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diybio session at open science summit 2010
I am Jason Bobe. There si an organization called DIYbio.org, it's not a real
organization. It's a couple of different things: it's a website, it doesn't go
much deeper than that. It's a movement, a label that people put on activities
that they do, and one of the main sources of activities is a global mailing
list. I am going to tell yuo first a little bit of background about where it
puts us historically with citizen science in biology. One of the most
interesting places to look for the harbringers of the future is to look at
what kids are doing today. I am going to show some of my most favorite
activities. My professional job is the Personal Genome Project. This is a- I
think- an example of innovation if yuo define innovation as putting existing
technologiesi nto something new. This is what a 15 year old did. An anonymous
sperm donation that his mother had told him this, you know, I have a little
bit of information about your father, I know his first name and the city in
which he was born, and I think he had a - which was the year his anonymous
sperm donor was born, and he took this information, took Geneaology, and
worked through the mail for af ew hundred bucks, and used an online website
like geneaology.com and for a few hundred bucks and a few weeks of work, he
identified a few candidates for his father- they were relatives, or his
father's brothers, and he showed up on someone's door and sad "dad?" and
that's pretty astounding. That's amazing.
Another example which is fairly recent- High School students in NYC and sushi
bars. They applied DNA sequencing technologies to samples of sushi that they
had collected from restaurants, they took note of what it was being marketed
as- a red snapper, or yellow-finned tuna, and they found that a large
percentage of that fish was mislabeled. And these kids were 16 years old. And
then this was another young woman who had been troubled- struggling with a
chronic disorder. She had not been diagnosed. She requested her pathology
slides from her doctor, took them into her biology lab, and got the first
correct diagnosis. I just learned this yesterday- this is really interesting-
there's a lot of excitement in diybio for doinng geneticc enngineeriinng. The
hello world of geenetic engineering is inserting a GFP into ecoli and taking
two tubes, mixing them together and then incubating them under your armpit for
6 hours, and you've done your first bacterial transformation. High school
students are required to do this as part of the AP Biology program. There are
percerloations of this- into the lives and minds of young teenagers.
And one of the things that excites me is- because I spent a lot of my years in
DNA sequencing- is what's happening with desktop DNA sequencing? They are
almost within the range of pro-hobbyist community. This was a 454 desktop
machine called the Junior. They still cost $50k, and you can do a few million
base pairs for a few hundred bucks. In a community lab near you, soon, you
will be using these instruments. Biology is quickly becoming a hobby. DIYbio
is growing all over the world. The newest most exciting thing- there's new
labs where anyone can join. There's Genspace in NYC, there's BOSSlab in Boston
(it's a mobile lab). About four people can work in there at a time. Bay Area-
Tito is going to talk about Biocurious. And there's another project if anyone
is interested in, about how we build a positive culture and set the patterns
for responsible practice in non-traditional settings, I'd love to talk to you.
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