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Hello, Brave New World

Biohacking the man machine at GenSpace Illustration by Karl Nicholason from Biology Today(1972). | 50Watts

Last summer, with the G train properly decommissioned, I took a ponderous B98 bus down to the necropolis of the Green-Wood Cemetery to do some casual gene editing. My last classroom lab experience likely included a printout on mitochondria being “the powerhouse of the cell.” Luckily, that didn’t prevent me from checking in for my CRISPR class at a refurbished late-nineteenth-century manufacturing plant that now houses the world’s first “bio-hackerspace.”

In 2009, GenSpace became the first temple on the futuristic frontier called DIY Bio, which seeks to democratize access to biotechnology and scientific literacy by offering open membership access to lab space, professional equipment, and training. For the past fifteen years, similar labs have sprung up around major cities from BioCurious outside San Francisco to OpenCell in London. Early on, cofounders Jason Bobe and Mac Cowell presciently codified DIY Bio as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, creating a central hub for the global offshoots. Bobe is the incarnation of DIY Bio ideology; as an open health researcher, he publicly shares his own genome with the world. He encourages others to donate their data as part of the Open Humans initiative, even providing template letters that can be sent to family (“Hello Family . . . I will make my whole genome public soon. If you have serious concerns, please call me immediately.”) On his Open Humans profile page, his mantra is to make participating in health research as commonplace as going to a movie. He wonders who can “recount any positive experiences participating in health research? Let’s change that!”

“Hackerspaces” have come a long way from the countercultural mavericks of the 1990s, who created open-source ecosystems that contributed to the computing boom, like the largely influential operating system Linux by Linus Torvalds while a student at the University of Helsinki or the “hacktivists” of the punk-tinged Berlin lounges like c-base. Today’s hackerspaces are commodified by comparison; there are at least fifteen in New York, with their blue-light glasses, Funko Pops, and earnest smattering of Lego-like Arduino chips for writing your first “Hello, World” program. Bio-hackerspaces are the radical new arrivals on the block.

Hacking, in this sense, is not the technobabble of Hollywood. No mainframes are breached with seconds remaining. The term conjures an orientation: the forceful pathos of autonomously developing projects, forging a path ahead, and persisting through unpredictable struggles. This mindset works well for the infinitely malleable playground of cyberspace, where the dominant element is metacognitive as opposed to formally scientific; so much of coding is gluing together abstractions. Interfaces provide a simplified way to link to the complex code of others without needing to know what lies beneath. Bugs in the code are natural, emergent properties of complex systems. With every release, old bugs are fixed, and new bugs are introduced. When things go wrong, there is an undo, CTRL + Z, a way to revert back to baseline.

Can this deregulated, individualist approach be extended to the building blocks of life, what we can now call “wetware,” the Lebenswelt of our cellular predicament? Are the stakes too different or is there a codon for DIY in DNA?

“GenSpace? Is that where everyone’s ex-girlfriend makes chairs out of mushrooms?” my friend joked. GenSpace offers a range of programming, from the fluffy—wine and paint with fluorescent microbes, macaroni-esque art projects—to harder stuff—CRISPR bootcamps and sheep brain dissections.  The Y Combinator-backed startup Opentrons, which offers user-friendly pipetting robots, originated from Genspace and has accrued hundreds of millions in venture capital funding. Opentrons’s founder, former staffer at lefty magazine The New InquiryWill Canine, took classes at GenSpace while participating in Occupy Wall Street. Since then, he has been an advocate of changing the system from within. The robot is an example of tooling ingenuity that comes from scrappy funding, reminiscent of the way garage biologists will put a 3D-printed caddy on a power drill as a centrifuge to save on equipment. The Bio-Art initiatives are harder to parse. The AIR (Artists in Residence) program includes artist statements of great permissibility, some of them too incoherent to even pass for shower thoughts: “Yes, I guess I can see how your work uses yeast and bubble gum to confront the absence of meaning.”

Various independent community research groups use GenSpace as a branching off point, the most serious of which is a group bridging two global open-source projects; Open Insulin and OpenPlant. I spoke to Jeremy Hoffman, the project lead, who explained that the global production of insulin is controlled by three major companies, which provides a barrier for competition and leads to price gouging. In recent years insulin prices have nearly doubled (though a 2022 law that passed the House hopes to cap that, but first it needs to reach the Senate). The global Open Insulin group has been trying to produce insulin from bacteria since 2015, but the GenSpace team has partnered with the OpenPlant group out of the University of Cambridge to create a recipe. Hoffman explained how model organisms like mice, fruit flies, and E. coli have been used as a standard for research, allowing studies to build upon each other for hundreds of years. However, most resources are siloed within institutional barriers and inaccessible to the public. The OpenPlant group has picked the common liverwort plant Marchantia polymorpha as its canvas, one where all studies and results will be open-sourced and available.

The group has had mixed success. The tricky process involves injecting a plasmid, a tiny piece of DNA, into the liverwort along with a gene to resist antibiotics. The liverwort cells are then soaked in antibiotics; the cells that have assimilated the DNA are the ones that will survive to produce the new hormone. To start, the team worked with a “RUBY reporter” gene from the beet plant to stain the liverwort leaves a bloody color and denote that the genes had indeed been replaced. Last year a batch of liverwort looked like it should be confiscated for crime scene analysis (that’s a good thing), but they have been unable to reproduce the results. Frustratingly, a newer batch of samples were contaminated by student projects using flowering mycelium—mushroom spores. “On the plus side, there are no barriers to entry; you are empowered to move as fast as you want,” said Hoffman. “But the lab can get disorganized, because there are people who are new who don’t know what they are doing.” Recently, the team has announced a breakthrough: a gene-edited liverwort sample has expressed the insulin gene.

Dr. Nafis Hasan, who has taught a course called “Bioengineering: From Terraforming to Designer Babies” at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research, has been following the DIY Bio movement since its inception and has grown skeptical of independent biology amid market forces. If the Open Insulin team is successful, he reasons, it’s not as if diabetics across the country will be loading up a syringe from a house plant; in reality, it’ll still be up to controlling parties like Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk to bring insulin costs down and enable smaller labs to compete in production. But what mostly concerns Dr. Hasan about amateur biology is the lack of regulation when it comes to tinkering with the human body. He referred to the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist biohacker group that provides instructions for fabricating medications at home, from the same anti-parasitic drug that made Martin Shkreli famous to an abortion pill or an auto-injection pen. On their YouTube channel, a man wearing a camouflage dinner jacket walks you through creating a DIY abortion tablet using a blender, ethanol, and an easy-to-acquire veterinary version of misoprostol powder. The collective has been criticized for putting people at risk with unregulated recipes but believes in the rights of individuals to repair their own bodies.

Beyond repair, there are vast terrains of potential enhancement, a field of ethical quagmires, disqualified Olympic athletes and amphetamine-boosted attention spans. The motivation of information seeking and conversely, information avoidance, is an evolving subject. This branch of study is tied in closely with the internet age, coining new terms such as cyberchondria, the hypochondria equivalent of self-diagnosing through WebMD. With so much information present, and now the great distillers of that information, AI, at our beck and call, all it takes is motivation to find oneself at the edges of an evolving field. With some skin in the game, my unfurling corporeality, I signed up for biohacking school.

In the foyer of GenSpace, I met my classmates: two visiting high school students from Brazil, a man working on a kombucha-based bio-absorbable bandage startup, a few garage hobbyists, a woman defending her PhD in bioinformatics, and her retired mother. The lab hummed with activity. Wires and pulsating machines occupied every perch, pipettes stood at the ready like cadets, and a vial-shaking machine the size of a toaster bore the name Vortex Genie 2. The main working area comprised four Durasteel tables pushed together, with an area in the back for heavyweight machines like the Illumina DNA Sequencer (worth over one hundred thousand dollars). Fashion Institute of Technology interns had left behind some curious flotsam and jetsam: biodegradable plastic, hardened molds of mycelium, textiles swaths with sun-bleached imprints of flora and fauna. A projector clicked on with instructions on how we would soon rewrite DNA with the ease of a cookie recipe. It was like watching a grainy home video of the future. On the wall, a quote from founder Dr. Ellen Jorgensen summed up the home economics approach: “My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology.”

Our instructor was a charismatic neuroscience PhD specializing in degenerative diseases like Lou Gehrig’s. He enthusiastically broke the CRISPR process into two parts: First, how to extract and analyze our own DNA, then how to edit DNA with CRISPR. We took a cheek swab and placed it into a test tube filled with an enzyme solution that would burst the cells and release the nucleic acids, aka the DNA. The double helix doodle we are all familiar with got split into two single helices before being centrifuged by our Vortex Genie 2 to remove organic debris. Next, we induced a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to make billions of DNA copies of a segment that we specified with a primer molecule. In the long necklace of DNA, these primers partner up with the newly single floating strands, leaving only some beads alone. When the enzyme polymerase is added, DNA goes crazy and replicates only the uncovered portion until the enzyme is all used up. This allows you to amplify and analyze a region of interest—for example, a few genes among the 3 billion base pairs of human DNA.

We checked the sample to see if all had gone according to design. This involved hooking up a plate of Jell-O (actually sea algae, agarose) to a battery, a process called gel electrophoresis. We put a droplet of our concentrated DNA mixture into the gel and electricity pushed it through the gel’s molecular pores. We would be able to see if our sample was contaminated by how far everything traveled in a certain amount of time; different sized molecules move at different speeds. Under a UV machine called the Transilluminator, one glowing band in the gel indicated that our sample was pure mitochondrial DNA.

The DNA was sequenced in a few days, and we were introduced to the world of open source biotech software, like DNA Subway, that would match our personal DNA sequences to relevant phenotypes (physical characteristics), as well as research studies and potential health risks. By doing it ourselves, we bypassed 23andMe, the market-dominating DNA sequencing company currently teetering on the financial brink, with shares down by more than 99 percent and the fate of the genetic data of over 15 million customers uncertain. We had obtained the same data sets without a gimmicky website telling me whether I had the gene where cilantro would taste like soap.

For the last part, we did a simple CRISPR exercise; we took the gene for Green Fluorescent Protein and inserted it into the genome of bacteria, resulting in a glowing plate of cells. We used basic CRISPR elements: a guide RNA strand to direct the Cas9 protein (aka molecular scissors) to the target region. We made a cut, inserted a plasmid carrying the new gene we wanted, and the DNA repaired itself, absorbing the code for the new protein we added into its New Testament. All of this, including the guide RNA molecules, can be custom ordered online. Bio labs which manufacture and sell these components provide tools, such as the Invitrogen TrueDesign Genome Editor from Thermo Fisher Scientific, that will allow you to create the gene-editing operation you want from a high level graphic user interface, so you can “knock out” a certain gene or update a number of kilo-bases at once. For all the technical language, the recipe was simple and seamless. A few days later, the bacteria glowed furiously in their petri dish. The bacteria that transformed was also gene edited to become antibiotic resistant to allow us to kill off the dull old growths with antibiotics and have a uniform glowing colony.

Despite varying academic backgrounds and day jobs, the class was able to get comfortable with lab techniques and able to follow the bio recipes in just a matter of weekends. Everyone in the class successfully extracted and analyzed the DNA samples and edited the DNA with CRISPR, despite multiple steps requiring accuracy and precision. That fact alone is an indicator of the potency of open lab space.

Is there some apocryphal version of Genesis where God gives mankind the power to remake their own image? Does he see it as good, like the vault of the sky and the firmament of heaven, or is he still waiting to see what wonders aquatic fungi will yield? The breakthrough gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 carries metaphysical questions galore. It’s BioTech’s Microsoft Word: a precise cut/paste tool for genes. Gene editing techniques have been around for decades; the FDA currently approves around forty therapies for treatment. But there has never been such a precise, relatively cheap, and efficient way to rewrite the body’s code.

In 2020, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for turning a quirky antiviral bacteria trait into the most accurate gene scissors available. Since then, the FDA has approved various CRISPR gene therapies for sickle cell anemia, which is caused by a single letter mutation in the gene that codes for hemoglobin. The misshaped protein causes the human red blood cell to acquire a crescent shape as it ferries oxygen across the body, which can lead to life-threatening clotting. The change of a single letter in a human’s genome can result in proper blood cells, effectively curing sickle cell disease. This is called somatic genome editing, meaning the changes are made in grown adults and will not be passed down the human lineage, because the reproductive cells have not been altered.

At biohacking conferences, some of these aforementioned grown adults proudly stick themselves with barely tested and definitely not FDA-approved—or even FDA-considered —CRISPR solutions. Among the first was Jo Zayner, who became an online celebrity in 2017 after performing CRISPR on themselves with the goal of dramatically increasing their own muscle mass. “I want to help humans genetically modify themselves,” said Zayner, who subsequently launched the ODIN project, a company that sells DIY CRISPR kits for around $100. At another biohacking conference in 2018, the late Aaron Traywick, CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, pulled down his pants and injected his thigh with an untested herpes treatment. By then Zayner had publicly confessed that they regretted their own public CRISPR performance: “There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody is going to end up hurt eventually.” Traywick was later discovered dead in a sensory deprivation tank.

The alternative to somatic editing is germline editing, where an embryo is modified, changing the code of all developing cells. In this case, the modifications will enter the gene pool of human lineage and be passed down to future generations, bypassing the caprice of nature’s whim or the merit test of evolutionary fitness. In the United States and other countries, federal funding is prohibited for germline engineering, though there is no ban against private funding. After rogue scientist He Jiankui shocked the world and was ultimately jailed for performing germline CRISPR on three embryos in 2018 to make them HIV-resistant, sixty-two leading scientists, bioethicists, and executives sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health asking for a globally binding moratorium on human germline experimentation.

The opposing coalition was fearful of the uncertainties involved in permanent downstream alterations to the human genome. Such modifications are difficult to foresee at both the individual and population levels. In the case of the prior sickle cell example, carrying one copy of sickle cell trait can make a person less vulnerable to serious illness from malaria by causing fragile blood cells that break before the parasite can spread across the body, prevalent in malaria-prone regions. It is a gargantuan task to fully model how even small changes will affect the entire human system over time, with genes playing complex, interrelated roles.

Other bullish proponents of germline modification, like University of Manchester bioethicist John Harris, have objected to scaredy-cat soothsayers, citing an impediment to research in baseless fearmongering, the same hostility and suspicion that was present at the similar arrivals of beneficial technologies such as IVF. Harris sums up his viewpoint:

One would need to consider why attempts at design are morally worse (if they are) than simply leaving things to the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction . . . Gene editing is now the stuff of do-it-yourself “garage research,” opening up nightmares for regulation and oversight. I have no quarrel with the idea of redesigning our planet, or indeed ourselves, if the elements of design promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for those creatures to whom such things matter.

This echoes the argument of CRISPR inventor Jennifer Doudna in her book A Crack in Creation: “Someday we may consider it unethical notto use germline editing to alleviate human suffering.”

Transhumanists see the body as an avatar, something to be customized freely with the laissez-faire of The Sims. Techno-futurists see Homo sapiens as an awkward corporeal blip, to be followed by a Homo technologicus, who will glide by museums from our time and say, “Yes, they spent half their lives sleeping, filling out forms, waiting in line. They walked around with all sorts of malfunctions and tried the best they could, they put little metal cages on their teeth, exhaustively managed hair follicles, and sometimes had to have barbarous surgeries.” “Oh, did you hear the one about the runners? They on average lived up to two years longer but spent those two years running.” 

Will karma run over dogma? The future of biohacking is tied in with questions around bodily autonomy. It’s too late for you and I to be designer babies, and no one asked us if we’d have liked to be, but there are some other options on the market. There are ingestibles (as biohackers love to point out, your morning coffee, or nootropics—remember that fad?), injectables (steroids, CRISPR), and implantables (Neuralink). The Dangerous Things group currently sells RFID and NFC human chip implants to enable a person to unlock a car door with their hand or share data with smart devices. The kit costs $200 and also comes with an injector assembly as well as a post-installation wound care kit of antiseptic wipes and gauze.

While surface-level chaos will dominate headlines, the underlying technology of biohacking will continue to develop, becoming more precise, accessible, and sophisticated. The arrival of generative AI is a force multiplier for augmenting human intelligence and is already playing a significant role in biotech. AI-based protein design company Profluent released an open-source gene editor last year called OpenCRISPR-1, which allows a user to create synthetic molecules not existing in nature with the power to edit human DNA in specific ways. In our lifetimes, it’s likely that the tools will not be the bottleneck; the power will be at our disposal.

Open-source labs may spur a new frontier of innovation, which heavily regulated and bureaucratic institutions struggle to manifest. The economic incentive in for-profit health care will likely see these concepts incorporated and integrated into existing giants, but the extra-institutional surface shows promise to yield new ideas from enabling a diverse set of people to achieve literacy in life sciences and pool mentorship into community centers. That said, the effect may be distilled by gimmicky programming to keep the lights on, and it’s up to the leadership teams to keep the core rooted in significant pursuits and not get too distracted by the ASMR slime classes.