Year: 2022

40 WORLDWIDE BIOHACKER GROUPS SEEK LEGITIMACY. "The kick-off meeting for DIY Bio Europe paves the way for amateur biologists to begin international-scale projects, gain greater credibility, and make biology accessible to all. But biohackers have a huge task on their hands. While there are more than forty groups worldwide, many suffer from serious financial restraints and tough legislation restricting their activities."" " http://lnkd.in/dv4HJ8r View in LinkedIn

GATES WISTFUL ABOUT BIOHACKING. "Bill Gates recently told Wired that if he were a teenager today, he would be hacking biology. "If you want to change the world in some big way," he says, "that's where you should start-biological molecules." " " http://lnkd.in/ddWxbRX View in LinkedIn

CITIZEN SCIENCE BECOMES WIDESPREAD. "From astronomy to zoology, and certainly in environmental monitoring. But really that’s just one style of citizen science and it has morphed into so many different things, like the do-it-yourself citizen science, particularly for environmental monitoring and mapping."" " http://lnkd.in/dpuYh2T View in LinkedIn

“MAYBE BATHTUB BIOTECH will be the next to capture the mindshare of the techie tinkerers. Certainly the technologies are there for those inclinded to genetically edit their plants or pets. Maybe a mouse or E. coli genome becomes the next operating system for hobbyists to profitably twiddle. Perhaps this decade will bring a Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates of bio-hackerdom — a hobbyist-turned-entrepreneur who can simultaneously innovate and market his or her DNA-driven ideas.” http://lnkd.in/dNS2_iP View in LinkedIn

MILITARY EYES OPEN SOURCE AND BIOHACKING. "The (retired) eighth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described a potential future of the military that’s founded not only in open source thinking, but in next-generation user interfaces and biohacking straight out of science fiction ... dramatic evolutionary changes could cascade down the entire supply chain of one of the world’s biggest organizations."" " http://lnkd.in/dMjBeYK View in LinkedIn

DARPA'S BIODESIGN PROJECT. " ""Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch ... Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”" " http://lnkd.in/ddnPGcY View in LinkedIn

BIOSECURITY is the theme of the next series of blogs; and just as life is programmable, it is also hackable. There are big lessons to be learned from cybersecurity in computing and the internet, and it is inevitable that similar tactics will be employed for malicious ends in hacking life. View in LinkedIn

DNA BIOSPAM is cheap to generate, "potentially making engineered biological spam very common in the future. It could use natural forms of widely propagating genetic information -- viruses, sperm, pollen or seeds. A synthetic batch could blanket the world in months."" " http://lnkd.in/dkjx-Yi View in LinkedIn

FUTURE BIOSPAM. "The more successful the attempts to program DNA as a 2 bit language for engineering biology become the more likely will be the appearance of “bio-spam, bio-spyware, bio-adware” and other bio-nuisances. An unrestricted biohackery scenario could put the health of a biohacker, the community around him or her and the environment under unprecedented risk."" " http://lnkd.in/dncwWnM View in LinkedIn

HIV AS A MODEL OF BIOSPAM. As HIV continues to mutate to evade immune surveillance and gain an upper hand over its host, it resembles computer spam trying to escape a computer's spam filter. The lessons from HIV strategies have been adapted to design computer spam filters. Spam filters are an artificial immune systems." " http://lnkd.in/d74GgKF View in LinkedIn