
The New Hacker Hobby That Will Change the World - cwan
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/70314.html?wlc=1278133428
======
davcro
Ex-bio engineer here. I do not think the DIY bio community exists or will ever
gain traction. For one, I don't understand how someone could do labwork in
their garage. Two I don't understand how people could afford mandatory tools
like PCR machines. Three, the results from your labor don't seem tangible or
exciting. At least with the computer hacking movement in the 60s and 70s you
could hold a computer in your hand, you could see improvements in speed and
performance as you tinkered. When programming, the output of your code would
be realized relatively quickly. Bio is too complicated, too tedious, and too
expensive to ever be fun or support a hacker community.

~~~
keenerd
Ex-plugboard operator here. I do not think the DIY computer community exists
or will ever gain traction. For one, I don't understand how one could build a
computer in their garage. Two, I don't understand how people could afford
mandatory tools like hard vacuum pumps and tungsten furnaces. Three, the
results from your labor don't seem tangible or exciting. At least with the car
hacking movement in the '20s and '30s you could go for a drive around the
town, you could see improvements in speed and performance as your tinkered.
When doing mechanical work, the change in the sound of the engine would be
realized as soon as you released the choke. Computers are too complicated to
wire, too tedious to replace dead tubes and too expensive to ever be fun or
support a hacker community.

~~~
keenerd
Ex-engine mechanic here. I do not think the DIY car community exists or will
ever gain traction. For one, I don't understand how anyone could build a car
in their garage. Two, I don't understand how people could afford mandatory
tools like a boiler welder or a metal lathe of required tolerance. Three, the
results from your labor don't seem useful or safe. At least the the electric
light movement in the '90s and '00s you could replace a dangerous and
unreliable flame with a modern Edison Lamp. Why, you realize the benefits as
quickly as you can toggle the switch lever. Steam engines are too complicated
to tool, too dangerous to operate and too expensive to ever be fun or support
a hacker community.

~~~
davcro
The difference between BioE is scale. Both cars and computers were built from
large objects you could hold in your hand. BioE is at the nano and micro
scale. Bio work requires a sterile environment, expensive hard to obtain
chemicals, and fancy machines like atomic microscopes. In my mind Biohacking
is as far fetched as nano-engineering and time travel.

Full disclosure: I have an undergraduate degree in bioengineering from 2008. I
did a lot of lab work, but never worked in industry. I've went straight into
web apps after graduating.

~~~
keenerd
Everything becomes more convenient and cheaper with time (barring cataclysm).
And just because something is a "large object" does not mean there is a huge
amount of precision work involved.

I'll give another example. A telescope is big. But good luck grinding the
mirror. You can do this by hand, by the way. To within a tenth of a micron.
The really good guys actually do the final "grinding" with their bare thumb.

At one point, being an amateur astronomer required building your own
telescope, entirely by hand. I have books that go through everything from
grinding your own 6" mirror to making an equatorial mount. Then in the mid
1950s, companies started making decent small astronomy scopes. Oddly enough, a
6" scope today has the same price as a 6" scope in 1955 ($450), but that
inflates to $3600 today.

Not too long ago I picked up a shoddy 4" scope for $10 at a yard sale. This
would have been the worlds largest telescope, if you went back in time to
1800. How is that for progress?

The paraphernalia required to do professional work is always getting cheaper
and easier to operate. Bio seems to be in a similar state as astronomy in
1930. The pros are using their huge 100" scopes on mountaintops. The amateurs
are using homebrew 6" scopes. You've used the real deal, but that does not
mean there isn't a lot of virgin territory within the reach of an amateur.

------
Rod
Paraphrasing Feynman: "I believe that a hacker looking at nonhackerish
problems is just as dumb as the next guy." The level of ignorance revealed in
most comments on this post so far is somewhat shocking. Michael Nielsen once
mentioned that HN'ers could be incredibly arrogant when treading outside of
their area of expertise, and this is all the proof one needs. Either that, or
Biology gets all the HN simpletons out of the closet.

~~~
danielford
Yeah, I haven't wanted to reach through the internet and smack so many people
since the last time I read the comments for a YouTube video.

I suppose they deserve to know why they're wrong though. For starters the
article isn't saying anything beyond the fact that there are people who buy
used PCR machines and run reactions in their basement. Now, I think that's
pretty cool, but nothing meaningful is going to come of it. There are a few
reasons for this:

1) Biological Research Is Expensive - Setting up a real lab so you can do the
basic stuff like running gels and western blots is going to cost somewhere
around $100,000. Note that this isn't like buying a computer where once you
pay for it you're set. Actually performing an experiment can cost hundreds of
dollars for reagents alone.

2) Biological Research Requires Oversight - If you're going to work with
radioisotopes, or toxic chemicals, or animals you need permits that are not
offered outside of an academic or industrial setting. Two of the basic
techniques of molecular biology, northern blots and southern blots, use
radioactive reagents. I'll grant that there are alternatives that use
fluorescence, but they're expensive, and aren't widely used.

3) Biological Research Is Tedious and Slow - I think part of the reason
computers took off so quickly is that you can run a program and get quick
feedback on whether or not it worked. Most of biological research is not like
that. In graduate school I worked on genetic modifications that hypothetically
extended the life spans of fruit flies. In order to see if a modification
worked, I had to assay their life span over a hundred days. I'd normally be
incredibly excited about getting the result on day one, but by day forty my
interest was mostly exhausted. Biology doesn't give you the instant thrill of
knowing a piece of code worked, which is one of the reasons it's not going to
take off like personal computers did.

I'm not going to single anyone out, but if you've been making comments in this
thread there's a high probability you have no idea what you're talking about.

------
nickpinkston
Wow - I'm really surprised at the polarization of the comments here.
Seemingly, there are only Drexlerians with replicator futurism or old guard
skeptics. This truth certainly lies somewhere in between.

For instance, is cloud-based synth/analytics really that far fetched /
impractical? For example, have you seen the automation we're seeing with
microfluidics?

<http://microfluidics.ee.duke.edu/>

Are you saying that hackers can't order biological systems the way we order
custom circuit boards today? The means of production are comparatively high -
yet it's very cheap to make them.

Techno skeptics love to say "why would". Futurists like to say "what if". The
correct response is probably "how can".

------
Ratufa
My prediction: as soon as "DYI Bio" begins to have any real-world impact (or
gets enough publicity), it will be banned/heavily regulated, at least within
the US. It is too easy to come up with alarming scenarios if an accident
happens or if the technology gets misused (which fits in very well with the
current anti-terrorism rhetoric). Also, many corporations will not welcome the
lack of control over some of the technology that a successful DYI Bio movement
would bring, so they will lobby for "protection".

------
bfung
It is a bit sad to think that the first thing people think of is how
impractical or malicious these ideas can be. How about instead of pure
biology, it turns out to be a mesh of several fields? Photosynthesis + energy
breakthroughs (custom designer plants for home decoration? grow your own
furniture?), biological computing, or biomechanical machines...

------
rbanffy
Hobbyists making homebrew viruses. What could possibly go wrong?

------
caffeine
I created a thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1483783> to try and
get a list of synthetic bio startups. If you know one/work at one, would be
great to hear about it!

------
thefool
The real question is: what will biology be able to do that computers arn't
able to?

Back then the real alure was that computers could compute things amazingly
quickly, and later, that through the internet, we could organize information
on computer networks. And that everything could scale really quickly.

We may be entering an era of basement labs, but that doesn't mean that these
breakthroughs will necessarily be life changing.

IT is working on the problems of organizing people and information. This will
likely produce many more people working on solving human maladies. But all
these things being done in basements without any regulation or standards may
lead to some health risks for first movers.

~~~
Tichy
I estimate the demand to be about one or two microbes world wide.

~~~
Confusion
This kind of answer distracts from the honest and interesting question that
thefool poses:

    
    
      The real question is: what will biology be able to do that
      computers aren't able to?
    

If you asked that question about carbon nanotubes ten years ago, I could have
answered that question and I think many people would have been interested in
the answers, as the ideas and speculations on the subject wouldn't yet be
widely known. In the same way, I would really like it if someone knowledgeable
answered this question: what actual things are thought to be feasible through
tailoring micro-organisms?

~~~
jodrellblank
This chap's fairly knowledgable...
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHL7Drfj0B0>

------
igrekel
Ok, interesting... So where are the links to these online communities of
thinkerers? We heard about this many times over the last few years but I'd be
curious to see what exactly is done.

~~~
kanzure
<http://diybio.org/>

<http://groups.google.com/group/diybio>

------
greenlblue
Wetware is a much more dangerous game that's why doing any kind of biological
research involves working in some big lab with tons of cash flow and
management personnel that have connections to health organizations and various
government oversight committees. A runaway biological virus is much more
dangerous than a runaway _computer_ virus so I'm not expecting an emergence of
the biological valley any time soon.

~~~
mikedmiked
It is far, far more easy for a malicious person to intentionally create
something "bad" than for a good person to do it by accident. That said, a
malicious person would not be able to create something "bad" without a
tremendously large amount of funding and manpower.

So lets imagine a malicious person with funding and manpower turns up: Sure,
totally synthesised genomes will turn up and you will be able to email some
guy who generates your operon to stick into whatever, so the barriers of entry
for a bio-terrorist will be lowered somewhat; but even then the knowledge of
how to create a killer virus will be scarce.

And after 20+ years of gained knowledge, once a billionaire Bond-villain with
a fortress of henchmen* has made a killer virus, it is tricky to imagine it
out-competing any virus created by nature's hands - she had several million
years worth of head-start and a hell of a lot more funding.

So, yes, it is very unlikely, but still possible. However, if you were going
to go to all that work to spread some virus, I would strongly recommend that
you just learn to make nukes instead. They are much more reliable,
predictable, and will have less fallout for you to worry about.

*Although a Government could much more probably fill this role.

------
sliverstorm
'lack of standardization of bioparts...'

Heh... I wonder what will play the same role as SCSI this time around...

~~~
Rod
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBrick>

~~~
rflrob
My understanding from talking with people in the field is that BioBrick parts
aren't nearly as turn-key as could be hoped. I'm sure that over the next
decade or so, they'll get much better, just as computer technology did, but
they aren't there yet.

~~~
mikedmiked
Frequently bricks aren't compatible or affect the expression of other bricks
in a totally unpredictable manner. The only way of guaranteeing a working
biobrick made of many biobricks is to combine as many combinations of
biobricks-which-do-the-same-thing as you can find, and use the ones generating
the best gene expressions. Even then you might want to take the best 3 or 4 as
they will behave differently when combined with other bricks.

------
SkyMarshal
Very cool, but a little scary to ponder what could happen when Fluffy Bunny
gets ahold of a DIY genetic engineering kit.

------
seven
For those who understand German: Podcast about biohacking:
<http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre143.html>

------
roadnottaken
I bet 90% of thes "basement labs" are just covers for manufacturing meth.
Biology is too expensive, and if you want to pursue synthetic biology you can
get well funded to do so by the NIH. You don't need a big corporate lab, you
just need to go to grad school.

