Turning Geek Into Chick, or: NY Times can't get enough of DIYbio this month<br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/fashion/19amateur.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/fashion/19amateur.html</a><br><br>"""<br>
GLOWING Fluorescent E. coli samples at GenSpace in Brooklyn.<br>By JED LIPINSKI<br>Published: December 17, 2010<br><br>IT was a school night in November, and a ragtag band of self-appointed biologists was trolling the Web for discount lab equipment, the way some people scan Gilt for designer deals. Coming across a new NanoDrop Spectrophotometer, a device used to measure quantities of DNA, they perked up.<br>
<br>“Ooh, that one’s 30 percent off,” said Sung Won Lim, 22, who works the graveyard shift at a 24-hour grocery in Elmhurst, Queens.<br><br>He spoke too soon. “That only applies to the service plan,” said Russell Durrett, 23, who happens to be a lab technician at New York University’s Center for Genomics. The actual price, he noted, was $10,650.<br>
<br>The group was hanging out at GenSpace, a new do-it-yourself biology lab carved out of an old office building in downtown Brooklyn. Its members, who call themselves “garage biologists” or “biohackers,” are trying to do for modern biology what hackers did for computers: turning geek into chic.<br>
<br>Aided by Web sites including OpenWetWare.org, which give laypeople access to the same information as Ph.D candidates — not to mention the easy availability of computers that rival those found in university and pharmaceutical labs — these biohackers are reinventing Frankenstein for the modern age.<br>
<br>Their pursuits are anything but amateur. They are cloning E. coli strains to become resistant to radiation, genetically engineering bacteria to prevent malaria and, in one case, seeking a cure for cancer using common items like salt water and radio waves.<br>
<br>But not all their undertakings are so bold. Mr. Lim, for instance, is sequencing a DNA swab from his cheek, in an effort to chart the migratory patterns of Koreans like himself.<br><br>Such experiments are typical of today’s D.I.Y. biology movement, or DIYbio, a motley crew that includes artists, bankers, baristas and freelance writers, many of whom haven’t cracked a science textbook since high school.<br>
<br>DIYbio is part of a wider movement of amateur scientists who, empowered by online resource sharing, are pursuing high-level scientific research in their basements and backyards. Their ilk made headlines this summer when Mark Suppes, a 32-year-old Web developer in Brooklyn, built a nuclear reactor in his studio, making him the 38th amateur physicist to fuse atoms successfully.<br>
<br>This same hobbyist spirit drives DIYbio. And while it has yet to produce any groundbreaking research, it has developed some ingenious devices. Biohackers have built centrifuges from commercial eggbeaters, powerful microscopes from cheap Webcams and photobioreactors from soda bottles and fish-tank pumps.<br>
<br>GenSpace, which opened on Dec. 10, bills itself as the first nonprofit community bio lab in the country. Situated on the seventh floor of the Metropolitan Exchange Building, a former bank near the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it resembles a makeshift garage lab transported to a light-filled Brooklyn artist’s loft, with the requisite chill, freight elevator and flaking cinderblock walls.<br>
<br>GenSpace’s seven members, who split the $750 a month rent, hail from wildly divergent backgrounds, which encourage creative cross-pollination. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a handful of them met for doughnuts and coffee around a reclaimed conference table.<br>
<br>Nurit Bar-Shai, an artist in her late 30s, said that her lack of science degrees frees her to ask “stupid questions” like “Why does an agar dish have to be flat?” So she’s trying to sculpture agar “like Jell-O” to “observe bacterial colonies in 3-D.”<br>
<br>Chetan Taralekar, 30, an options trader at Barclays Capital and a former videogame programmer, said he saw a parallel between writing computer code and manipulating genetic code. “But with genetics, the medium is reality,” he said. “You’re programming life.”<br>
<br>A primary goal of GenSpace is to promote science as a viable hobby for children and adults. “The more people get their hands dirty in a lab, the less likely they’ll be to have knee-jerk reactions to things like stem-cell research and genetically modified organisms,” said Daniel Grushkin, 33, a freelance science writer and an unofficial spokesman for the group.<br>
<br>The space has a distinct D.I.Y. appeal. The walls of its self-enclosed wet lab were built from salvaged sliding glass doors and its interior is stocked with dated equipment (pipettes, bench top centrifuges, an ultraviolet light box) acquired free from downsizing biotech startups. Dog-eared books (“Bioinformatics for Dummies”; “Genetic Engineering: Dream of Nightmare?”) sit on shelves from an old high school chemistry lab. <br>
<br>“Our landlord is a real pack rat,” said Ellen Jorgensen, 55, a founding member who is the unofficial science adviser. Her day job is assistant professor of clinical research at New York Medical College. “He had a lot of this stuff just lying around.”<br>
<br>It may not be fancy, but the space is a huge leap from the group’s humble start in 2009. “There were always a bunch of people crying out into the darkness on the DIYbio Google group: ‘Where are the New York people?’ ” Ms. Jorgensen said. “I finally just typed, ‘Let’s meet at the Viand Coffee Shop near the Beacon Theater at 7 on Tuesday.’ ”<br>
<br>Three people showed up: Mr. Durrett, Mr. Lim and Mr. Grushkin, who wanted to write about the budding DIYbio scene. “We assimilated him instead,” Ms. Jorgensen said.<br><br>A few weeks later, they met at Mr. Grushkin’s brownstone apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and performed their first experiment: extracting DNA from crushed strawberries. Using salt and dishwashing liquid to break down the cell wall, they were able to remove the fruit’s DNA with wooden shish kebab skewers.<br>
<br>“It was all a little bizarre,” Mr. Grushkin recalled. “I’d only met these people once, and now they’re in my house. There was this giddy anticipation mixed with, you know, this might perhaps be a disaster.”<br><br>For their second meeting, they posted an open invitation on their Google group titled “Pizza and DNA night.” Three reporters showed up. “They’d obviously been trolling the site,” Mr. Grushkin said. News reports were questioning whether amateur biologists posed a threat to national security. An article in The Boston Globe in 2008 said the group raised “fears that people could create a deadly microbe on purpose.”<br>
<br>Under the supervision of Ms. Jorgensen, the hobbyists laid a plastic tarp over Mr. Grushkin’s living room table and genetically engineered E. coli bacteria with spliced DNA. The reporters stood on Mr. Grushkin’s parquet floor, jotting notes.<br>
<br>“I thought that any second the cops would break in and we’d all be arrested,” Mr. Grushkin said.<br><br>Biohobbyists have had run-ins with the law. In 2004, Steve Kurtz, a SUNY Buffalo art professor, ordered some bacteria from a Pittsburgh geneticist to use in an exhibit, only to find his house surrounded by F.B.I. agents in Hazmat suits. Mr. Kurtz was arrested and charged with mail fraud that took him four years of legal battles to clear.<br>
<br>So when GenSpace members began building their new lab, they worked with the F.B.I. to write biosafety guidelines. “We don’t regard the GenSpace people as dangerous at all,” said Ed You, a special agent in the F.B.I.’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. To prevent any misunderstandings, Mr. You encourages biohackers to “reach out to their local Weapons of Mass Destruction coordinator.”<br>
<br>More DIYbio labs are under way. DIYbio.org, an open-source discussion board begun in 2008, now has 1,557 members, with formalized groups in Boston; Seattle; Austin, Tex.; Los Angeles; and San Francisco, as well as in London, Paris and Bangalore, India. Similar organizations are cropping up, like Quantified Self, an international network of people who monitor their mood, sleep habits or blood pressure to uncover new aspects of the human condition.<br>
<br>Last summer, Joseph Jackson, an entrepreneur, transhumanist and “citizen scientist,” helped raise more than $35,000 on Kickstarter for a science lab called BioCurious in the Silicon Valley. And MacKenzie Cowell, 26, a founder of DIYbio.org, is building a wet lab on the second floor of Sprout, a warehouselike hacker space in Cambridge, Mass.<br>
<br>For its part, GenSpace is concentrating on short-term goals, like recruiting more members to help share the rent and branching into high schools.<br><br>Meanwhile, the members are getting acquainted with the lab. Ms. Jorgensen recently made some bacteria glow by splicing it with green fluorescent protein. Mr. Taralekar learned how to separate DNA in a gel. And Ms. Bar-Shai held a pipette for the first time.<br>
<br>“The school I went to in Queens didn’t even have a lab,” said Mr. Lim, who became interested in science by reading Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking as a teenager. “I’d eventually like to see students walk out of GenSpace with their own genetically engineered organisms. That, for me, would be really cool.” <br>
"""<br clear="all"><br>Earlier this month:<br><br>Home Labs on the Rise for the Fun of Science<br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/technology/personaltech/16basics.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/technology/personaltech/16basics.html</a><br>
<br>- Bryan<br><a href="http://heybryan.org/">http://heybryan.org/</a><br>1 512 203 0507<br>