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I just finished reading "Biopunk: DIY Scientist Hack the Software of Life" by Marcus Wohlsen and I was initially quite smitten with the idea. I thought everything behind DIY biology (DIYBio) is very romantic and is a worthy pursue. It also recalls my younger days when I tried to perform experiments in my parent's kitchen.
One particularly vivid memory was my attempt to investigate the anti-microbial properties of ginger for a high school science project. The original plan was to make LB agarose plates from scratch, inoculate them with my spit, and then apply freshly extracted ginger juice at various dilutions to see if ginger can stop bacteria growth. The whole thing turned into a mess. I didn't even make decent agar plates and only succeeded in ruining a perfectly good cooking pot and stinking up the kitchen for several days. I did manage to extract and strain ginger juice—only to find that the juice quickly oxidize into a foul-smelling brown liquid. Needless to say, my score was rather low for that project.
Despite all of that, I had a lot of fun. I simply lacked the know-how at the time to make the project successful. Knowing what I do now, I think a better plan is to use boiled chicken broth in test tubes as the primary culture medium and add various dilutions of purified ginger juice (available online) to each sample (with 2 samples of broth reserved for positive and negative controls), and then let them sit at room temperature with the caps off and see if the broth appears cloudy after a few days. I may even be able to figure out the optical density of each tube by taking their pictures and using image software to measure opacity. Now that knowledge regarding basic bacterial culture and assays is readily available to all who wants it, the problems I had encountered can be easily dispelled with a simple Google search.
While I thoroughly support the DIYBio movement to empower and engage the individual in scientific innovation and discovery, my biggest gripe is the underlying premise that DNA is everything. This premise presupposes that if only we all have access to our genetic code and the means to manipulate it, then we can crowdsource the best ideas and bioengineer our way out of diseases. Sure, DNA may be dubbed the "software of life," but life is messy and our genetic code is anything but static because our everyday experiences affect how this code is read. Besides that, our DNA inherently possesses some instability that makes room for adaption and evolution. In order to bioengineer any workable solutions based solely on DNA manipulation, we will be forced to control many aspect of the environment to ensure the desired outcome. Therefore, equating the fluid nature of DNA with the predictability of computer code is misleading, and expecting genetic engineering to solve all our problems is brash. I don't deny an individual's right to know and understand his or her own genetic information, nor do I believe scientific research is the exclusive domain of academics or big pharma; but let's recognize the limits of DNA and bioengineering, and try to tone down the hype.
Now that I got that off my chest, let's consider what kind of stem cell experiments the amateur/citizen/hobby scientist can feasibly perform at home. I'll be exploring this topic and other opinions on DIYBio in future posts. Let's start a discussion.
Image credit: © dryodora via Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dryodora/76082177/)
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