Biotechnologies in (or Creating) a World Without Barriers to Entry

• In Event: Interrupting Innovation: Pausing to Examine New Biotechnologies - I

Abstract

“Amateurs Are New Fear in Creating Mutant Virus;” “DIY Gene Editing: Someone is Going to Get Hurt;” “In Attics and Closets, Biohackers Discover Their Inner Frankenstein;” “College students try to hack a gene – and set a science fair abuzz”. These headlines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others when read aloud sound like the opening trailers for horror movies. However, the story that is rarely told, are the thousands of citizens across the globe that have been provided an opportunity to experience, study and develop biotechnologies and science more broadly. Over the years I have been actively involved with the larger Do-It-Yourself Biology, iGEM, and growing citizen health innovator communities; exploring and developing governance strategies alongside them. And over the past year I have been traveling across the globe visiting with community biotech labs to better understand the current landscape. What I’ve observed is that these sometimes separate, sometimes merged communities have broken down the “traditional” barriers to entry, changed how technologies are perceived; and developed adaptive, bottom-up governance strategies. By examining the culture and expansion of the DIYbio community, the safety, security and human practices programs of iGEM, and a strategy recently developed to enable citizen health innovators to conduct responsible research; this paper will explore whether the rapid advances in biological and information technologies have democratized biology, whether it’s built knew on-ramps to the “STEAM” superhighway, broken down the traditional mechanisms of governance and what the implications of that could be for the global community.

Author

• Todd Kuiken, North Carolina State University