Also dangers of pay walls, beware.
Not a subscriber but I was able to read.
Summary:
Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow.
The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol.
"This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab," he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish.
For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen.
In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr.
Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime.
The positive results he's seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor.
At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience.
Zayner's start-up, The Odin - to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser - has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA. These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.
In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as "Dual use", meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
Many of the parties are now worried that increased accessibility to such technologies could heighten accidental or deliberate misuse, including the development of biological weapons by rogue actors for mass or targeted attacks.
It's a regulatory oversight that worries Dabrowa more than most.
He's spent years trying to warn officials and journalists about the growing capabilities of amateurs like himself.
"If bioterrorists wanted to do it undetected, they could buy a second-hand DNA synthesiser for $2,000. The whole process would cost $10,000 and could be done in a kitchen," he says.
Most officials did not take Dabrowa or his warnings seriously.
Under the terms of the BWC, states are officially committed to taking all the measures they can to prohibit and prevent biological weapon development with such dual-use capacities.
Dabrowa's lack of understanding of niche legalities is far from unusual.
Dabrowa's own campaign to enlighten officials has been motivated by a desire to prevent the actions of a few bad actors, whether by accident or through ill intent, from giving the whole hobbyist community a bad name that eventually shuts everyone down.
"Biohackers are what we used to call scientists," Dabrowa says, noting that Louis Pasteur might today have been considered an equally dangerous operator.
To Dabrowa's mind, pressures like this have made the biohacker scene all the more analogous to the one that spawned the personal computing revolution from the garages of college dropouts in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Instead of the internet, their discoveries will cure disease and increase everyone's lifespan," says Dabrowa.
The process first drew international scrutiny when Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical University in the Netherlands, successfully used the method in November 2011 to make the H5N1 flu more infectious and transmissible to humans.
The problem with such an approach is that it is voluntary, says Filippa Lentzos, a social scientist at King's College London who is researching biological agent threats.
"We need a part of the process that is expensive, difficult and necessary," he says, advocating for control of a key input material for DNA processing called nucleoside phosphoramidite
