DIY biohacking in the Boston Globe
The Boston Globe has a feature on DIY biohacking, including folks like Mackenzie Cowell and his friends are doing DNA analysis and the like at home using scavenged gear. Of course, this isn't new -- BB guestblogger Steve Steinberg and others were having similar fun at least 5 years ago -- but the price-of-entry is certainly dropping. Meanwhile, law enforcement is getting increasingly suspicious of DIY scientists. From the Boston Globe:
Previously on BB:
• Charges against (biohacker) artist Steve Kurtz thrown out
The clash between the potential benefits and dangers of doing home science were highlighted by the case of Victor Deeb. The retired 71-year-old chemist in Marlborough saw his basement lab dismantled by authorities this summer after it was noticed by fire officials putting out a second-floor air conditioner fire."As Synthetic Biology Becomes Affordable, Amateur Labs Thrive" (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)
The state DEP said officials intervened in Deeb’s workspace because it did not meet lab standards. Chemical companies shipping Deeb their materials were unaware that they were shipping to a residence, authorities said.
Deeb, who said he was trying to make safer surface coatings for food containers, insists that the chemicals he was using were less hazardous than common cleaners and household chemicals. He questions why his hobby was seen as more dangerous than, for example, a hunter with a gun collection, or a person using a propane grill.
“The more I tried to explain, the more they thought I was a lunatic,” Deeb said, questioning why he should need permits to tinker in his basement.
Previously on BB:
• Charges against (biohacker) artist Steve Kurtz thrown out
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I'm an environmental chemist (in MA also). I keep small samples of a large number of hazardous materials at my house. Their use is regulated. I know perfectly well how to store them safely, better even than the hazmat team that showed up at his house, I'll wager.
To the Commonwealth of MA and it's fainting couch policies I say this:
[cartman] Screw. You. Guys. [/cartman]
He questions why his hobby was seen as more dangerous than, for example, a hunter with a gun collection, or a person using a propane grill.
He seems to forget this is America, the land of anti-intellectualism. How dare you try to do something intelligent in your spare time!
MDH: Yes, but for every responsible person like you with the knowledge and expertise to properly handle such things, there are a dozen idiots cracking open old smoke detectors to remove the radiological materials or mixing toilet cleaner with lime sulfur on a lark to see how much hydrogen sulfide gas they can whip up. Hey, why not mix powdered chlorine and brake fluid- they do it on YouTube, right?
I have no problem with the whole "no lab at home" without a permit thing. Let these folks have their fun in a non-residential area. Way too much potential ugliness from the loons with their Gilbert chemical weapons sets, otherwise.
I think it's probably easier to hang on to the right to do something if most people are either heavily for or against it, than if most people are entirely indifferent.
Access to practical science as a private individual is a bit like the Maker's charter in reference to things you buy. If you aren't free to manipulate the matter around you, the world isn't yours, you're just a tenant.
I know lots of people with lots of "skills" who can actually do very little. They've all been trained only to play inside the sandbox they're given. One of the best things I like about this blog is the number of people that it showcases who really can do things, cool things and empowering things.
I read a fair amount of BoingBoing, and I really hate it when the government oversteps their bounds, but I might be able to give another spin on this.
My profession is emergency response, specifically, I am a firefighter.
Day in and day out we respond into peoples houses and find things that shock us.
The chemicals may in fact be very safe, but if I am crawling into a smoke filled basement and stumble upon a lab, I am going to be scared.
Furthermore, when chemicals are combined they can form dangerous and un-expected byproducts which are hazardous not only to us, the rescuers, but also the neighbors. Similar things can happen when chemicals are burning.
MDH, I have no doubt that you can safely house the chemicals that you are working with, and in your eyes they may not be dangerous. In our eyes, we see lots of containers with substances that we can only assume are harmful and don't have time to identify, especially if we are working in a dark, hot, smoke filled environment which we have never seen before.
This is why labs are licensed, so that we know ahead of time what we are getting into.
at least he wasn't Steve Kurtz'ed
What's more suspicious than science in a theocracy?
#6 Took the words right out of my (typing).
Except that I don't know how to so elegantly package my URLs, alas.
PRWHITE @6, They mention the Steve Kurtz case in the article, in fact!
Someone could use this technology to do enormous harm to a lot of people. Say some jerk is mixes E. Coli with some gene that produces a neurotoxin or something. Or mixes AIDS virus with a common cold virus. Bio-hacking is very very dangerous, because it deals with self-reproducing machines that happen to be made of the same parts as we are.
It is only a matter of time until someone does something terrible with this stuff. We can try to limit the damage by keeping some reasonably close supervision on what is going on, giving us precious time to respond.
This isn't like chemistry, it's not like teenagers souping up their cars, it isn't like people modding their computer cases, it really is not like anything else, in terms of the potential downside of human disease or damage to our food supply.
Nobody can regulate biohacking. As technology in general becomes cheaper, more and more things can be afforded by the amateur tinkerer... or the "bioterrorist". I don't think anything can be done about it.
@ Happykittybunny,
In a word - no. But you're also right - it's not like teenagers modding their cars. It's more like baking a soufflé.
It takes a lot of skill and training to get the genes you want into a target organism. Even with the right combination of kits, plasmids, host organisms, target genes, protocols, reagents, and ability, it's not as easy as you think.
You can only insert so much extra DNA into a given bacteria, and even if it takes, there's no guarantee that you'll get any (let alone good) expression. After that, you have to make sure that your modifications don't prevent the organism from being overgrown by the ones that didn't take the insertion. But suppose you do get expression and you have an easily isolated colony - now you need some way to isolate & purify your content.
Hacking a virus is even harder. Now you don't just have to be able to modify the DNA (or RNA as the case may be. Oh, and you have to know which you're dealing with), but you also have to have a method to culture it. The cell culture you need to keep viruses reproducing is much harder to maintain than the agar for growing bacteria or fungi. The slightest contamination will ruin everything. Do you honestly think that the majority of biohackers have dedicated, aseptic workspaces? Do you really think that they've even practiced aseptic technique?
The simple truth is that if you don't know what you're doing, you're more than likely going to end up with a useless, inert, or dead end product. The odds of a biohacker producing the next great plague are, honestly, pretty slim.
But if you want to be afraid, think about the emergence of multiple-drug-resistant strains of bacteria. These didn't come about as a result of biohackers, they came from selective pressure exerted on the bacterial populace since the introduction, and subsequent overuse, of antibiotics.
Oh, and one last note... It's not like antibiotic resistance is entirely new either. We've already demonstrated penicillin resistance in strains of S. aureus that have been in frozen store since before the drug was introduced to the public. Our use of the compounds have only forced the bacteria to adapt that much more quickly.
@Happykittybunny
I completely agree with Chloramphenicol (12).
I'll add that from a threat perspective it's very much like people playing with chemistry. My formal education in Chemistry stopped in high school, but I'm pretty confident I could make all manner of explosives, poisons to release as gas or drop into water supplies and other nasty compounds. Granted my HS chemistry is supplemented by further science enducation and generalised geekiness, but that can't be too unusual. My (bio)chemitry Ph.D. friends know how to make some deeply scary stuff.
For the reasons Chloramphenicol pointed out, no-one is going to engineer the perfect biological weapon by accident. By contrast, if someone wants to do it deliberately but can't get access to the equipment then they'll just find some other way to kill people. Ricin should be pretty easy to isolate using kitchenware and chlorine gas is trivial to extract from toilet bleach. Do you propose to ban those too?
[This is an excerpt from my standard rant number 375: "Almost all terrorists must be either deeply stupid or completely imaginary, or we'd be dead already". Order your copy now!]
Sorry to double-post, but this is cool enough to justify it:
DIY Biohacking: extract (and see!) your own DNA!
This is from memory, but it should work:
Get a mouthful of cold salty water and slosh it around your mouth. We're trying to get some cells to detach from your cheek/tongue and come into the water, which is pretty easy. The salt is there to help stop the cells from bursting too soon, which they might in pure water due to the differece in osmotic potential (roughly, salt and other ion concentrations) inside and outside the cells.
Spit the water into a very clean glass.
Add a tiny drop of soap to the water; this breaks down the lipid membrane that forms the cell surface. It's mostly made of fat, so soap breaks it down exactly the same way as it washes fat of dishes.
Now take the coldest, purest alcohol you can find (you already have some vodka in the feezer, right?) and add about twice as much as you have water in the glass. Stir.
You should get a small blob of sticky precipitate that looks a bit like off-white snot. It'll probably stick to whatever you stirred the mixture with. This is mostly your DNA, with some RNA and associated cellular proteins mixed in.
Notes:
Try to start with the smallest volume of saltwater you can; you want to maximise the cheek cells per ml of salt water.
The alcohol really does need to be very cold and very pure. I'm not joking about putting vodka (or any other spirit) in the freezer to cool and purify it. Anything solid after a day in the freezer is mostly water and can be discarded; the remaining liquid will be mostly pure alcohol. NB: I know nothing about US law, freeze-distillation of alcohol without a license might be illegal where you live.
If it doesn't work, try adding a bit of acid e.g. white vinegar or lemon juice. A low pH is sometimes useful to aid precipitation.
Masturbation: the original bio-hacking.
Hunters need a license and an approved storage space for the guns and an approved range for usage.
Propane is used outside and connected to an approved apparatus.
I have *zero* issue with this guy and his basement lab, but I gotta agree with the authorities on this one if what they say is true. Chemicals by themselves may be harmless, but mixed together incorrectly (or correctly!) can produce something quite harmful. A proper lab is just as important as proper training. I'd like to assume he has that proper training, but one wonders if he considers a safe set up not entirely necessary.
I really want to know how much they paid for the freezer. Those things aren't cheap.
I have to say that I find terms like 'biohacker' incredibly irritating. I'm suspicious of people who aspire to be 133t b10T3CH HAXX0Rs but who aren't interested in any other aspect of biology. As I someone who is more interested in the academic study of life than in its practical uses, it is possible that this is simply a cultural aversion.
In general, I agree with Chloramphenicol: this sort of thing is not easy at all. However, I agree with Happykittybunny's assessment of the risks involved with an amateur biotechnology movement, largely because I doubt that it is necessary to engineer a plague in order for it to be devastating. One could use directed evolution to accomplish the same thing, if one had some good way to screen a viral or bacterial population for lethality. I think this might have the advantage of allowing for the creation of many plagues rather than any single one. A single perfect disease is probably not necessary.
@CRIMESHARK
Yes, but for every responsible person like you with the knowledge and expertise to properly handle such things, there are a dozen idiots cracking open old smoke detectors to remove the radiological materials or mixing toilet cleaner with lime sulfur on a lark to see how much hydrogen sulfide gas they can whip up. Hey, why not mix powdered chlorine and brake fluid- they do it on YouTube, right?
Well, the same could be said for responsible gun owners and yahoos who think it's fun to go stop-sign hunting (or just plain old hunting while drunk and tresspassing). Ditto for responsible car owners and idiots who think drag racing on public streets is a victimless crime, or who think carsurfing is cool (hey, I say it on YouTube!).
And the same thing even goes for our anonymous firefighter. While I heartily agree that finding a lab while crawling around in the smoke and flames is a perilous thing, so would being in a burning house filled with fire-heated ammo, cans of stored paint and varnish, cans of hairspray, kerosene, cleaning chemicals and, yes, those pesky radioactive fire extinguishers melting all over the place.
Moral of the story is stuff doesn't kill, people with messed up intentions about what to do with the stuff kill. And his lab is no more unsafe to anyone (including my brave and utmost respected neighborhood firefighters) than my kitchen under-sink or my neighbor's God-knows-what-plus-ammo trailer home.
@ anonymous #5 - I also do emergency response occasionally (though not to burning buildings) - it helps enormously to have your head on you shoulders in tough situations else we all become Star Simpson when you overreact. I can tell by stepping on a property if what I find is going to be a problem. Piles of junk, poor storage, and unlabeled chemicals - problem. Tidy storage and labeled containers - not likely a problem.
But I do see your point, limited information and your ass is on the line - but if you let yourself assume (as crimeshark does) that there is a 1:12 ratio of responsible home chemists to jackass home chemists rather than 12:1 - just because your ass is on the line - and you react accordingly, then you do us all a disservice.
That said, you do us all a great service. And I Thank You!