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April 12, 2011 10:20 pm PDT
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Af2j2rUilO0/biopunk01.html
Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life
Marcus Wohlsen has covered startup culture, the maker scene, and the marijuana industry as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Associated Press. His first book, Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life, was published this week by Current. I asked him to contribute a few pieces about the biotech underground to run on Boing Boing. Here's the first one. HACK/OPEN: DNA, DIY and the right to do The first time I met Meredith Patterson, she lived in a weird old apartment building plunked down in Pacific Heights, just below where the street rose to an epic view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. Christmas trees glowed in the windows of the mansions nearby. Inside, the walk-up's arches, doors and sconces gave off a cheesy 1940s Hollywood "Moorish" vibe. I didn't know what to expect a DNA hacker's lair to look like, because I had no idea who would want to hang out at home tinkering with genes in the first place. But I should have guessed Meredith. If she hadn't existed, screenwriters would have invented her. Tattoos. Gauged ears. A smoker. Black t-shirt. Black leather trench coat. Boxes of disemboweled electronics littering the apartment. Shelves sagging with heavy tomes of sci-fi, coding manuals, linguistics texts and histories of cryptography. The consummate hacker chick before the English-speaking world had ever heard of Lisbeth Salander. Her wet lab was on the dining room table. The setup included a hot plate, yogurt containers, beakers, dozens of small plastic vials and a jerry-rigged thermal cycler, a kind of glorified crock pot that serves as the essential gene-brewing tool in almost all modern biotech. We spent the next hour or so chatting as she filled tube after tube with a clear liquid that she assured me contained both yogurt bacteria and the jellyfish gene she planned to splice into it. Like hackers of every stripe, she was playing with this stuff because has a compulsive need to tweak. And like so many hackers, she thought her hack could change the world....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Af2j2rUilO0/biopunk01.html
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