John Brecher / NBC News
Michal Galdzicki, chief science officer for the new HiveBio community lab in Seattle, looks through a spreadsheet listing the boxed equipment in the group's new space.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
SEATTLE ? Right now it's a storeroom filled to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and cast-off gizmos, but HiveBio's hacker space is being transformed into the latest frontier for a nationwide DIY biotech movement.
Fueled by crowdfunding, grants and membership fees, community labs?like HiveBio are delving into what's arguably the 21st century's hottest scientific frontier. Once, projects such as DNA barcoding, biofuel-producing bacteria and?glow-in-the-dark organisms?were the exclusive domain of professional researchers. Now they're also the domain of amateurs???including Katriona Guthrie-Honea, a 16-year-old student at Seattle's Ingraham High School who is one of HiveBio's founders.
"When you open up access to biotech and biology, people understand it more," she told NBC News. "They're also less afraid of it."
Guthrie-Honea and Bergen McMurray, a biotech-savvy artist, started working on the HiveBio project several months ago. McMurray drew upon her hacker connections to find the room that will serve as HiveBio's first headquarters, inside Hackerbot Labs' warehouse in Seattle's SoDo industrial area. She also got her hands on boxes and boxes of donated equipment and supplies. Guthrie-Honea, meanwhile, raised $6,425 through a MicroRyza crowdfunding campaign to pay the rent.
Now they're unpacking the boxes, setting up a thermocycler to do amateur DNA analysis and getting ready to open for business sometime in the next month. Anyone 16 or older will be able to use the lab if they pay HiveBio's membership fee (as low as $50 a month) or a $15 drop-in fee. Scores of people are on HiveBio's mailing list for the grand opening.
"We are already looking into a bigger space," McMurray said.
John Brecher / NBC News
At HiveBio, a new DIY biology lab getting set up in Seattle, chief science officer Michal Galdzicki talks with co-founders Bergen R. McMurray and Katriona Guthrie-Honea.
HiveBio and the other biolabs are attracting attention from schoolkids and retirees, from techies who want to build a cool gizmo and entrepreneurs who want to build a cool startup. But they're also attracting attention from the FBI, due to the potential for bioterrorism.
"We don't view them as threats themselves, but they are in the domain of entities that could be exploited for nefarious activities," said Nathan Head, an FBI agent with a Ph.D. in microbiology who works for the bureau's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
For the past three years or so, Head has been building relationships with biohackers and putting out the word that the FBI is on their side. "We need assistance from the community," he told NBC News. "It's like, 'If you see something, say something.'"
The hackers appear to be getting the message. "With one or two missteps to the contrary, the FBI has been a huge supporter," said Raymond McCauley, co-founder and chief architect for the BioCurious community lab in Sunnyvale, Calif.?
"There's a potential for bad stuff to happen, and the way we're going to deal with that is to have a cadre of people who know how to handle this," McCauley told NBC News. "We want to let a thousand flowers bloom. We want to help people improve their environment and serve as watchdogs in case bad things happen."
Glow-in-the-dark plants?
Bioterrorism isn't the only concern: One of the ventures that took root at BioCurious is the Glowing Plant project, which has garnered almost $400,000 in Kickstarter pledges to create a glow-in-the-dark plant. The project's team members plan to graft snippets of DNA from a bioluminescent bacteria?into a common mustard plant, grow the hybrids in a greenhouse, and send thousands of seed packets to their supporters.
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