In the 1960s, Stewart Brand – an organiser of the first hacker conference – believed that environmental biotechnology aligned with the hacker ethos could provide new freedoms. In the early 2000s, biohackers were unorganised and disconnected, but the movement grew quickly after the establishment of the DIYbio collective in 2008, by biology graduates Jason Bobe and Mackenzie Cowell. It influenced the first community biolab, Genspace, which opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 2010.
Now, there are dozens of community biolabs, and the subculture is evolving in many directions. Wherever there are biological problems, biohackers can be found developing inventive ways to make an impact by hacking intolerably slow innovation processes, or just having fun. Next year, biohacking will start to seep into the mainstream and it will be used to bring about a change in the way we treat the planet.
In the last decade, a convergence of social, technological and economic factors has given citizen scientists access to many of the technologies used by scientists in academia, government and industry laboratories, and this has led to a biohacking response to the planet’s climate crisis.
Many biohackers are comfortable breaking traditional biotechnology rules. Some create open-source pharmaceuticals, others reverse-engineer gene therapy patents to circumvent million-dollar price tags. Their interest in emerging technologies contrasts with that the timelines proposed by risk-averse conservation and environmental groups. And it will take years for legislators to authorise the use of technology such as synthetic biology.
Instead biohacking is driven by an impatience with slow results. In 2020 we could see radical biohackers using advanced biotechnology to develop faster growing trees, or deploying gene drives to geoengineer phytoplankton that can help sequester carbon dioxide on the ocean floor.
Indeed this may already have happened. At a 2019 workshop on biosecurity sponsored by the US Department of Defense, a show of hands indicated that half the attendants suspected that gene drives had already been deployed by vigilantes – either by biohackers or traditional biotechnologists with access to widely distributed CRISPR technology. Most doubted any small-scale effort could succeed, but they agreed it would be hard to detect.
We now understand how urgent it is to reduce climate change. And urgency is what drives radical biohackers. In 2020, green biohacking will emerge into the mainstream.
Edward Perello leads food and agriculture company creation at Deep Science Ventures
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