The Pimm – Partial Immortalization blog offers a few comments on how easy bioDIY is and encourages anyone with a biological bent and an interest in a fun new hobby to play around with his or her own genome at home.
If interested, you can do home biotech, you have the right and power to work with the basic macromolecules (DNA, RNA, protein) of life and with cells too. But it is not allowed to make experiments with animals and humans because of straightforward ethical reasons. DNA, cells, yes, animals and humans, no. So let’s exercise our rights and keep in mind the ethical standards. In the era of bioterrorism, raising self-awareness is crucial: knowing and using bioDIY in a clear-cut and legal way helps to dissipate fears.
Bottom line: Pimm acknowledges that bioDIY is easy and fascinating but has potential to cause harm if applied unethically. Despite an ongoing dialog about synthetic biology regulation among bioscientists, and between them and the government over the past few years, your own ethics are what keeps you from creating some microorganism that (probably by accident) gets loose and does something totally unexpected, like kills off all cattle, or makes all wheat inedible, or causes human disease.
Is it a good idea for a bioscientist to encourage more novices to enter the field through self-training and home experimentation? There are two sides to the debate, and the other side might be represented by Roger Brent with some points he makes in his paper, Power and Responsibility. He feels that the risk from a basement biohacker is low, but it could increase.
…developing an additional class of DNA hackers via high school and undergraduate engineering routes (as opposed to the existing scientific or biomedical communities) also provides some increment of risk. I can’t quantify that risk, either, although I suspect it is not high, but it will become very much higher if we permit an outlaw hacker culture to come into being and are foolish enough to glamorize it.
So the question remains about how this potentially, but unquantifiably, risky collection of biological technologies and techniques will be regulated. My hope is that the scientific community will develop a formal structure of self-regulation and monitoring before some “bio 9/11″ scares the government into doing it.
Filed under: biological science, biotechnology, science, technology
