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I am a master student of molecular biology in Copenhagen. I have been DIYbio-active since 2 years.
I don't want to start a new discussion, but I would like to put in a small anecdote about my grandfather. He was living in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s. And he was a social democrat. He had a political opinion and he had to leave the country because the government did not like him and his opinion; he was put to prison for two weeks but they couldn't charge him for anything. His wife and children left the country with two bags and ran over the border, I don't want to start a discussion about this but I do want to give you something to think about.
We'll skip the iGEM part, we all know this. I participated in iGEM 2009. We were working on a universal restriction enzyme. In 2011 the students setup the old lab again to do it again. After the coding session in London, we took the synbio oath. We tried to present the synbio oath to the iGEM community. I will talk about this later a little more.
After my iGEM participation in 2009, I got infected by it. I didn't have an opportunity in university to do this. There was so much lab restrictions, as an undergrad you can't be there alone. And they wouldn't let you anyway, they want the lab for themselves. Because I wanted to research freely and educate people because many people did not know about molecular and synthetic biology. I started before I knew the DIYbio group, then I found out about it and I saw all the people talking about these ideas. I bought more materials, I bought discarded materials from university that was just sitting around there in the basement decaying. The professors just handed it to me. I bought stuff on ebay, got free samples from companies, spent money on equipment and everything. Supplies and so on. I was basically alone. I had no hackerspace. My town was too small to get a critical mass of people together to rent a space, so I did it at home.
What I did was some forensic analysis, Sascha was there. A friend of mine is a skilled electrical engineer, he crafted a ... pulsifier? The head of security of BBC and London Hackerspace killed the device by tinkering with it. I did some lectures at hackerspaces. Now, the things like really get going automatically, I didn't do much more than that. I got a corporation setup in Copenhagen where I am going to locate now. I want to do DIYbio in their museum. They want to import all the equipment that I had at home to present at the museum.
I work at the technology assessment department, so now I write about the diybio movemnet for politicians so that they know what's going on. My long-term goals is that we could have a European Network that is active and lively. I want a number of spaces everywhere so that people don't have to start at home, because it's much more fun when you do it together. It's more secure because people can look over your shoulder once in a while.
Because of this fueled up controversial situation between the green groups, the established scientific people, and the bashing in public, and I think the DIYbio people are in a good position to mediate. We are sort of grassroots but we're also largely scientists, so hopefully we can resolve this ideological problems to benefit research in this society. This can be done by education and educating people, setting up a think tank on bio topics. We have a different perspective than the establishment, so it's an interesting to have open to debate.
I am a member of Hackteria, which is now international. It's mostly art focused, so they don't do synthetic biology, it's more about education and museums and so on. They do lectures and workshops all around the world, and they won the German Wikipedia Prize for Free Knowledge, so that was pretty cool. DIYbio is mentioned in the context of transhumanism, futorologism, bioterrorism, and I would like to address that. They bring up all these crazy things, where people cut open their hands and put in magnets, I would like to distance myself from that. I don't want to do that. But we are also portrayed as harmless and aimless, and it's not so easy to answer this.
On the regulatory issues, I can't do the GMO stuff because of policies in Europe, so I have just been doing genetic analysis. What I found out while working on the CODE is that there are companies like Mansanto have codes of conduct, except they use subtext and twisted words in between. They do everything for themselves, not for the public. It would be nice to have a less beauracratic version.
The synbio oath is kinda a remake of the code of conduct, it's a personal commitment, it's not something to be forced, it's something that you really want to do. Law does not replace responsibility. Codes of conduct are mostly image campaigns by the public. No concordant stand by DIY community.
I want to give you an outlook. The number of estimated species is 112 million species; only 2 million are known; only 12,000 are sequenced, and of these 12,000 sequenced, we have about 160 million genes. You can see the exponential number of genes and entities in pdb here. Thanks for listening and special thanks to Mark from Hackteria. Thank you.
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