Bunch of Amateurs (17 page)

At a public forum in Cambridge, a crowd of about forty people took their seats in a lecture hall at MIT on a pleasant fall evening. Cowell and his partner Jason Bobe, who have announced the first DIYbio chapter here, welcome everyone. There are a few reps from start-up biotech companies, hoping to catch a rising star. Most of the people
here are frustrated programmers who are no longer content with the kind of success one can achieve in the computer domain. Sure, there’s money to be made, but where’s the glory in creating the latest add-on to Excel or patch for Google’s search algorithm? Some apparently think it’s time to head to a new frontier—where they are still putting down wood sidewalks over newly trafficked mud.

The key attraction of synthetic biology dominates the night—how cool would it be to engineer life or create it altogether? On some level, hasn’t this historically been the greatest wet dream of every scientist, mad or sane, since the beginning of time? Well, yes. So the conversation quickly becomes a question and answer about safety issues. What about making all this knowledge so freely available? Won’t some kid resurrect smallpox or weaponize Spanish flu? How does one promote healthy Boy’s Club fun for synbio at a time when Americans regularly hear about anthrax attacks, radioactive dirty bombs, and endless airport announcements in tinny android voices to please report any unattended packages? It’s a question that haunts the evening.

Over the course of several days I hung out with Bobe and Cowell, they both spent as much time trying to explain to me exactly how they intend to position synbio as they did explaining the science itself. They very much want it to have that free-flowing joy associated, say, with the young-adult chemistry sets of our imaginations.

Cowell has created a cartoon how-to for basic biology very much in the noble science tone, and their websites are a pleasure to cruise, charged with cautionary principles. Bobe says that he wants one of the main missions of their group to be researching the protocols of garage biology from state to state and to have those guidelines freely available on their website. So if an amateur biologist in Nevada wanted to know whether he could set up a lab in his backyard, he could easily access the current legal requirements.

“At the first meeting, a kid name Mike showed up,” Bobe said, referring to the unofficial gathering in the secret fort. Mike proudly showed everybody his online picture. “It’s Mike by a desk lamp holding
up a test tube,” Bobe said. Shot with lots of spooky shadow, Mike’s crazed smile and tuft of chin hair makes the whole look very mad scientisty. Another amateur named Julie piped up: “You can’t publish that, the FBI will be here any minute!”

It’s not exactly an idle speculation. Bobe and the others continually discuss the recent case of a retired seventy-one-year-old chemist named Victor Deeb. He was doing some work in his basement lab in Marlboro, Massachusetts, when an upstairs air conditioner caused a fire to break out on the second floor. When the fire department came and stumbled upon the homemade lab, they summoned the alarm. Even though Deeb had maintained the lab for twenty years without incident—mostly recently working on “a carcinogen-free sealant for the lids of baby-food jars”—the government seized his science equipment.

Officials with the state environmental agency admitted in the local paper that the “chemicals in Mr. Deeb’s basement posed no radiological or biological risk, and there was no mercury or poison.” Pamela Wilderman, Marlboro’s code enforcement officer, summed up her accusation: “I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere.” But the official wouldn’t or couldn’t say what the line was.

The case has since turned into a civil rights issue. In answering a fire call, can bureaucrats poke around one’s house and decide that it looks like it might be bad, so that all the property has to be impounded? The town’s assistant solicitor said it didn’t really matter if Deeb’s rights had been violated or his livelihood deprived because: “He’s a creative person, and I don’t think that’s something you can shut off.”

What?

An earlier generation might have celebrated Victor Deeb as a hero, a charming crank, and a garage inventor trying to come up with the next big thing. Now he is a threat to the “homeland”? But here’s the real question on the minds of amateurs: What if Deeb had been a twenty-four-year-old trying to isolate the hemoglobin-producing gene to create bacteria that could pump out an endless supply of artificial
human blood (been done, by Berkeley students, already a registered part known as “Bactoblood”)?

Or what if Deeb had been “Splicer”—an overseas DIYbio enthusiast who is causing Bobe some ulcerous concern à la Mike? Besides his tangy handle, Splicer’s photo icon on the Internet is a baby with nails sprouting from its head. Bobe rolls his eyes at the kind of trouble this sort of teen swagger invites from the unknowing public and small-town safety bureaucrats.

If the professionals like Endy and Dyson are toying with metaphors involving manufacturing and bacterial factories, the amateurs are already at the barricades of this new science. Academics with large funded labs and lots of protocol are not as likely to attract sudden and possibly catastrophic media interest as Bobe and Cowell. They must simultaneously worry about PR on the one hand, while trying to establish a fundamental code of conduct on the other. They want to come up with solid rules of synbio behavior before some incident brings down the fury and ignorance of outsiders. The tricky question is this: Can they figure out the equivalent of the Boy Scouts’ rules on campfire etiquette before someone burns down the forest?

Amateurs may dabble in any science, but one of their unacknowledged jobs is dealing with how the common man understands it.

For Bobe, the ready-made metaphor is already out there, both a blessing and a curse: hacking. Now upgraded to “biohacking.” As other chapters of DIYbio have immediately sprung up, Bobe confides in me one day about the headlong progress of the “people in San Francisco.” He refers to the folks out there in the legendary Silicon Valley as if he were an Eastern banker in 1880 fretting about the rumors one hears about that new town, Dodge City. One of the Bay Area biohackers has somehow managed to get some of the glow-in-the-dark plasmids (literally, the piece of a fish gene that allows it to glow in the dark). Such things are supposed to be difficult to access unless you are a company. The biohacker who’s pulled this off apparently hasn’t
gotten the memo warning about provocative pseudonyms and goes by the handle “clonearmy.”

Not far off Fillmore Street in San Francisco, in that stretch that’s still mostly Boho coffee joints with a head shop or art gallery or two, is the apartment of clonearmy. No need for secrecy. She’s Meredith Patterson, a thirty-something woman pushing five-foot-ten, who favors combat boots and butch leather jackets. She wears the kind of glasses slightly pinched at the tips like cats’ eyes to finish off her look with a nice hint of 1950s girl nerd.

On our way to Trader Joe’s to pick up some plain yogurt from which to extract some DNA, I noticed a tattoo on her ankle. She pulled her pants up above her boot. “This one’s not done yet,” she advised. It’s a steampunk biomechanical X-ray of her lower tibia and fibula, a series of mechanical cogs, robotic pistons, and bicycle chains. “It’s kind of a joke because I have these weird mutant ankles,” she said. “I had this thing called an accessory navicular bone.” All of her tattoos relate, in some way, to her sense of herself as an off-the-grid scientist: On one arm she has a rose window and sword from her favorite anime story,
Revolutionary Girl Utena
. Down the bicep is the iconic image of Atlas holding up the heavens, most familiar as the paperback cover art of Ayn Rand’s novel
Atlas Shrugged
. And keeping the burdened Titan company is the Page of Pentacles, the tarot card figure who signifies the “eternal student,” Patterson says, and officially described as “a young man who stands alone in a field full
of freshly blossoming flowers … unaware of anything around him other than the golden coin which seems to float in his hands.”

Patterson does in fact have a sample of the glow-in-the-dark plasmid sealed in a bag in her freezer (next to some frozen chicken wings and a box of Eggos). The gene known as green fluorescent protein or GFP is already famous for many reasons. In 2000 an artist named Eduardo Kac created “GFP Bunny,” an albino hare genetically altered into a chimera rabbit that would glow bright green in the presence of ultraviolet light. Since then, the gene has been domesticated—very domesticated. Pet stores now sell GFP-altered zebra fish as GloFish ($7.99 a piece, $6.99 if you buy three—now available in Starfire Red, Electric Green, Sunburst Orange, and Cosmic Blue). The American scientists who isolated this gene won the Nobel Prize in 2008, and GFP is more seriously used as a marker, to track the movement of genes. Patterson’s hope is to create “Glo-gurt.”

“I thought it would be cool,” she said. She imagined how great it would be to go to a rave with glo-sticks you could eat.

While I’m visiting, her goal is to cultivate enough bacteria in her homebrew lab and then to improvise a homemade electroporation device in order to transfer the glow-in-the-dark gene into a bacterium that then can be used to cultivate yogurt according to the regular recipes.

“Electroporation involves exposing a sample of bacteria to a high-voltage, pulsed electrical field,” Patterson said. In this case: 2500 volts. (A standard wall socket is 120 volts.) “Essentially,” she said, “we’re going to Taser them.”

Getting the plasmid, it turns out, is no big deal if you’re an old Silicon Valley hand. Like nearly every programmer out here, Patterson has a shell company with an address and name. This way, ordering plasmids from Carolina Biological Supply Company in North Carolina was as simple as shopping for a pair of shoes online.

Her lab is on a table right in the front room. The place is what one expects in an apartment shared by a changing number of roommates.
I say number, because it’s never quite clear to me how many actually live here. The roommate she refers to at one point doesn’t show up after several of my visits because she’s “at a rave” that appears to be moving into its second lunar orbit. Otherwise, it’s all very familiar—a friendly wreck of used furniture, piles of books and boxes, coats, beanbag chairs, and a potted glade of pioneering house-plants clustered desperately at the windows.

Scattered on the table is Patterson’s homebrew genetic gear. While Cowell was still worrying about lab-quality pipettes (since they run around $200), Patterson had long ago solved that problem with an online pharmacy selling cheap disposable insulin needles that can measure down to microliters. She originally reengineered an old nine-inch floppy drive motor from a computer she bought on the street for $5 to serve as a centrifuge for spinning vials of liquid containing bacteria.

Patterson’s autoclave is a pressure cooker, and the glycol she tells me awkwardly comes from Astroglide, the sex lube. I’m sure there is some brilliant cultural observation to be made about Bay Area amateurs instinctively improvising with sex lube while East Coast biohackers are horsing around with suppositories. It’s just that I’m not sure I want to ponder these distinctions long enough to find out what it is.

Patterson’s incubator is a Sharper Image tailgater’s fridge that can cool or warm.

“Someone was getting rid of one of these for $30; mine now,” she said proudly.

Patterson has employed a number of ingenious hacks to get what she needs. She scoured supply house sites regularly for deals. So, for instance, one company offered a free sample of one of five polymerases (very useful enzymes that can copy a DNA strand). But the deal was limited to one shipment per address.

“So it shows up two days later in a Styrofoam cooler full of dry ice pellets. And I am like, wait a second, they just sent me a DNA polymerase and a ton of free dry ice. But they will only send me one type of polymerase and they have five available,” Patterson explained,
noting that dry ice is much in demand at raves these days. “And I want all of them, so I call up a bunch of my friends and I say, ‘Hey, do you want some free dry ice?’ All you have to do is order this polymerase stuff,” she said, then “give me the polymerase and you can keep the dry ice.”

Patterson’s evident pleasure in creating this kitchen-top lab and the different ways she has hacked the system is clearly a major part of why she, a computer programmer by day, moonlights as a kitchen biologist. It doesn’t matter whether she has socially engineered corporate suppliers, bale-wired some junk she’s bought at a street sale, or worked out ingenious substitutes from the local pharmacy (or sex shop), Patterson talks about this part of her work with as much glee as she does the actual genetic engineering she’s attempting.

There’s a playful quality to all this, an entertaining quality, and in fact, she confesses at one point that she probably owes her interest in all this to an accidental piece of DNA-style performance art she stumbled into. When a famous programmers’ conference was getting scheduled—Codecon—she volunteered to put on a little DNA show and the organizers agreed.