Bunch of Amateurs (21 page)

Around midnight in San Francisco, Patterson and I are on the floor with our fortieth or fiftieth attempt at configuring the 2500-volt transformer so that we can Taser the lactobacillus, get the glow gene in there, and proceed to make Glo-gurt with it. Even here, in this most isolated lab, the group is all around us. Patterson regularly consults old e-mails for advice, downloads one more schematic from another site, consults with a wiki or two. Late in the evening, she calls “Brian,” who’s a whiz at electrical issues, and they confer for forty-five minutes.

“So, Brian’s advice was to turn these around”—she points at two connectors with wires—“and put the load between the power supply and the collector.” So we make our adjustments and continue to find problems with the connections. Work like this is mostly just the tedium of getting things right or attempting to, and for long stretches, the only sound is Patterson cheerfully muttering to herself:

“Something lights up, well, hello.”

“That’s a 15k resister. Again, didn’t work.”

“I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood which pin is which. If I did, that would be stupid.”

“Things that do not make sense include … what the fuck, yo?”

“Where the hell are you coming from?”

“What the damn hell?”

“Unplug!” she calls out to me, and then stares at the schematic for twenty minutes.

“I would be astonished if they had the wrong drawing.”

“Fuck, this shit doesn’t even say.”

“Plug us in.”

“Again, we’re not getting dick.”

“That’s heating up. Unplug that!”

“So we’re definitely not going to try that.”

We both stare at the tiny board one more time.

“We want red to go here and black to go here, and somebody needs to touch this wire to the base. So if you want to just hold these, I can plug it in. First, make sure you are not touching the lead. Good.”

A viscous snapping sound shatters the concentrated silence of the room. Some lights go out, throughout the building. Patterson pulls the plug.

“I think we killed it.” A hideous yet familiar metallic smell fills the air. “Time for a cigarette break,” she says.

After Cowell showed me his secret fort in Cambridge, he also wanted to show me his public one. As with Bobe, Cowell has been struggling to navigate just how synthetic biology should present itself to
the world—a demonic crew of biohackers blowing stuff up in secret locations? Or a responsible crowd of innovators poking around the front lines of what’s known in order to find something new?

For the latter, he’s rented a public lab space from a group called NUBlabs. It’s a big open warehouse in Cambridge where a bunch of designers of all kinds of things maintain their workstations. Part of it is occupied by a guy importing odd but beautiful bicycles from Europe. He sells that seven-seat circular contraption built by some corporation forward-thinker who preferred to hold his high-level meetings while people got exercise. There are programmers scattered around, and in the corner is Cowell’s space. He’s thrown together the usual amateur gear for a start-up lab. There’s an autoclave off eBay, an old centrifuge he scored, and some pipettes. There are worktables and books and all the other minor gear, but Cowell hasn’t invited anyone in yet. He’s very much aware that just what happens in the next little while is going to be crucial to how the general public understands what synthetic biology is.

This struggle has been going on for the last few years among the professional crowd. They think of it in different terms. If the kids are worried about how it will look, the grown-ups fret over how it will expand. There are three killer aps—money, altruism, hipness. Drew Endy, for instance, is trying to frame synthetic biology as the next cool science—what computer programming was in the 1980s. His parts registry idea and “gene-bashing” lingo are all sparking the imaginations of young amateurs.

“If you make biology easy to engineer, and you make it accessible, by definition people will learn about it, and write comic strips about it,” he’s said. Along with Jay Keasling of Berkeley, George Church and Drew Endy constitute the secular trinity of great minds birthing this new field.

Keasling is not writing comic strips. His boosterism takes the form of actually making synthetic biology do something. For instance, he’d like to cure malaria. (Of the three, Keasling is the one
most likely to make it to a morning talk show.) The classic malaria treatment involves a substance called artemisinin, which derives from the slow-growing wormwood plant. The idea is to create bacteria that will quickly pump out artemisinin. So far, no luck. But Keasling’s bet is that they will succeed soon. And if “curing malaria” is the first thing most people hear about synthetic biology, that’s a better start than almost any other kind of headline (such as kids create deadly insect, now rogue).

Meanwhile, George Church occupies an entirely different niche in the synbio ecosystem, both in terms of who he is and what he talks about. Currently at Harvard, Church is a towering six-foot-five, with a lumberjack’s beard, a commanding presence, a seductively hyperactive and chatty mind—not to mention a brilliant scientific eccentricity: He suffers from narcolepsy. So the great man can be talking to you and boom, he blinks out for five seconds and then boots right back up. It’s the equivalent of Einstein’s hair: notice given that you are in the presence of wild and ranging genius.

Church talks up the economic approach, specifically biofuels. He wants to engineer something that makes a lot of money and gets positive attention that way. The obstacle to turning piles of organic material such as switchgrass or other high-sugar plants into easy biofuels is that the sugars in the plant are bound up by cellulose. In order to get it out, the cellulose has to be extracted. What if you could design a bacterium that would chew up cellulose and expel sugar? That would have a worldwide market, much larger and more noticeable than a malarial cure or a comic book.

“Biofuels are the low-hanging fruit of synthetic biology,” Church insisted one afternoon in his office. Pharmaceutical cures might earn good press, but the “markets are small relative to fuels, where the markets are huge.”

Everyone involved in synthetic biology recognizes on some level that if robotics, say, is a fairly mature pursuit, then synthetic biology is in utero. So they worry constantly about public relations and imagery.

“NASA had the moon shot,” Church pondered, as he struggled with how the public comes to understand the complexities of any new scientific discipline. “There was the homebrew computer club, even robotics had a cinematic push.” He recognizes that Hollywood prefers to deal in a “dystopic version of biology.” He considered the ill effects of
Jurassic Park
,
Gattaca
, or Will Smith’s
I Am Legend
, even though the hero of that movie was a geneticist trying to do the right thing.

“There is one isolated non-dystopic movie,” Church said,
Lorenzo’s Oil
, the story of parents who will stop at nothing to find a new cure for their child’s rare affliction. The movie was not exactly a hit. “You can see how hard it is for Hollywood to make a blockbuster out of lipid chemistry,” he added.

Later over coffee, Cowell and Bobe can’t help but continue this conversation. For amateurs trying to start a DIYbio group, they don’t have at their disposal massive funding and can’t really talk about engineering trees, curing malaria, or solving a planetary energy problem. Their anxiety is much more local to their group and identity.

“Even the use of the word ‘biohacker,’ ” Bobe suddenly volunteered, “my girlfriend’s parents read that word and were terrified.”

“Terminology is key,” Cowell agreed, and he reminded Bobe of the scientific tragedy that cascaded after the seemingly cool word “cloning” achieved currency at the expense of the less glitzy term “nuclear transfer.”

“The word ‘hacker’ really used to be a badge of distinction—even if they weren’t doing anything bad. We need the opposite,” Bobe said, trying to come up with a new term. “Hackers are makers. They are scientists.”

“Biomaker would be better than biohacker?”

Bobe said there would be resistance, but “we have to change the attitude people have toward hackers.”

“The Biomaking Manifesto?”

“Well, you either try to redefine biohacking as a good term or you come up with a different term.”

“I think the label is inevitable.”

“I’m just trying to be conscientious.”

“Initially, ‘biohacking’ is a good way to describe the ideas. If you go to one of these hobbyist workshops where they are building robots and you say, ‘Do you want to come to a biohacking meeting?’ they get it.”

“Depends on who your audience is. Is it PR for the public?”

“But that doesn’t make the term go away.”

“Biohacking is cool, if you’re young.”

“Bio-innovating sounds like a PR term that no eighteen-year-old will call himself.”

“Biomaker? Biocreator?”

The question occupied the entire several days I spent hanging out with Cowell and Bobe. Later there was a long discussion about the term “synthetic biology” and how that first word was awkward, suggesting something plastic and unnatural. And there used to be other terms, “bioengineering” and even, briefly, “constructive biology.” It’s not easy to domesticate an emerging science so that it’s cool enough to attract the most renegade thinkers while simultaneously not bringing down the wrath of the FBI. Later, Bobe expressed nothing but jealousy at the way the guys behind
Make
magazine—the new hip
Popular Mechanics
of our time, the DIY monthly that’s achieved national success—have pulled it off so beautifully.

“
Make
, which was just a small twist on ‘hack,’ is really effective,” he said.

As Cowell and Bobe attract more and more members, there will be smart, innovative people among them, and there will be people who insist on taking the mad scientist pose. The whole field could turn on a dime, and they know just how Janus-faced the fetal science in fact is—a generation of Jonas Salks over here, Victor Frankensteins
over there. They could become a collection of gee-whiz do-gooders right out of the 1950s, or they could become demonized as the fabricators of evil viruses—just as an earlier generation of computer hackers were, only this time the viruses won’t be digital.

There is another way to get a plasmid into a bacterium that doesn’t require 2500 volts of electricity: “an ultrasound bath,” Patterson told me, as she planned yet another approach. This is the same technology that allows us to peer inside a woman’s womb and look at a fetus. “Ultrasound is used in labs normally for lysing cells, for ripping them open and getting out the DNA. And it is also used for sterilization—really high amplitude of ultrasound can be used to kill off bacteria.

“When the frequency is in the 40 kilohertz range, you can actually use it for transsection, one of the terms for introducing plasmids into things.” (Having failed at frying the bacteria and then Tasering them, we now hoped to yell at them.)

Of course, the issue is how do you get an ultrasound machine?

“This thing ran forty bucks,” she said—this thing being a “jewelry cleaner operating at 40 kilohertz.” The machine is small and compact, easy to handle. Dozens of them are offered for sale on eBay on any given day. Even as she presses forward in search of Glo-gurt, though, Patterson tells me her interests have recently shifted to something more, well, functional.

She’s started a conversation with an Internet pal on the DIYbio list, Jon Kline, about synthesizing a bacterium that would react in
the presence of melamine: Recall that in 2008 the substance began showing up in Chinese imports of milk products, eggs, baby food, and pet food and led to numerous deaths of people and animals. Melamine-contaminated milk, alone, sickened some fifty thousand people. The scandal caused a food scare and focused attention on the fact that American agencies were testing for the presence of these lethal chemicals.

Patterson and Kline call their creation the melaminometer.