Legislation and/or standards affecting DIYbio or Biohacking in your country

[Andrew Gray]

Hey gang,

Hello from Australia! I've started a series of blog posts which is acting as an intro for DIYbio for Australians outside of what the mainstream media is interested in. I've done my first post 

http://bioquisitive.org.au/diybio-in-australia/

The next post will be a big one as i dive into how Aus compares to the rest of the world from a legislation, standards, and safety context. Especially how community labs here are affected by this in comparison to the rest of the world. So i've come to you, the rest of the worlds biohackers and diybio'ers to hear more from you on how legislation affects what you do in your given location. You don't have to write out the entire legislation obviously but if you would be able to point me in the direction of the agencies, regulators, legislation or otherwise that either enforce or write the policy that directly affects what you do in the world of DIYbio i would really appreciate it! Also if there are any interesting notes you've made, maybe shortfalls or areas that are ridiculously restrictive in your eyes please do share!

For example

Down here in Australia, we have federal regulators (Office of The Gene Regulator, who have cool badges) who enforce legislation around what sort of gmo experiments can be conducted where. Certain things we don't have to report on due to certain host/vector combos being in an extremely low category of risk. However if they find out your violating any law due to negligence it could be lock up for you or heavy fines. Having said that, in the pursuit of transparency we have been in contact with them from day 1 largely due to BioFoundry's Meow Ludo who has been extremely persistent in creating strong channels of communication with them. They're actually really excited about us getting this movement off the ground as long as we maintain our effort of being as open and transparent as possible.

In addition we also have to consider national standards which act as "guidelines" for construction and operation of various lab facilities such as AS/NZS 2243.3 

We're also subject to state level legislation which is pretty much just a repeat of what the OGTR has said in their legislation.

So any information like that would be very appreciated, also if you could tell me a bit about your WetLab or Group and country of origin i would be very appreciative and be sure to give you a shout out in the next blog.

Thanks guys,

Andrew

[Cathal (Phone)]

I would *love* to see a crowdsourced knowledgebase of regulation. When I was hoping to design IndieBB (a plasmid) for global shipping, one of the tough questions for me was how the law would apply to me and my customers in different countries. For example, apparently in France a plasmid with certain kinds of selective cassette is considered a GMO in itself, whereas in Ireland things are far more sane and only living cells can be considered GMO.

There's also an unfortunate amount of "regulator head-canon" that isn't widely understood. For example, EU regulators appear to agree that "self cloning" applies to microorganisms, and "cis-genics" applies to macroorganisms, but not the other way around. This is contrary to the generally accepted language used by everyone but regulators, and has bizzarre side effects because (IIRC) both terms are used in the "contained use" regulations but one is absent from the "deliberate release" schedule... leading to paradoxes where engineered bacteria can be considered exempt from containment but not permitted for "deliberate release". Wut?

Where should we put this data? I think another thread on the DIYbio wiki settlef on Github wikis...not ideal but at least portable someday to another system. Has anyone started said wiki?

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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Andrew Gray]

Hey thanks for the interesting info. I haven't come across anything painfully visible regarding an open resource containing regulations for different countries but i'd be happy to copy and paste what i come across. What country are you operating out of? What regulations are you subject to? 

[Dennis Oleksyuk]

Google search is way better than any wiki platform or other thing that requires coordination. Just post what you have to say as a blog post on some well known platform like https://wordpress.com/ and everyone everywhere will be able to find it very easily.

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[Cathal Garvey]

Shouting into the void is nice and all, but I'm personally a fan of
good, well-curated canonical resources. You might as well say wikipedia
is useless and we should all just blog random factoids and leave it up
to massive, corporate-owned search-engines to "Organise the world's
information".

[Dennis Oleksyuk]

Then why not publish what you have to say on Wikipedia? You can author the page titled Gene Editing Legislation in EU. 

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[Cathal (Phone)]

Wikipedia doesn't like "original research", you generally require offsite sources.

[Dennis Oleksyuk]

What is the problem with that? You were going to describe legislation without giving links to legislation?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/70004982-3BB1-48EA-9660-BA43603481C4%40cathalgarvey.me.

[ukitel]

We're discuss a bit about legislation (in Germany) in the thread I opened:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/diybio/1L6v0Ev0h8Q

Might be relevant for your interest