Fun and games in the garden
Christina Agapakis
Materials
Synthetic biology promises to make life clean and tidy. Thank goodness, then, for the misfits and dreamers of DIYbio, says Christina Agapakis
It is sometimes easy to forget that scientists are real people, too. Sternly holding a clipboard and frowning at expensive equipment, the image of the scientist is someone who makes serious and important discoveries, discoveries that lead to new technology, innovation, useful things. My field in particular – synthetic biology – mixes science and technology, defining itself primarily by its potential usefulness. We’re engineering cells to cure disease, feed the world, reverse climate change… With all this talk of saving the world, who has time for fun?
I don’t just mean fun after work or on the weekends, outside the lab, although that’s important too, and I don’t just mean fooling around in the lab – graduate students making YouTube videos to kill time while their gels are running – although it’s also important to remember that graduate students aren’t robots quietly pipetting all day long. There is joy in science, fun in learning, pleasure in making experiments work, just as there should be joy and pleasure in the things that we make. There is harm in eliminating what some might call “useless”, and harm in perpetuating the notion that scientists are somehow separate from everyone else, driven solely by an abstract scientific method and only important when they’re solving problems.
Ironically, even when we try to break down the barriers between science and everyone else, we often end up perpetuating and reinforcing the boundary. I was a graduate student in Boston, across the river from where the first ever DIYbio meeting was held, in 2008. There was joy in do-it-yourself biology, a pure passion for science that extended outside of the confines of the lab, that sought to learn and explore outside the “useful” range, outside of taxpayer-funded grants, least publishable units, and PhD dissertations. At the same time there was growing talk of democratisation, of citizen scientists, of applied “garage” science leading to synthetic biology breakthroughs, paralleling the origin myths of Silicon Valley billionaires. Science is too serious, too useful to be left only to scientists.
Citizen science doesn’t assume that “regular people” won’t care about the details of an obscure research project; it opens up ways of seeing and learning about the world to people who don’t make their living in the lab. Citizen science doesn’t assume that research has to be applied in order to be fascinating and important to the untrained eye. But the phrase “citizen science” also maintains the distinction between science and the public; aren’t scientists also citizens? In this model, scientists are still somehow above and outside the world, handing down discoveries and innovation, unaffected by the messy emotional and cultural world. So how can we make visible not just the research, but also the complex practice of science?
As DIYbio grew and solidified in research hubs in Cambridge MA, New York and San Francisco, the establishment of community labs like Genspace and BioCurious didn’t just accomplish their mission statement of making the “innovations in biology… accessible, affordable, and open to everyone”; they also made the structural, financial and political aspects of science open and accessible for all. Discussions on public message-boards established what you needed to start a lab with homemade equipment, discussed funding through Kickstarter, and arranged meetings with the FBI to discuss safety and security. DIYbio made apparent just how interconnected and complicated the practice of science is. By trying to “do it yourself” they made clear how science is only done together.
Synthetic biology has greatly expanded the boundaries and notions of where good research can be done and by whom. While the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition is often focused on applications, iGEM is also in large part about having fun. Posters for bacteria that clean up oil spills stand next to much less directly useful posters about bacteria that play sudoku. The extraordinary range of iGEM projects and the diversity of the community emerge, paradoxically, from an effort to standardise biology, to turn DNA into the uniform nuts and bolts of a new engineering discipline. The hope driving iGEM is that from a defined set of open-source parts, we will be able to construct nearly infinite combinations of living machines, creating diversity from uniformity.
Industrialised biotechnology offers us commoditised biology, simplified and sterilised, hidden in vats pumping out medicines and fuels. In food and agriculture, biotechnology leaves us with just a handful of species that we then process into the thousands of products you can find at the supermarket. A team of iGEM students I mentored for the 2010 competition asked whether iGEM’s standardised parts could instead lead to a garden, its plants modified to produce different colours and flavours.
Our team wasn’t immune from the iGEM trend towards gears and mechanisation (a friend more cynical than I once suggested that iGEM’s primary output is actually logos with cells turning into gears). Still, we tried to include imagination, aesthetics, and taste in our engineering strategy, to make biotechnologies at the human scale. Food is not just fuel; it’s life, cuisine, and culture. Our bodies aren’t machines; they are complex biological systems, assemblages of human and microbial cells that grow and change. The genomes of the human ecosystem can be read and perhaps even rewritten, but they will still respond to our environment, to our food, to our culture, in varied and beautiful ways.
Forgetting the biology of the human body is as dangerous as forgetting the humanity of the scientist. When we look for the “gene for X”, the mutations that lead to this or that personality trait or cultural preference, we treat the body like a computer with software bugs that need tweaking, rather than as a complex entity shaped as much by the world as by genes. This is part of the reason why the notion of human “enhancement” makes me so nervous. Whether the improvements are genetic or mechanical, they are always judged against a culturally dependent idea of what is normal, what is a mutation, what is outside of the useful range. My hope is that in the future, biotechnology will look more and more like natural biology : messy, smelly, complex, and more robust and adaptable than the sleek, shiny gears of industrial engineering. Maybe human “enhancement” in the future won’t be a bionic implant, but a yoghurt , modulating the microbes in our bodies to improve our health. DIYbio is misnamed. The point is not to “do it yourself”. The point is to do it together, strengthening the bonds with each other and with nature.