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Part field guide and part critique, Marcus Wohlsen’s Biopunk navigates the contentious new terrain of biohacking

WHEN her dad was diagnosed with the hereditary disease haemochromatosis, 23-year-old Kay Aull did the natural thing, at least for an MIT graduate in bioengineering. She went online and bought a used thermal cycler for $100. She also ordered several custom-made DNA sequences, designing each to bind to a different mutation of the gene responsible for the disease. Then, using other second-hand equipment she had acquired, she set up a simple lab test in her closet and determined the likelihood that she would inherit the condition.

Aull’s wasn’t the sort of achievement that earns grants or tenure. Doctors already have an effective haemochromatosis test, and most of her lab techniques were way behind the times. Aull’s test was remarkable because she did it herself, getting accurate results for a fraction of professional lab costs. As Marcus Wohlsen writes in Biopunk, “Aull’s test does not represent new science but a new way of doing science.”

That new way is typically called biohacking, in acknowledgment of its computing forerunner. Biohackers share with computer hackers a distaste for authority and mistrust of institutions, as well as an admiration for ready knowledge and quick-and-dirty techniques that put powerful tools into the hands of everybody. Yet while this philosophy dates back to the early 1960s, the trickster sensibility has infiltrated biotech only in the past few years.

As Wohlsen points out, biohacking is more controversial even than its digital equivalent. The viruses unleashed by black-hat computer hackers merely destroy data. A novel strain of smallpox or swine flu cooked up by a rogue biocracker could kill people. A carelessly designed bug let loose in nature could unleash ecological disaster. But “could” is the operative word, and Wohlsen does an admirable job of countering newspaper sensationalism with a realistic assessment of how primitive synthetic biology still is – and how much more easily a terrorist could cultivate a biotoxin such as ricin from castor beans.

The greater threat biohacking portends is to mainstream thinking. Wohlsen gives dozens of examples of biohackers who are working to circumvent or subvert academia and big biotech. There’s Tito Jankowski, who is providing free blueprints to his easy-to-build DNA copier. Andrew Hessel has formed a “drug development co-op” to crowdsource a cure for cancer. And Meredith Patterson is attempting to reconfigure the bacteria used to culture yogurt as a cheap at-home test to check if milk has been tainted with melamine.

“Biohacking poses more of a threat to mainstream thinking than it does to people’s safety”

Like the vast majority of biohacking projects, Hessel’s is as yet more concept than co-op, and Patterson’s melamine test remains in development. Because Wohlsen is careful not to exaggerate their accomplishments, Biopunk is dogged by biohackers’ lack of world-changing progress – the imbalance between promise and achievement. In this respect the book feels somewhat premature, and makes the nascent movement seem less than serious.

In another respect, that may be an asset. The signature trait of biohacking is playfulness, which biohackers deem an antidote to the narrow-minded professionalism of most scientists and the unquestioning deference they command. The prospects for success of Patterson’s melamine test are secondary to what it represents: the audacity to take on the multibillion-dollar biotech industry in her kitchen. Aull puts it best when she says that “doing it in the sink demystifies the process”.

Part field guide and part critique, Wohlsen’s book provides a reliable point of departure for navigating this contentious new terrain, and ultimately presents biohacking as a playful approach to science that renders science a playful approach to life.