Tito Jankowski, who works on DNA research tools in his garage, started the San Francisco chapter of DIYbio.
Over the weekend, the SF Chronicle ran a piece on biohacking, with some of the usual suspects (DIYbio, Drew Endy, Tito Jankowski) and raising some of the thornier issues involved in high-tech kitchen-table science.
In a kitchen in Saratoga, an electrical engineer is working with pure strains of E. coli purchased over the Internet in hopes of creating a handheld diagnostic tool to detect dangerous bacteria.
Out of a garage in Sacramento, a bioengineer is designing low-cost equipment to allow people to see and construct DNA.
From a studio in San Francisco, an artist is building houses from a medicinal fungus.
Across the Bay Area, and in other high-tech hotbeds, a revolution is under way. Citizen scientists – or biohackers, as they’re being called – are taking biology out of academia and closed-door laboratories and bringing it into garages and kitchens, studios and warehouses.
Above image by Adam Lau for the Chronicle.
Do-it-yourself biology grows with technology
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Check out our own citizen science efforts in the Make: Science Room
4 thoughts on “Biohacking in the Chronicle”
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It’s the guy that used to sell encyclopedias on TV!
“Out of a garage in Sacramento, a bioengineer is designing low-cost equipment to allow people to see and construct DNA.”
Eek… that is the scariest sentence I have read in a long time.
Read “The White Plague” by Frank Herbert (yes, the Dune author) sometime about a biochemist who in his basement using cheap materials constructs a virus to get back at terrorist who kill his family; the plague wipes out 99% of mankind….