At December 13th’s SoNYC discussion, our panel will discuss the growth of DIY science, describing some of the opportunities it presents and looking towards the future. The conversation will cover the challenges faced by DIY science enthusiasts, such as safety and accurate data collection, as well as the ways to deal with these concerns within an online world of support. In the build up to this event, we are running a mini-series of guest posts on the SpotOn blog. We will hear from DIY science tinkerers, amateur astronomers, enablers, as well as educators interested in this field. Follow the online chatter using the #DIYSci hashtag and feel free to share your own experiences.
This post is also cross-posted on the SciLogs.com’s Beyond the Lab blog.
Rayna Stamboliyska is a PhD student in Genetics and Bioinformatics. She is a science blogger at SciLogs.com’s Beyond the Lab, which looks at emerging ways of doing science. She also blogs at Australian Science and is an editor at Bioinfo-fr.net. In addition, Rayna writes for Global Voices Advocacy and FutureChallenges.org. Despite what you might think, she is very much a human being. She tweets as @MaliciaRogue.
Funding is a serious issue in the “garage biology,” biohacking and DIYBio communities. This is largely the result of them being made up of a small number of disparate groups or individuals. And while homebrew or second-hand lab gear can be relatively cheap, the cost of regularly used chemical reagents, such as enzymes (vital for ubiquitous processes such as PCR) is quite expensive.
Funding strategies: how sustainable are they?
Many DIYBio enthusiasts fund themselves from regular membership fees, or voluntary pledges within the group. Some biohacking groups associated with larger hacker spaces often benefit from shared bills among the wider hackspace membership. More established biohacking groups, such as the Bay Area’s BioCurious, are fairly well-supported because they command relatively high membership fees (>$100/month) – probably because highly-paid professionals use the space for their hobby. Some hacker spaces, such as NYC’s GenSpace, make money by charging for lessons and workshops. While Biocurious and GenSpace both work towards the DIYBio community’s aim to educate the public, these different approaches raise the issue of membership fees vs. funding via lessons and workshops.
BioCurious is a great place for anyone with a background in molecular biology to dabble in the science but beginners may struggle to get the hang of Taq polymerases and restriction enzymes. Conscious of this drawback, the BioCurious folks have started organizing classes for the general public. In contrast, GenSpace’s main goal since the beginning has been “promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Putting different approaches to one side, the question remains of how sustainable is funding through educational and outreach activities. How broad is the public appetite for any of these?
Crowdfunding endeavours through dedicated web platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are also possible funding routes. An amazing project such as OpenPCR was funded through Kickstarter. But, as MAKE’s David Lang points it out, running a crowdfunding campaign to kit up your home lab may pretty often be a tough experience. Encouragingly, recent changes in legislation, namely the US Jobs Act and Italy’s Crowdfunding Exemption, help rekindle the crowdfunding idea in a rather interesting way. Thanks to the Jobs Act, “a new era of crowdfunding” may very well be unfolding as “the law will hopefully make it much easier and cheaper for small ventures to get funding-for-equity from the crowd.”
Of course anyone can look to donations. These may, however, be volatile and are not a sustainable type of funding. Then there are grants. The Awesome Foundation, for instance, “provides grants with no strings attached and claims no ownership over the projects it supports. It is, in the words of one of our trustees, a micro-genius grant for flashes of micro-brilliance.” In the UK, Wellcome Trust provided funding to Manchester’s MadLab, perhaps because of its academic backing, but grants are scarce.
Thanks to the recent formation of DIYBio Europe, different groups have been talking of getting together and applying to the European Commission (EC) for grants. Specific grants within the EC do not seem to exist yet though. Also fishing for funds this way could be tricky in terms of deciding how to distribute EU funds within the network.
Closing openness?
There may also be further tensions arising from accepting grants. Some biohacking groups are wary of the restrictions that may come with accepting a grant, such as possibly having to focus their work in predefined directions. Many others shudder at the thought of becoming more like a university PI who, they perceive, spends more time writing grant proposals and politicking than doing actual science. These, some would argue, are exactly the problems academia has faced, with chasing grants at the expense of open-ended research goals.
Another possible route for funding biohacking is through the creation of commercially-viable projects. Some DIYBio groups have already started to form private companies and are going through the process of patenting some of their products. Such an approach may create tensions as many biohackers see it in total contradiction of the movement’s goals.
In this context, the FBI-DIYBio synergy cannot be ignored. The FBI has organized regular meetings, convening an impressive number of DIYBio enthusiasts at this year’s meeting. As Michael Scroggins, a PhD working on the validity of ‘hackerspaces as educational Institutions’, points out, “paradoxically, and this says something about the uncomfortable nature of policing in the current clime, by hosting this conference over the last three years and expanding the list of invitees each year, the FBI has become one of the most important institutions in the global spread of DIYBio.”
Such a deep-pocket interest from the FBI is reminiscent of the engaging welcome the US Department of Defence R&D branch, DARPA, provided the synthetic biology community. Many people, not only from the DIYBio community but also from the bioengineering field at large, seem quite concerned with military money, and accepting DoD grants to “green our explosives.”
All these considerations prompt the question of how to draw the line which separates appropriate uses of biotech from inappropriate. Knowledgeable engagement, vigilance and dialogue are required by each one of us to set this line and recognize research that crosses it.
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Joel Winston, co-blogger at SciLogs.com’s Beyond the Lab, contributed to this post.
Great overview and food for thought; I was sad to have missed the EU-DIYbio meetup for reasons like this, it’s one of the Big Questions ™.
Just on the link to the Amplino discussion you cited when you discussed the appearance of patents in biohacking, the Amplino guys were explicit in the cited article that they wouldn’t be pursuing patents on the Amplino. So far, while there isn’t absolute consensus on the matter, the DIYbio community has yet to register a single patent on biotech products as far as I’m aware. Some have expressed a view that patents are good for innovation, but I think (thankfully, IMO) that it’s a minority view from my discussions there and in person with other biohackers.
Oh, sorry. I thought it just didn’t go through.
Oh, it did go through. Um… Maybe my message was just too long. Oh, well, I will try in 3 parts.
As has been mentioned for some DIYBio places, free classes are given to members of the community, and the lab spaces are supposedly accessible to the masses in some such facilities. I would like to pose that this, therefore, is a community service which could allow them to apply for tax deduction status, so that donations to the particular DIYBio facility could be tax deductible. People love giving donations come tax time, so the surrounding community could become one source of income – with those whose kids of family members make use of the facilities likely being the greatest donors. What better way to buy your own own lab supplies (and those of everyone else at the facility) than in tax-dedictible fashion?
I would also like to pose a compromise between contracting with private companies that uses this tax-deductible status: a donation scheme where working on their projects are not mandatory, but where there is incentive to do so at least in part that leaves significant leeway for people to work on what they want with the rest of the money. Such a scheme could, perhaps, work as follows: they make a donation of some amount, which allows them to put a request for particular work of some predetermined complexity. This work goes on a list of projects that are not mandatory to work on, but if completed by the facility the project and all documentation (they would of course have to specify the level of documentation required) will be sold to them for about the cost that it took to produce it. Or another thing one could do is have a half-before, half-after scheme, where half the total amount they would be willing to pay for it is given as a donation at the start, and the other half given upon completion. If their projects are completed, then they have incentive to ‘donate’ for further projects in the future. However, regardless of whether their project even gets worked on at all, they have given a tax deductible donation to an organization to a facility that will increase the skills of the community from which they draw their workforce, and they benefit. Also, regardless of whether their project is compeleted, the facility has the initial donation with which it can use for its continued running. Also, I’ll have to check on the legalities of it, but I think that because any work that is done at the DIY facility is done on a not-for-profit basis, and only later sold at-cost to a for-profit firm, many of the reagents can be non-comercial and thus MUCH cheaper (like home-taq instead of fancy comercial types) so it might be cheaper to ‘donation-contract’ out to DIY facilities than it would be to do it themselves. There are many ways in which it could become a mutually beneficial relationship but where neither is required to initiate the interaction, and there is no obligation unless both agree ahead of time.
As a side note, I have to say that I am okay with people using what they learn and start at a DIY facility to go off and start their own companies. I am all for openness, but mandatory openness could eschew some and detriment some works, and the entreprenurial spirit is one of the things that can make openings job-wise for us biologists. Likely such for-profit offshoots would often open near the DIY facilities because the people starting them already live there when they start their private firms. It becomes a synergy with the very offshoots that the DIY facility spawns – a complex and chaotic system that can lead to many benefits and, so long as the DIY facility keeps to strict ethical codes – can hopefully avoid corruption on the end of the DIY facility, while providing a source for great works among the community where people can learn new skills and apply them in ways that they can further their own lives if they so choose, or further the biological community if they so choose, or both.