Jason Bobe from DIY Bio passed this along to the list and I feel obliged to share it with you all. Andrew Balmer and Paul Martin of the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham, England wrote this fantastic paper on the societal implications of DIY biology; on our laws and way of life. The paper should be required reading for anyone interested in this stuff, especially you law students (Jimmy, Dad, Ken) I know read this blog!

Cheers …

“Whilst the academic community continues debating regulation and ethics, biohacking or ‘garage biology’ is, according to some media reports [Rowan 2006], being established as a home hobby. As DNA sequencing becomes cheaper and quicker and second hand equipment becomes available on eBay the power to create synthetic sequences may be dispersed to many individuals and groups. Biohackers have also become known by the portmanteau ‘biopunk’ (biotech punk)58, that has its origins as a science fiction genre. The most recent, and significant addition to this movement has been the online publication of a ‘Primer for Synthetic Biology’, a manual, written in simple, non-technical language, for those wishing to engage themselves in some bio hacking [Mohr 2007]. Interestingly Mohr, a student at Boston University at the time of writing, includes in his 72 page draft a notice of intent to provide an outline of the key ethical issues facing synthetic biology titled ‘ethics for everyone’. Though biohacking is beginning to develop a web presence, and is certainly becoming quite prominent in the blogosphere there is little evidence, as yet, that it has any active/practising following. Tucker and Zilinskas identify two potential terrorist categories: the ‘lone operator’ and ‘the biohacker’. The lone operator is a rogue synthetic biologist and the biohacker is, as above, a college kid eager to demonstrate their technological prowess. If indeed second hand tools for genome assembly are becoming available to the public at affordable costs then this would seem to add weight to the concerns over possible terrorist use of synthetic biology research. However, Tucker and Zilinskas [2006] argue that ‘At present, the primary threat of misuse appears to come from state-level biological warfare programs’.”