How Biohackers Are Tinkering With the Future

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Inside the unassuming brown walls of a warehouse in Hackney lies London’s first community hackspace, in which “biohackers” assemble to unravel the secrets of the human genome, whilst also seeing whether they can make their beer glow in the dark.

Biohacking is a new social movement whose members pursue DIY biology using tools once only available in professional labs, whilst testing innovative new practices and ideas.

Sam Thompson is a director and trustee of the Biohackspace who is currently working on genetic modification. “We get a huge range of people coming along: students, engineers and professional biologists. Everyone is free to come and work on their own projects, but we all learn from each other,” she said.

The non-profit workshop is now in its fifth year and has attracted over eight thousand members since opening. It is also the only lab in the country which allows anyone, regardless of qualifications, a stab at genetic engineering.

Such community-led hackspaces have sprouted up all around the world, many of them attempting to make science more accessible, whilst fostering a deeper collaboration between like-minded individuals.

“We’re trying to teach people the skills they need to take their experiments further; at the moment it’s like amateur rocketry with some people. It’s about trying to take the passion these biohackers have and translate it into tangible science,” Sam said.

One man who feels very comfortable within the pragmatic rooms of the London Hackspace is Philipp Boeing, co-founder and creator of the “Bento Lab”, the world’s first complete portable DNA laboratory. The invention combines all of the essential tools necessary for complex experiments and is the same size as a sheet of A4.

“When I first started thinking about building the lab, I thought the London Hackspace would be a fantastic asset, that we could work together and get so much work done. Although at the time the group was just starting out, so it ended up being us training them from the ground up. But in a way, they trained us to think like hackers,” Philipp said.

This shift towards “hacking”, whether it be modifying our own DNA or the digitalisation of our natural systems, has been profound. Just last August, Phillip Ball documented the trend of DIY science in the Lancet journal, stating that “profound conceptual advances in science can be made without rigorous and deep training”.

This is new territory: scientific innovation which once required a state of the art laboratory can now be achieved in your bedroom or garage at a fraction of the cost. However, it is possible that this could create a generation of scientists unaware of the ethical implications of their work.

After the experience at the Hackspace, Philipp Boeing and his team got hooked on this mingling of cultures and methods, and went on a tour of the world’s biohacking spaces. These spaces currently range from crowdfunded basements, to illustrious government-funded institutions.

Philipp said: “They were all so distinct, there’s not one model that works. And the Bento Lab really came from this experience of mingling with the community. We didn’t feel like there was something like this already existing in biology, and it was holding everyone back.”

The lab itself is designed to remove the huge barriers to entry for enthusiasts; if individuals are preoccupied building their own equipment, they may never actually perform an experiment.

The Bento Lab also allows users to edit genes using “CRISPR-cas9”. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a gene editing tool vastly more precise and powerful than its predecessors, one which allows for direct alteration of DNA sequences, effectively letting researchers cut and paste genes.

The method has attracted enormous levels of attention due to its minimal cost and incredible levels of precision. During the last two years alone, search traffic for the method has increased by 176 per cent, whilst the cost of acquiring the appropriate tools has plummeted.

Researchers have been able to use CRISPR to cure blindness in mice, with many hoping genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis could also be eradicated entirely. However, Boeing indicated that whilst the method is possible using tools in the Bento Lab, the level of expectation should be tempered. “We live in this societal paradox where all of these tools are getting more powerful, yet the general public is mostly bio-illiterate.”

There are also moral implications to using gene modification tools, as Edward Perello has seen during his development of Desktop Genetics and DESKGEN, a landmark piece of software which assists in genome editing and utilises CRISPR technology. “Our goal is to build an AI that is so good at predicting how CRISPR behaves in cells, that it will be the standard technology for use in labs, the clinic and even hackspaces,” he claimed.

Whilst this may appear to have little relevance for the average person, the level of intricacy that biohackers can achieve with CRISPR is potentially monumental. The technology is still in its infancy, but CRISPR has the potential to cure the HIV virus, or extract the DNA strand within mosquitos which allow them to carry malaria and remove it completely.

If CRISPR is a surgical laser, then software like DESKGEN will be vital in ensuring it works correctly. According to information obtained from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), there are 10 active programmes explicitly utilising CRISPR-cas9 receiving funding, totalling approximately £7.6 million in research grants. The BBSRC are predominantly funding universities and educational institutions, but the amount of funding has decreased since the emergence of CRISPR.

Dr Ángel Goñi Moreno is a lecturer in synthetic biology at Newcastle University and previously worked at the Centre for National Biology in Spain. He argued that widespread bio-illiteracy is holding back some hackers. “If an amateur enthusiast joins a powerful synthetic biology laboratory, they could embrace those skills and techniques quickly, but they still might struggle to do anything complex in their garage.”

As the technology involved becomes increasingly cheaper and easier to use, thanks in part to creations like the Bento Lab, more and more individuals can interact with multi-faceted scientific methods, whilst not being entirely aware of the scientific processes behind them. This will undoubtedly create numerous regulatory issues in the future, besides the obvious ethical implications of DNA editing.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) closely monitors developments within the UK, yet made a world-first move by approving the genetic editing of human embryos at the Francis Crick Institute in London last year.

Forma Biolabs is Ireland’s largest community hackspace and its founder Cathal Garvey is a proud biohacker. “I have seen people come all the way up from having zero knowledge to founding a biotech company, just based on the information they learned from forums and talking to others. Actually, I was recently talking to a total newcomer working with a CRISPR kit to engineer his first bacteria; they haven’t succeeded yet, but it is a phenomenal first project attempt.”

This appears to be a welcome by-product of the hackspaces: not only do they aid in the collaboration of existing scientists, but they are helping to make science more transparent and accessible for the general public, encouraging the next generation of biohackers to get involved.

The advent of CRISPR based technologies has coincided with the proliferation of community-led hackspaces across the globe, undoubtedly fuelling a change in the way science will do business forever. The influx of amateur biohackers has seemingly reinvigorated the space, providing differing and creative alternatives to age-old problems.

Ultimately the scientific community will need to find a way to utilise this resource whilst instilling a level of ethical responsibility on the biohackers, who may become too distracted changing the colour of their beer to realise the true extent of their actions.

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