Trendsurfing: DNA hacking (The Times)
By David Rowan
Fancy creating a new form of life today? Thanks to extraordinary advances in genetic engineering, meddling with DNA has become a fashionable (and increasingly affordable) hobby for the curious amateur to try at home. You'll need a basic scientific knowledge, of course, and a few lab tools that you can buy over the internet. But if you do want to tinker with life's building blocks - and heck, why not synthesise a few genes of your own? - you will find a growing international community of DNA hackers who will gladly share their tips and triumphs.
It's a trend known variously as biohacking, garage biology or simply amateur genetic engineering. As DNA sequencing becomes ever cheaper and more straightforward, home hobbyists are swapping tips and techniques to isolate and experiment with genetic materials as never before. They might buy second-hand tools on eBay, or use the growing number of commercial gene-synthesis firms to create new proteins designed to perform specific functions. Even children can now join in, thanks to £50 science kits that come complete with centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber that can be used to experiment with DNA extracted from vegetables.
Here's where the fun begins. Once you have mastered the basic techniques, you could splice genes from luminous bacteria into other living cells to make them glow in the dark. Or, with the help of magazines with names such as Biotech Hobbyist, you could grow cultures of your own skin (splice in some DNA from the Great Star coral gene, apparently, and you can make that human skin glow cyan under ultraviolet light). A useful place to start is the DNA Hack website, at dnahack.com, which shows you how to introduce genes into mammalian cells or, more simply, how to extract the DNA from split peas using a kitchen blender and some pineapple juice (the juice provides the enzymes that will help the DNA strands to separate once you have finished with the blender). And if you want to isolate some of your own DNA, start with a mouth swab, some salt
dissolved in water, a squirt of washing-up liquid and a test tube containing some very cold ethanol. Just don't come complaining to The Times if you end up creating something scary.
There is a serious academic side to what biotech experts are calling "constructive" or "synthetic" biology. By custom-building living cells using carefully selected strands of DNA, they hope to create a valuable new field of biology that allows scientists to program living material just as software writers control how your computer works. Their vision, articulated most loudly at universities such as MIT, involves engineering bacteria that offer the medicinal properties of rare plants, or creating helpful living robots that repair themselves.
There's a but, of course. If anyone with a reasonable education can play around with nature's building blocks at home, what happens if a DNA hacker has evil intentions? What if, say, a terrorist found a means of isolating the nastier bits of the smallpox or Aids viruses, and then splicing them into another virus that could be unleashed on the world?
It is not a theoretical risk: in 2002, Eckard Wimmer, a professor of molecular genetics in New York, headed a team that synthesised the live polio virus from scratch using the virus's genome sequence. The experiment, thankfully, was part of a US government research project, and the only victims were laboratory mice. But four years on, with DNA hacking far more widespread, what if your friendly local terrorist decided to take up the hobby?
(The Times Magazine, September 16 2006)
Fancy creating a new form of life today? Thanks to extraordinary advances in genetic engineering, meddling with DNA has become a fashionable (and increasingly affordable) hobby for the curious amateur to try at home. You'll need a basic scientific knowledge, of course, and a few lab tools that you can buy over the internet. But if you do want to tinker with life's building blocks - and heck, why not synthesise a few genes of your own? - you will find a growing international community of DNA hackers who will gladly share their tips and triumphs.
It's a trend known variously as biohacking, garage biology or simply amateur genetic engineering. As DNA sequencing becomes ever cheaper and more straightforward, home hobbyists are swapping tips and techniques to isolate and experiment with genetic materials as never before. They might buy second-hand tools on eBay, or use the growing number of commercial gene-synthesis firms to create new proteins designed to perform specific functions. Even children can now join in, thanks to £50 science kits that come complete with centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber that can be used to experiment with DNA extracted from vegetables.
Here's where the fun begins. Once you have mastered the basic techniques, you could splice genes from luminous bacteria into other living cells to make them glow in the dark. Or, with the help of magazines with names such as Biotech Hobbyist, you could grow cultures of your own skin (splice in some DNA from the Great Star coral gene, apparently, and you can make that human skin glow cyan under ultraviolet light). A useful place to start is the DNA Hack website, at dnahack.com, which shows you how to introduce genes into mammalian cells or, more simply, how to extract the DNA from split peas using a kitchen blender and some pineapple juice (the juice provides the enzymes that will help the DNA strands to separate once you have finished with the blender). And if you want to isolate some of your own DNA, start with a mouth swab, some salt
dissolved in water, a squirt of washing-up liquid and a test tube containing some very cold ethanol. Just don't come complaining to The Times if you end up creating something scary.
There is a serious academic side to what biotech experts are calling "constructive" or "synthetic" biology. By custom-building living cells using carefully selected strands of DNA, they hope to create a valuable new field of biology that allows scientists to program living material just as software writers control how your computer works. Their vision, articulated most loudly at universities such as MIT, involves engineering bacteria that offer the medicinal properties of rare plants, or creating helpful living robots that repair themselves.
There's a but, of course. If anyone with a reasonable education can play around with nature's building blocks at home, what happens if a DNA hacker has evil intentions? What if, say, a terrorist found a means of isolating the nastier bits of the smallpox or Aids viruses, and then splicing them into another virus that could be unleashed on the world?
It is not a theoretical risk: in 2002, Eckard Wimmer, a professor of molecular genetics in New York, headed a team that synthesised the live polio virus from scratch using the virus's genome sequence. The experiment, thankfully, was part of a US government research project, and the only victims were laboratory mice. But four years on, with DNA hacking far more widespread, what if your friendly local terrorist decided to take up the hobby?
(The Times Magazine, September 16 2006)
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