The biohacking movement has created a wealth of options for hobbyist scientists. In Brooklyn, a DIY lab offers a place for the curious to dabble
On a crowded stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, on the seventh floor of a building gentrification forgot, is a place where you can dabble in genetic engineering. Genspace, a kind of co-working lab for scientists, offers a fully equipped research laboratory available for public use for a modest monthly fee.
It was the first of its kind to open its doors back in 2010 and signaled the rebirth of the gentleman (or gentlewoman) scientist. Since then, BioCurious, another DIY lab, has opened in Silicon Valley, allowing hobbyist biologists to fiddle with their own DNA and titrate their own blood samples. A number of startups like Bento Lab have popped up to serve the DIY Bio movement, making compact desktop versions of traditional biology lab equipment small enough to set up anywhere at home.
Above the din of rumbling trucks and screaming teenagers strolling home from nearby schools, the noise in the Genspace lab that is troubling founder Ellen Jorgensen is a centrifuge. Its too loud and she is not sure if it is safe to use. The equipment in the lab was donated or purchased secondhand to keep costs down.
In one corner near the communal table that serves as an office sits a small aquarium of the type that usually houses hamsters in elementary schools. It is now home to a few enormous South American cockroaches. A DIY neuroscience company called Backyard Brains used to teach workshops at the lab using a SpikerBox, a device that picks up and displays nerve signals. The easiest way to show those nerve signals is to tear the leg off one of the roaches, attach it to the SpikerBox and stimulate it to show the nerve signals being sent from the leg on an app. Backyard Brains has not run the workshop in a while so the lab inherited the roaches, which Jorgensen has become attached to since she started feeding them. Theyre practically pets at this point. I dont know how I would feel about the legs coming off, she says.
Many different people have rotated through the lab, from those needing gel electrophoresis equipment to others looking for low-temperature storage. There are people working on an RNA-based therapy, on genetically engineering E coli to produce cellulose, on trying to turn spent grain from the brewing industry into feed using a fungus and on stabilization work for personal care products. While lab members are all adults, teenagers rotate through as well for science projects and internships.
One teenager diligently working at the lab was diagnosed with ADHD and is using Genspace in his spare time to figure out if he has a particular genetic signature for the disorder. He even got his school to allow him to collect DNA samples from other students for his investigation.
Jorgensen, a trained scientist, runs regular workshops in the evenings on how to modify genes and use the basic equipment. She offers research 101 for those who may not have a traditional science background. While it may seem strange that you can be splicing DNA after one or two workshops, the so-called biohacker movement has made it the norm. Just as there are adult classes for baking cupcakes or repairing old cars, there are now people who try to genetically modify plants after work or on the weekends.
A few factors came together to encourage biohacker hobbyists, Jorgensen explains. There was the rise of the maker movement, as people started trying to do everything themselves, from growing and pickling vegetables to brewing beer. At the same time, there was the standardization of synthetic biology: the idea that DNA could be treated like code, made modular and with a little training used by someone without a biology background to run experiments.
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