Back in 2004 I was flying all over the place, promoting blogging. It was the year The Blogger entered the public eye, came out in magazines, built empires. One of the great debates was the clash between Main Stream Media (MSM) – the newspapers, publishing houses, and TV stations – versus the citizen journalist, the bedroom blogger, the unwashed masses of online writers.
MSM, of course, said that bloggers were not accurate, were not honest, were temporary, that only MSM was the font of Truth and quality information. Well, so much has happened since then. I feel there is still a place for professional journalism, but blogs have settled into their niches, providing a "long tail" (there I said it) of content of varying quality and scope. And, well, blogs today aren't the same as blogs 5 years ago, in the end, they are still just an online publication.
But watching the style and aspirations of the DIYbio crowd reminds me of those days. It seems that the friction between DIYbio types and Main Stream Scientists – the labs and institutes – hovers around the same issues as in the day of blogger vs. MSM.
And I think the change will be just as profound and the outcome just as mundane.
iGEM for me was the first time I got to meet folks in the DIYbio "movement." The DIYbio folks from NYC and Boston had a meeting the first night to discuss where things were going. They all knew each other and had collaborated in some areas.
It was nice to see the easy flow of ideas and decisions. As with iGEM, this group is in a very early stage. But already some things are becoming clear as to what it's going to take to keep growing.
One more thing (and I might be inviting a flame war): there is clearly some friction between the iGEM folks and the DIYbio folks. Part of this resides in prejudices towards amateur biologists (unfounded), part in worries about safety (well founded), part in the small difference in culture.
DIY home base One of the things that happened is that iGEM required teams to be affiliated with an institution. That was a way to ensure safety concerns (indeed, the FBI was a sponsor of the Jamboree, go figure). Independently, the DIYbio groups in Boston and NYC (and I) realized that, while it would be nice to actually do kitchen biology, groups need some sort of entity with which they can buy supplies, teach safety and techniques, and, of course, enter into iGEM.
I'm all for it. In the past months, reading and following and talking to DIYbio folks, my thoughts on hack-spaces has evolved to include more than just a bench, but also seminars, safety certification, mini-grants, and even a store (check out Pearl Biotech).
I was also glad to finally meet Mac, one of the leaders in DIYbio. He's recently purchased a lab trailer, full of equipment. He's now looking for space (too bad my ample backyard is so far from town). His goal is to build this out as a hack-space, also hoping to mix novice and experience biologists, to get some culture and skills transfer.
That's super. I look forward to getting more involved. Mac has a ton of projects in mind and could use some help. And I want to learn from the DIYbio NYC folks who recently formed a non-profit and are acquiring space so that they can get out of their living rooms and get a nice space to play around in.
This iGEM was my first. I’d read about it, talked about it, but this is the first time I’ve been immersed in it.
OK, so I wasn’t part of a team, so I told folks I was a “lurker.” That was out of the ordinary, since most folks were either staff, team members, or volunteers (which is what I should have done to save the registration fees – maybe).
Clever little undergrads I’m not going to go into details as to how the teams got to the Jamboree. Suffice it to say that anyone who wanted to come, came; also, the teams were undergraduates who thought long and hard on what they would build and then built everything over the summer.
I was impressed with the creativity the teams showed. There was light-induced vanillin production (for the aroma), electrically-induced light production (creating pixels – see video below), various detectors (for toxic metals and mines), and inducible pigment production (to free us of the boring tyranny of all the usual fluorescent reporter proteins).
While some might call for something applied to come out of all this, I am content to see the participant’s enthusiasm; their learning of how to solve problems, think, and communicate results; the multi-disciplinary nature of teams, mixing engineers, biologist, sociologist, designers, mathematicians, physicists, artists, and programmers; and the gathering of like spirits to exchange information and dream up even more exciting things.
Keeping up with the E colis For me, it was heaven. I had not been immersed in this field in so long. It was good to try to figure things out, talk about how decisions were made, and learn all the clever techniques and solutions folks came up with.
Of course, at the end, I started dreaming up some of my own “machines.” Who knows if I might be able to build one someday.
E. chromi I was particularly pleased with the winning team – Cambridge – for their creation of inducible pigmentation in bacteria. Through a network of connections, I had met the irrepressible Daisy Ginsberg, a designer from London who has been exploring the future world where synthetically engineered biological organisms are established and integrated into society. Daisy coined the term Kingdom Synthetica to add to the Eucarya-Bacteria-Archaea Kingdoms that we already have.
Daisy, and her partner in design-crime, James King, worked with the Cambridge team to help them explore the sociological and design aspects of what the team was building.* They got the team to think of a future that had colored bacteria and what that would mean. For example, one team talked about color-poachers killing rare wild-life for color genes; or, global battles over patenting of colors (for example, the Dutch if China were to patent Orange).
The best example of the future was colored poop, formed by these color producing bacteria detecting metabolic states and reporting it through color production, say green for an ulcer or red for vitamin deficiency (see picture). This colored poop was the sensation of the Jamboree. James and Daisy walked around with a silver valise, telling their whole story and ending with opening the valise, much to the surprise of their audience.
It was very fun.
Naming gaming Daisy christened the Cambridge bacteria as E chromi (@echromi on Twitter). And they presented their colored poop to the MOMA in NYC, so don’t be surprised if the valise ends up there.
Once again, these names just point out that this Jamboree is more than a bunch of geeks building gadgets, but a whole way of thinking and mixing and creating. This is all so embryonic and what will come out of it no one really knows. But what is sure is that mixing folks from different background in a fertile playground with no dominant player is a sure way to come up with lots of interesting things.
Now I’ll go off and start building my E coliroid (hm, what might that be?).
Here are some images and video that I took at iGEM:
*One nice feature of the competition was a thorough list of judging criteria, nudging the team to do more than just building something. Most interestingly, teams were encouraged to do a sociological survey around ethics, society, and synthbio. This added non-scientists to the teams. One of the most interesting findings (as these we mostly qualitative, due to experimental design constraints) was that folks were against genetically modified organisms (GMO) in general, but were fine with GMO use in humanitarian work, such as toxic waste or mine detection.
"In an interview with Innosight, Intuit Chairman Scott Cook said that in his experience, the most successful disruptive teams have "an executive that is rooting for them, cheering them, mentoring them, actively spending time with them every week and protecting them from the antibodies of the rest of the companies that are trying to love them to death, or, exterminate them.""
"THE daguerreotype on the right is believed to be the only known image of railroad worker Phineas Gage, who was enshrined in the history of neuroscience one day in September, 1848, when a large iron rod he was using to tamp gunpowder into a hole in a rock caused an explosion and was propelled through his brain." [via @mocost]
Back in 2004 I was flying all over the place, promoting blogging. It was the year The Blogger entered the public eye, came out in magazines, built empires. One of the great debates was the clash between Main Stream Media (MSM) – the newspapers, publishing houses, and TV stations – versus the citizen journalist, the bedroom blogger, the unwashed masses of online writers.
