Fwd: In this issue: Bio hacking comes of age
Ryan Bethencourt
From: Mary Huss, Publisher <re...@mail-1.bizjournals.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 6:17 AM
Subject: In this issue: Bio hacking comes of age
To: ryan.bet...@gmail.com
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Patrik D'haeseleer
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Ryan Bethencourt
Bio hacking comes of age
The ‘Steve Jobs of biotech’ may be at work right now inside one of the Bay Area’s nascent biohacking labs
Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) molecular structure on white background
Tinkerers, dreamers and makers are forging a new breed of biotech researcher. But whether do-it-yourself science stays a hobby — or creates the Steve Jobs of biotech — is not yet certain.
So-called biohackers are nothing new. Scrounging a piece of equipment here, Dumpster-diving there to build a makeshift lab in their kitchen or garage, they have been around for decades. The new generation, however, is coming together in share-it-all labs like BioCurious in Sunnyvale, Counter Culture Labs in Oakland or Berkeley BioLabs to pool their varied expertise and interests.
“It’s maybe like it should be called ‘do-it-together bio’,” said Mac Cowell, one of the pioneers of the DIY bio movement.
Indeed, biohacking labs in the Bay Area offer shared equipment, classes (like a how-to at Berkeley BioLabs on hacking at the bacterial genome) and maybe even a push toward turning your biohack into a company.
There is a growing list that Cowell has assembled of projects that have raised small amounts of money or collected payment for creating something. Berkeley BioLabs, meanwhile, has put an emphasis on helping biohackers move beyond garage-style tinkering to spin their ideas into actual startups.
Users of the Berkeley labs, including walk-ins, can rent space for $100 a month. Startups pay $500 for longer-term space with Berkeley BioLabs taking some equity.
Berkeley BioLabs is “odd,” CEO Ryan Bethencourt said, because its peak hours aren’t office hours. Users typically start arriving at the one-level building along West Berkeley’s lagoon around 6 p.m., after fighting through Bay Bridge and East Bay traffic that crawls along Interstate 80 a couple hundred feet away.
On its first open biohacking night in February, Berkeley BioLabs attracted a stem cell researcher, an Autodesk employee, a man with a master’s degree in economics, a computer programmer, a 20-something who isolates terrestrial fungi and others.
“There’s a ton of people in Silicon Valley all day, everyday, and they want to do something different,” Bethencourt said, “and we’re tapping into that.”
Still, Cowell said, there is yet to be a DIY biotech Steve Jobs — someone who biohackers can hold up as the archetype of the biohacking entrepreneur-cum-billionaire.
The closest is Glowing Plant, which came together at the BioCurious facility in Sunnyvale. It raised a half-million dollars on the Kickstarter crowdfunding site a year ago to design DNA sequences on a computer, make the DNA with laser printers and then insert the DNA into plants to become luminescent.
“It’s the novel factor,” said Antony Evans, the founder and CEO of Glowing Plant. “It’s really about the vision that there’s this world out there where it’s as easy to build a biological app as a social media app.
“It’s a symbol of our future in which people create those applications,” Evans said. “It’s the first step in a journey.”
Glowing Plant was the first crowdfunded synthetic biology project on Kickstarter, and it raised a ruckus. Because of concerns about genetically modified plants popping up anywhere in the world as gifts to funders, Kickstarter now doesn’t allow a genetically modified organism to be offered as a reward for funding a project.
“We’ve spoken to Kickstarter and they’re watching what we do and the public response,” Evans said.
Now Glowing Plant is “four people and an intern” working out of the Bioscience Laboratories incubator space along Third Street in SoMA.
Cowell started Genefoo, a company in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood that imports cheap equipment from China and distributes it to teachers and DIYers.
Low-cost equipment and more-efficient technology and processes are helping the biohacking movement come together at the biological intersection of the maker movement and open science. There’s even an ongoing low-key debate about whether the movement should continue to use the word “hacker.”
“In Silicon Valley, ‘hacker’ has a whole different meaning,” Evans said, “but the rest of the country has a very different view of hackers.”
But there has been progress as more people see the ability to relatively easily rewrite and reprogram DNA as “empowering and fascinating,” Cowell said.
“I don’t know why you need a biolab in the home,” he said. “But we didn’t know in the beginning why you needed a computer in the home.”
Ron Leuty covers biotech, higher education and China for the San Francisco Business Times.
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