Daria Dantseva

https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1167910886528282626

Hi, everyone. It was a long flight from Ukraine. I am the first biohacker in my country. It started when I was 17. I am now 19. I was studying biotech and bioengineering. Universities in Ukraine don't have a lot of budget, so we didn't get to do cool things. Bioengineering and biotech studies didn't include genetic engineering, because there's not enough money to do that. I was interested in learning this. My brother said, you know, there's this company called the-odin.com where if you post your experiments on twitter then you get $2 credit for each post. So I just posted a lot of pictures of me doing experiments. That's how it started in January.

Here's a picture of me extracting proteins.

Now I am trying to build the first lab in Ukraine. It exists in my brother's... now it's a lab. It's the first lab in Ukraine. Now we're trying to build a bigger lab in October-September we're moving to another space. It's going to be huge. Me and my friends are working on building a community in Ukraine, because it doesn't exist. People are interested in biohacking in Ukraine, but there's not that much money. People want to learn more. Students want to learn, and even some of the professors too.

This is my cosy little lab in Ukraine. It's 9 square meters. I'm from Europe. We do basic genetic engineering experiments, just to learn. Fluorescent bacteria, antibiotic resistance, all the easy things. But it's new for us. We also build a lot of things, because we don't have money but we want to do things. We're building a bioreactor. It's an old Soviet ... and now we're trying to make a bioreactor out of it, so that we can make bioluminescent beer. I needed a fridge for my lab. This is an old fridge. I fixed it. It's now my lab fridge. To the left, is my gel imaging system that I built. Yeah, the box. I did some experiments with fluorescent bacteria. We tried to do bioart. Nothing worked, except for the one to the right up. My friend is a student of the ukraine academy of arts. She had a project where she had to draw portraits of famous Ukrainian biochemists. She painted that, and it's going to be in the book for ukrainian scientists.

This is what I started from. All great things start from building a table. It was a year and a half ago.

When my teacher found out what I was up to, she told me that this isn't science. We filmed a video of me doing genetic engineering in the grass. It was very hot. After I started posting on twitter, people started noticing me. There was an article about me, then BBC Ukraine found out about me. Then the rest of the Ukrainian media found out about me. Ukrainian people said this is kind of amazing. This is me hosting the first Ukrainian biohacking meetup. It happened a month ago. In order to build a network of labs in Ukraine, we need people. It's Sasha, Max, my friend Boris, my friend Vlad, all my friends, and I said well I guess we need to organize a meetup. Here are the people that showed up. It was a university building in Kiev. We asked the library can we meetup there? They said sure. We spent no money. It just came together in two days, by just bugging people on facebook to please come. A lot of them were Ukrainian genetic engineering students. They heard genetic engineering and CRISPR and they were excited about it. They didn't know you could do this at home, and that you wouldn't need equipment or money for it.

So now we're trying to build a lab in Kiev. It's two labs now. It's exciting but cool. What I wanted to say is, here in the United States how you can do whatever you want... but in Ukraine, it's kind of like that. People are open to new stuff. As a developing country, people are excited to do that. People want to develop a movement and we're pretty excited about that. I said that's pretty cool. You can show other people how to do biohacking.

"The birth of biohacking in Ukraine" does that mean I'm a teen mom? Come to Ukraine and help us. Collaborate with us. I'm very excited to be here. I wish some of my friends could be here too. It's just amazing how I knew nothing about genetic engineering or this community that existed. Now all these people are exchanging knowledge and experience to create something beautiful. Thanks.