It’s astonishing what you can pick up online these days. For a few thousand quid, you can get all the kit you need to become a DIY biologist. And we’re not talking white coats, magnifying glasses and specimen jars. This is the real deal: DNA synthesisers, DNA from a catalogue, and industrial-grade fridges.

Welcome to the curious and quite possibly alarming world of DIY Biology (usually shortened to DIYbio), a fledgeling community of people who want to do science for themselves. Their agenda is part curiosity, part democratisation of science: they relish bouncing around their kitchens tinkering with the genes that make jellyfish glow (one goal is to make glow-in-the-dark tattoos) but they also want a stake in the next big scientific revolution, which is synthetic biology. The field fuses engineering with biology: it entails souping up life forms by inserting off-the-shelf DNA into their genomes to make them, say, deliver a vaccine, or even cooking new organisms up from scratch.

Last year, Craig Venter, the controversial entrepreneur who helped to sequence the human genome, announced that he had sewn together, using purely synthetic DNA, the genome of a small bacterium. Venter’s motto could be Never Knowingly Underbold: his next stated aim is to create an artificial life form and his ultimate goal is to make a bespoke organism that turns sunlight into useful energy.

The DIYbio community, led by US twentysomethings Mackenzie Cowell and Jason Bobe, want a slice of the action. They say: “DIYbio is an organisation that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety.”

The movement borrows heavily from the ideology — and lexicon — of early computer hackers (some DIYbio-ers prefer to be known as biohackers or biopunks). Hackers saw no reason why writing code should be the preserve of software companies, and they revved up the field (mainly be exposing security flaws that needed patching up). The BioBricks Foundation (set up by MIT and Harvard, among others) is trying to come up with a standard ingredient list for synthetic biology, with specified stretches of DNA encoding a particular biological function. This information, known as wetware, is placed in the public domain; it has obvious parallels with open-source software.

The DIYbio brigade, generally young enthusiasts with a science degree, hope they too will speed up progress and encourage governance. You could, at a push, also compare them to twitchers and amateur astronomers. Except that stargazing or birdspotting don’t carry any risks (aside from tripping over in the dark or losing all your friends because you’re in a bird hide rather than the pub). It’s possible that a rogue organism will escape the kitchen and wreak havoc; bioterrorism is another fear. At least two US home-grown labs have already been shut down. While conventional labs also harbour risks, the oversight is greater (tighter regulation here also means a British DIY lab would be hard to set up).

So, the next great frontier in the debate over synthetic biology will be societal: the science has arrived and promises great things in medicine, energy and the environment, but what of the perils? How can its power be kept from the clutches of evil, or from an incompetent amateur? More realistically, what if a bacterium designed to cleanse contaminated soil starts evolving once in the environment?

The Royal Academy of Engineering recently launched a report on synthetic biology; the European Union has set up the Synbiosafe project to dream up a framework for gauging safety and public opinion; and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics addressed the topic in its annual lecture last week. This field is definitely one to watch, but only at a safe distance from that glowing bowl of jelly in your neighbour’s kitchen.

www.diybio.org

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