Hacking into the building blocks of life itself

WIRED:How defensible is it to mess with genetically modified organisms in your spare time, asks DANNY O'BRIEN

A FRIEND of mine is somewhat mournful at the end of a tutorial organised by Ginkgo BioWorks, an MIT-based startup that aims to make biology easier to engineer. “I had to throw my cool sample into bleach!” he complains.

A day later, another attendee is examining her sealed Petri dish.

Weren’t you supposed to throw this away, I ask, as I peer inside. “Oh, mine aren’t fully grown yet.”

Besides, she wants her kid to see them before the purge. They glow in the dark.

The sample is a colony of E.coli, slightly altered. This batch glows in the dark because it’s had a new feature added to its genetic make-up. You can pick glow-in-the-dark E.coli, or E.coli that smells of banana. Or turns red. It’s your E.coli, you decide.

If you’re already freaking out about such casual talk of genetically modified organisms, you’re not the only one. Hardened computer experts – “hackers” in the old, positive sense of that term – are equally disturbed by this new hobby of their peers.

I’ve watched otherwise brave home-experimenters turn pale at the idea of others extending their “DIY” aesthetic to genetic engineering – especially when the results end up being stored in the communal fridge.

Nonetheless, this is exactly what the next generation of hackers is beginning to explore, although, as the old joke goes, very, very cautiously.

Ginkgo BioWorks intends to create a simple toolkit for built-from-scratch DNA systems, rather than muddling around manipulating and prodding existing, incredibly complex and poorly understood organisms.

Instead of building what mankind wants by splicing together bits of animals, we build them the way we build cars: using standard parts like cogs, levers, motors and engines. Easier to handle and experiment with, and more benign.

As it happens, the E.coli experiments are about as benign as current biotechnology gets, despite the “glow-in-the-dark” hearkenings to the worst nightmares of the nuclear age.

Lab E.coli, as experimented on by the volunteers at the Ginkgo tutorial, are deliberately designed to be the weaklings of the living world, susceptible to all antibiotics, casual hand-washings, and anything outside their coddled Petri-dish world.

The plug-in modules added to their basic DNA by tutorial attendees make them even more unlikely to survive in the world outside their Petri. Random, useless mutations are quickly burnt away in the zillions of regular E.coli generations happening every day. Deliberate mutations that throw precious bacterial energy away on non-reproductive frippery like fluorescence or banana smells are just as doomed.

If you’re not reassured, I understand. If the original media presentation of computer hackers was anything to go by, the presentation of bio-hacking will hardly be easier to swallow. Here in the US, the chemicals you need to run a decent kid’s chemistry set are carefully controlled, and kids are reported for the simplest experiments in stinks and explosions. Stick the word “retroviral” into the mix, and you have a recipe for both the cutting-edge of a self-taught vocational education, and the FBI busting down your bedroom door at 3am.

How defensible is it to mess with the building blocks of life in your spare time? As a species, we are notoriously poor at calculating risk – both overestimating and underestimating our chances. But in this case, I think we’re far more likely to err on the side of too much caution than appraise this new development correctly.

If anything, I’ve actually been exaggerating the true dangers for comedic effect here.

The true dangers are likely to be more to our civil liberties than to flora or fauna: panicking policymakers clamping down on a “dangerous new craze” that is sweeping our kids, or due to be transferred to al-Qaeda.

The media doesn’t exactly help. It’s unlikely that DIY biology is going to be met with friendlier treatment than this column when it hits the news headlines. That’s a shame.

What we’re actually talking about is learning about and exploring, in safety, the basic building blocks of an imminent revolution – peeling off the parts of biology that we can treat as engineering, and working with the same standard kit of safe tools that we need to build safe biology as we used to build the engines of our last few industrial revolutions.

However, we do need to talk about this. It’s going to be a long, hard discussion. We need rules to work on every side. People need to be reassured genetically modified material is not going to leak out from a college dorm or a rented flat. DIY bio-hackers will need to make what they’re doing easier to understand for the general public.

But so much of the current state of public knowledge and policy of biotechnology is based on the “eww” principle – that if it feels icky, we should ban it outright. This reminds me of the days when computer hackers were thrown into jail at the age of 15, just for doing strange things that none of the judges, police or juries quite understood.

Like the computer hackers, these biotechnology enthusiasts may well be the vanguard for a future revolution. Handle them with care, perhaps, but don’t kill them with bleach before they’ve had a chance to grow.