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Journalism of Courage
Cathal Garveys home laboratory in Cork,Ireland,is filled with makeshift equipment. His incubator for bacteria is an old Styrofoam shipping box with a heating mat and thermometer that he has modified into a thermostat. He uses a pressure cooker to sterilise instead of an autoclave. Some instruments are fashioned from coffee cans.
In the burgeoning world of citizen science,where the ethos is closer to scout manual than peer-reviewed journal,Garvey,a 26-year-old geneticist who worked in a cancer research centre for about four years after earning a graduate degree,is something of a hero. He is perhaps best known for inventing the DremelFuge,a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer. His plans are freely available online,so anybody who has the desire and the resources to make one can do so.
One of the movements rallying points is Genspace,a nonprofit laboratory in New York that is open to members of the public,regardless of scientific background. Since it opened in 2010,on the seventh floor of an old bank building,similar labs have sprouted in Boston and San Francisco. Genspace has roughly a dozen members,and each pays 100 a month to cover rent and what laboratory people call consumables: chemical agents,disposable tubes and other paraphernalia that need to be replaced regularly.
The initial concept,said Daniel Grushkin,a journalist based in New York who was a founder of Genspace,is similar to the ethos of open-source software development: If you get as many brains as possible working collaboratively on biotechnology,you might get a really good idea.
The idea of amateurs doing their own biology has raised fears about both deliberate bioterrorism and the unintentional creation of a deadly disease. But making a new and virulent pathogen is far from easy,and the DIYbio community has adopted a set of safety standards to minimise such risks. Genspace has a strict policy against working with anything that can infect humans,and it has established a safety review board of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,the US Department of Health and Human Services and other institutions to approve proposals for new experiments.
To DIY enthusiasts,one of the most frustrating things can be the pace. Biology involves working with organisms that,like infants,need attention at specific times. So much of biology is just waiting, said Charlie Schick,a Boston-based member of DIYbio who runs a blog called Molecularist. And getting a temperature wrong or adding an incorrect chemical means that an experiment has to be started all over again.
An even bigger hurdle is all the expensive gear: Cheap centrifuges and polymerase chain-reaction machines cost about 3,000 each. Genspace,for example,could not have acquired all of its equipment with membership dues alone: A founder and the current president,Ellen D Jorgensen,previously worked at a private lab that decided to offload equipment after the recession forced it to downsize. She volunteered to take the jettisoned instruments.
Still,some bio-hackers think that what is needed is simpler and cheaper lab equipment. People vastly overestimate the cost of running a biotech lab, Garvey said. The cost of his home laboratory? Four thousand euros,he saidabout 5,000.RITCHIE S. KING
