisticated enough to modify sufficient muscle cells to make a significant visual difference to his arm’s muscle growth. However, it is just a matter of time before efficient delivery systems are available to biohackers like Zayner.
Zayner has many detractors. According to an opinion piece by Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, entitled “Hacking Your Own Genes: A Recipe for Disaster,” many in the biohacking community call Zayner “a publicity-seeking stunt man, perhaps deluded by touches of toxic masculinity and techno-entrepreneurial ideology, peddling snake-oil with oozing ramifications.”[23] In 2017, the FDA, without directly pointing a finger at Zayner, released the following statement: “The FDA is aware that gene therapy products intended for self-administration and ‘do it yourself’ kits to produce gene therapies for self-administration are being made available to the public. The sale of these products is against the law. The FDA is concerned about the safety risks involved.”[24] In 2019, the California Department of Consumer Affairs reacted to Zayner’s CRISPR demonstration by opening an investigation of him to establish whether he was practicing medicine without a license, and it instituted the first law in the United States to directly regulate self-administered gene therapy. Starting in January 2020, it will be illegal to sell gene-therapy kits (CRISPR kits) without a notice displayed conspicuously, “stating that the kit is not for self-administration.”[25]
Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs started the personal computing revolution in their garages. Zayner believes the biohackers and their new DIY research spaces will have a similar impact on traditional science. He would like to expand biohacking and sees himself as the spokesperson for the new movement. At Biohack the Planet 2017 conference he said, “We buy our equipment on eBay. We run it out of our garages, our kitchens, our sheds and we don’t fucking have review boards. There’s nobody to tell us what to do. There’s no committees who can sit there and say you can and can’t do this. No, we make that choice and because of this everybody thinks we’re going to destroy the world, well fucking-A the world’s already destroyed and biohackers are the only ones who can motherfuckin save it.”[26]
Zayner has some surprising supporters. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, is an adviser to Zayner’s DIY company. Furthermore, since his CRISPR demonstration Zayner has had hundreds of email requests from people interested in self-modifying themselves with CRISPR. “The barrier of possibility is broken,” Zayner says, “So now the fun begins.”[27]
I suspect that in the long run Zayner’s public experiments will do exactly what he is rebelling against: result in new guidelines and regulations on biohacking. I think he is putting places such as Genspace in danger, lending credence to detractors who fear the making of the “next Frankenstein’s monster.”
Jennifer Doudna, one of the discoverers of CRISPR, has said, “The thing I worry about the most is primarily just people getting out ahead of the technology itself.”[28] This may just be an example of someone outpacing CRISPR.
Predicting future trends is a risky but entertaining business, and I certainly don’t fault Daniel Koshland Jr. for his prediction in 1992 that the demise of amateur science was just around the corner. He was right that there haven’t been many amateur scientists making breakthroughs in the laboratory sciences. This certainly doesn’t mean that amateur scientists in the lab have been marginalized. Far from it; DIY science, biohacking, and citizen science are burgeoning, are very active, and get a lot of media attention. At the same time, citizen science and crowdsourced computing have most definitively contributed to expanding our understanding of science. And while community science facilities and biohackers have democratized science, it remains to be seen whether rebel biohackers can make the transition from social media novelties to true transformers of science.
1.
Hannibal, M. E. (2016). Citizen scientist: Searching for heroes and hope in an age of extinction, New York: The Experiment; Hannibal, M. E. (2017). Can amateur scientists save animals from extinction?, NPR TED Radio Hour, September 29.
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Sacks, O. (1996). An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales, New York: Vintage Books.
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Bryson, B. (2003). A short history of nearly everything, New York: Broadway Books.
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Koshland, D. E. (1992). Where the grass is rougher and greener, Science 257, 1607.
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Berman, R. (2018). It’s a movement: Amateur scientists are making huge discoveries: Citizen scientists are advancing scientific knowledge, Big Think, February 3.
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Riesch, H., and Potter, C. (2014). Citizen science as seen by scientists: Methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions, Public Understanding of Science 23, 107.
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