B I O P U N K DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life Marcus Wohlsen CURRENT current Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2011 by Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Marcus Wohlsen, 2011 library of congress cataloging in publication data Wohlsen, Marcus. Biopunk : DIY scientists hack the software of life / Marcus Wohlsen. p.cm . Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-101-46801-7 1. Biotechnology—Social aspects. 2. Genetic engineering—Social aspects. 3. Amateurism. 4. Punk culture. I. Title. TP248.23.W65 2011 660.6—dc22 2010043689 Designed by Nancy Resnick Contents Preface xi PART I: HACK/OPEN 1 Chapter 1: Blood/Simple 9 Chapter 2: Outsider Innovation 18 Chapter 3: Amateurish 28 Chapter 4: Make/Do 37 Chapter 5 : Field Testing 49 Chapter 6: Cheap Is Life 60 Chapter 7: Homegrown 69 Chapter 8: My Life 77 Chapter 9: Ladies and Gentlemen 87 Chapter 10: Cancer Kitchen 99 PART II: READ/WRITE 117 Chapter 11: Reading 122 Chapter 12: Writing 143 PART III: SAFETY/RISK 165 Chapter 13: Threat 171 Chapter 14: Outbreak 184 PART IV: LIFE/SCIENCE 193 Acknowledgments 211 Notes 213 Index 233 Preface Bringing a child into the world has always taken a great measure of faith. No matter when or where, parents have always had to believe that the future offered their kids something better, or at least not something worse. Now is a weird time to have a child. I wonder if parents ever had so many reasons to be pessimistic while at the same time feeling confident that their kids have a good chance at leading remarkable lives. The promises and perils of technology weigh heav­ ily on both sides of this emotional seesaw. A few years ago, The Economist ran a cover story on some slightly obtuse advances in the scientific understanding of RNA. I knew from high school biology that RNA carried the genetic code spelled out by DNA into the part of the cell where those instructions are translated into proteins—the basic stuff of our physical selves. According to the article, these latest insights into RNA comprised “biology’s Big Bang.” Biology would be to this century, according to the story, what nuclear physics was to the last. Headlines sell magazines, and the article failed to convince me that these advances in the science of RNA were biology’s equivalent to splitting the atom. Yet the more I learned, the more I began to see sense in the piece’s broader claim that biology—specifically, molec­ ular biology—w ould be the marquee science of our time. As I paid more attention to the field, I saw the potential for transformation everywhere. Stem cells that could mimic any tissue. Scanners that could decode all three billion letters in a person’s DNA alphabet in weeks. Deep insight into the genetic roots of disease. Genes hacked together to create new varieties of life not conceived by nature. Even more than what researchers can do and do know, I mar­ vel at how much is left to learn. Each advance in the understand­ ing of the complexity of cells, the fundamental unit of life, brings a glimpse of an even greater complexity that scientists could not know existed until they reached the precipice of their previous knowledge. The intricate pathways from genetic code to bodily expression. The baroque folding patterns of proteins. The subtle mechanisms that tell a gene when to speak and when to remain silent. The maddening elu­ siveness of the cancer cell—the evolutionary equivalent of a suicide machine. Biologists have so many doors left to unlock. Perhaps the twentieth century’s great push outward and upward into the sky and beyond will be matched this century by a great turn inward, into the body and its intricate secrets. We might not discover the biological equivalent of the Big Bang, but perhaps some intrepid explorer will take the biological equivalent of the first trip to the moon. The analogy isn’t perfect: The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 may well have been biology’s one giant leap for man­ kind. Or perhaps that distinction could even go to the first time sci­ entists spliced together genes from two different organisms, just four years after Neil Armstrong took his one small step. Perhaps gene splicing will be looked back on as the equivalent of the invention of the internal combustion engine and the Human Genome Project the Wright brothers’ first flight. If molecular biology advances as far in the twenty-first century as twentieth-century aerospace, between Kitty Hawk and the International Space Station, life will look much differ­ ent one hundred years from now. Not long before I started this book, I took part in the riskiest genetic engineering experiment of all: I became a father. Bringing a new life into the world when life itself has become such an unstable category induces a strange kind of anxiety. Parents have always feared the unknowable future. But until the past decade or so, wondering whether your son would keep the genetic identity he was born with would have seemed a sci-fi delusion. No credible scientist would say that bioengineers are close to infusing human subjects with horse genes to run faster or fish genes for breathing under water. Yet these comic book fantasies contain a germ of credibility. If not plausible, the concept of genetically altered humans is comprehensible. The ability to tinker with our genetic essence feels not so much like a problem of basic science but one of engineering. Scientists can create a rough sketch of how to get there; they just need to discover the remaining scientific details in order to fill in the outline. Though he won’t be aware of it for a while, the epic quest now under way to trace the complete blueprint of our genetic selves will give shape to my son’s life, and his entire generation, as they grow into adulthood. These children are the first to be born with the genetic map already drawn. Every advance made toward understanding what the signposts on that map mean and how they function will repre­ sent another step toward a greater understanding of a certain version of himself. Ironically, each discovery could also mean another step taken toward the means to alter that self in ways that stir both hope and horror. I want to understand what that future will look like for my son. This book is a search for that long view and the people who might point the way. I HACK/OPEN T he most disruptive force on the planet resides in DNA. Don’t believe it? Only five days into the 2009 swine flu out- break, the swapping of a few genes in a virus native to pigs shut down Mexico. Schools closed. Churches were shut­ tered. Mexico City’s famed Cinco de Mayo parade was canceled. In the United States, a few dozen cases of the flu caused by the genetically novel virus sent airline stocks tumbling. Pundits mut­ tered about economic recovery being stopped in its tracks. Russia and China barred U.S. pork imports. Europe warned against travel to North America. In the weeks that followed, the world discovered the new swine flu strain was not as deadly as originally feared. But its potential for sowing social and economic chaos was already clear. All because a few letters in the genetic code of the world’s most primitive life forms merged, switched places, and became something new. A few bits of disrupted DNA commanded the instant attention of the world’s polit­ ical, economic, and social institutions with the same force as war, financial collapse, and natural disaster. Yet plague has a way of burrowing more deeply into our night­ mares than those other dark horsemen. Pathogens are invisible. They are remote from our senses, yet they are everywhere. They also have 4 BIOPUNK no conscience. Infection knows no morality. These pestilential micro­ organisms exist on an entirely inhuman scale. We feel we have no control. This scares us. But imagine you did have control. Imagine the genetic changes that transform a harmless bit of DNA into a lethal germ were some­ thing you could see. And not only see, but understand. And not only understand, but change. Three days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first announced the detection of swine flu, Mackenzie Cowell issued this disgruntled tweet: “@CDCemergency declines to answer ques­ tions about H1N1 genome sequence identity.” Of all the things to worry about at the onset of a possible global pandemic, Cowell’s slightly cryptic concern seemed low on the list. But the impish twenty- four-year- old could trust that his hundreds of Twitter followers knew what he meant and why it mattered. Cowell is the cofounder of a group called DIYbio. Based in Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts, Cowell and his cohort believe that biology is too important to be left in the hands of experts. By this they mean that the life sciences as practiced by academics, corporations, and the government are hamstrung by politics and bureaucracy in ways that make cumbersome the beneficial applications of the latest life- science discoveries. They also believe that computers, genetics, and engineering are fast converging toward a single point where tinkerers and hobbyists without advanced degrees will soon be able to perform sophisticated feats of genetic engineering at home. But at the onset of the swine flu outbreak, they had a more press­ ing concern: A global virus-driven pandemic was breaking out, and the CDC would not release the source code. Over the past decade, scientists have made blistering advances in decoding DNA, human and otherwise. The three billion pairs of chemicals identified by the letters A, C, T, and G that make up human DNA took the Human Genome Project $2.7 billion and thir­ teen years to read, an earth-shaking project finally completed in 2003. Not long after the swine flu appeared in 2009, one scientist reported Hack/Open 5 that he had read all three billion letters of his DNA for $50,000. The process took a few weeks. Better computers, software, and optics are the main technological advances that have made this explosion in genetic data possible. As that avalanche of information has piled up, biologists have remarked upon the striking similarity between the code used to program computers and the genes that encode our living selves. The more geneticists learn, the more tempting it is to think of DNA as the software of life. Members of Cowell’s group and its offshoots in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere call themselves biohackers. They cheerfully embrace the idea of human-computer commonality. If computers can be programmed, and living things are not so different from comput­ ers, they reason that life too can be programmed. Hacking in this con­ text is not a negative concept. It does not mean breaking into systems, stealing identities, or trashing privacy. It absolutely does not mean spreading viruses. Biohacking in the form promoted by DIYbio is about engineering elegant, creative, self-r eliant solutions to doing biol­ ogy while relying not on institutions but wits. The solution is the hack. Hacks do not require fancy lab equipment, federal funding, or peer review. They simply need as many hands, eyes, and brains focused on a problem as possible. Somewhere in that community of creative minds, the hack is waiting. Uncovering it simply requires the access to tools, the access to knowledge, and the freedom to access both, according to the biohacker credo. When a global pandemic is looming, there can be no target riper for the hacking than the swine flu itself. But for biohackers to take a run at hacking the virus, the code must go open source. Hence the push for the CDC to make the sequence publicly available. Let anyone who wants to take a swipe at swine flu hack away. Supporters of open- source software contend that their movement has shown the superiority of allowing creative minds to come together for a common purpose. Without the rigid restraints of ownership, they argue, ideas flourish. In the end, you get Linux, the fast, fun, free alternative to Windows. Lock up the code in the bowels of a centralized bureaucracy where ideas are compromised