Try this at home

I was drinking at a Cambridge, Mass., bar called Miracle of Science when the guy next to me slipped an index card marked with a highlighter-yellow dot. “Try it,” said the guy with scruffy hair wearing a black and red flannel shirt and thick black glasses.

“OK, I will,” I replied. Every time I’ve seen this guy, Mackensie Cowell, over the years, he’s offered me a bizarre gift. The first time, he put a strip of paper laced with the chemical PTC on my tongue to see if I had the gene to taste its bitter flavor. Another time, he offered me a lamp that ran on electricity produced by soil bacteria. And now this: Embedded within the dot was a microscopic swatch of DNA, a set of genetic blueprints.

I folded the card in half and put it in my wallet. With a simple set of instructions from the Internet and a common laboratory solution called TE buffer, a couple of friends and I dislodged the genetic instructions from the paper and inserted it into a batch of bacteria. Within a day, little colonies on the petri dish began to glow red.

A little more than decade ago, Time magazine declared that the 21st century would be the “Century of Biotech” and predicted the rise of gene therapies (still to come), anticipated a map of the human genome (completed in 2003) and wrung its hands over the possibility of genetically engineering children.

But it flat-out missed some of the last decade’s milestones, like the creation of the first synthetic organism (as The J. Craig Venter Institute did last spring). And Time did not anticipate the rise of synthetic biology, a field that applies engineering principles to biology with the goal of standardizing genetic parts so that designing life could be easier, more predictable and more open to the novice. Think of it like ready-made genes that fit together like Legos.

And the magazine did not foresee another by-product of biotech century: Three years ago, Cowell and his counterpart Jason Bobe, director of community outreach for the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, founded a movement called Do-It-Yourself Biology, which brings hobbyists to genetics. From its first meeting of 25, the group has grown to have more than 2,000 subscribers online. While the Venters of academic and industrial biotech open new frontiers, a growing segment of enthusiasts and garage biotechnologists are looking to find new applications for their discoveries. They are people like me. In the scientific journals, we’ve been labeled biotech hobbyists, citizen scientists, even biohackers.

Last December, seven of us opened the first community lab, called Genspace. Though it’s a fully functional lab, it has a decidedly hacked-together aesthetic. We built it in a Brooklyn, N.Y., warehouse that was converted into a workspace for architects and designers. At the center of the floor sits a glass cube made of found objects. The walls are created from windows and sliding glass doors saved from demo sites. The lab benches are stainless steel tables salvaged from industrial kitchens. Most of the equipment was donated by a biotech company that downsized during the economic crisis.

We incorporated Genspace as a nonprofit to serve as a shared lab, a nursery for biotech tinkerers. Our members include an entrepreneur with great ideas but a miniscule budget, an artist employing single-celled organisms for an experimental design palette, a molecular biologist with a penchant for mentorship, and folks like me, who want to learn by creating novel organisms.

Genspace won’t be the only spot for bio tinkerers for long. A second community lab is being hatched in San Francisco called BioCurious. Its members raised $35,000 on the Kickstarter fundraising website to launch. Once we iron out the protocols for setting up and running community labs, they’ll be replicated all over.

Where it will lead? In a now-famous essay in the New York Review of Books, the pre-eminent physicist Freeman Dyson speculated that the children of the future would genetically engineer their pet dinosaurs. Drew Endy, one of the fathers of synthetic biology, envisioned inserting genetic instructions into trees so that they would grow into self-assembled houses.

Recently, I was asked by the FBI to brief 250 new agents about amateur biotech at something called the weapons of mass destruction basic course. It’s an odd distinction to stand before an auditorium where scientific enthusiasm is tethered to evil intent, but the agents wanted to know the future risks associated with the opportunities, a task limited only by the depths of dark imagination.

Ultimately, the difference between the computer and biotech revolutions lies in applications. Computers allowed us to manipulate information in new ways. Biology will allow us to manipulate physical materials. Look at a single cell under a microscope; it’s a tiny factory. Using a given set of DNA instructions, cells can assemble anything in nature, ranging from a fingernail to a leaf, from heart tissue to yogurt or spider webs. The magic of cells is that they can produce nearly anything, and do it using less energy that any process humankind has invented.

Who knows what the “biotech century” will churn out? All I know is that I want to be part of it.