For the Most Part, DIY Biologists Are Not Working on Creating Pandemics

That “mad scientist in the garage” that has become the villain of news stories explaining the do-it-yourself biology movement is unlikely to be crazy, perform experiments in the garage, or actually be a (professional) scientist, according to a new study of people who practice the hobby.

Just 8 percent of DIY scientists practice exclusively at their homes. They are overwhelmingly more likely to use a community or university lab or other hackerspace, according to the survey, conducted by the Washington, DC-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“The idea of people working in their closets or garages, they’re metaphors that have been drawn from computer science. We hear stories about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working on Apple computers out of a garage and think that’s what these guys are doing,” Daniel Grushkin, lead author of the paper, said. “People think they’re the boogeyman, think they’re working on creating life or synthesizing something in their home labs, and they’re not.”

Grushkin, a fellow at the Wilson Center, a think tank that often studies economic policy, the STEM workforce, and international policy, has some skin in the game. He founded Genspace, a community lab in Brooklyn that has given amateur scientists a place to work and to learn from each other.

Community labs are increasingly popular, as is DIY biology in general. According to the survey, which included 359 DIY biologists from the DIYbio.org and other community message boards, a third of DIY biologists have started the hobby within the last six months, more than half have started within the last year. There are now 14 community labs in Europe and North America and DIYbio.org has more than 3,800 members.

“To do anything useful, to do anything above high school-level biology, you need a dedicated space. A lot of the fears of working anonymously or alone kind of evaporated because they’re here working in groups, they adhere to lab standards,” Grushkin said. “The chance for ignorant people doing ignorant things is lessened when people with lab backgrounds are around.”

That increasing popularity has worried some, who think that some DIY-er will accidentally create the next pandemic or that a homegrown terrorist will brew up deadly pathogens undetected. Last year, Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota professor, told a panel of biosecurity experts that he’s worried that a bird flu pandemic could be created by an amateur scientist.

“I worry about the garage scientist, about the do-your-own scientist, about the person who just wants to try to see if they can do it,” he said.

Grushkin’s data suggests that, by and large, DIY biologists are working on experiments that are harmless and are doing them in spaces that have serious safety and ethical standards. Just 13 percent of DIY biologists have synthesized a gene from DNA, and 45 percent of people have added a gene to bacteria, a process that Grushkin says can be done with kits ordered online and is pretty basic. The most popular one allows scientists to insert a gene into a bacteria that makes it glow in the dark and involves using bacteria that are classified as Biosafety Level 1, which are not even “remotely pathogenic.”

Other DIY scientists have done studies that let them extract DNA from an organism—often a fruit or vegetable—tested themselves for a certain gene, purified a protein, or sampled the environment for an organism, a process known as DNA barcoding. There are, of course, some DIY scientists who have done more advanced experiments.

Though many of the projects are pretty basic, the people doing them are often highly educated: A fifth of them have a PhD., 27 percent have a masters degree, and 37 percent have a bachelors degree.

That’s not to say that DIY bio is just a hobby. DIY biologists have rarely achieved scientific breakthroughs or made any new discoveries, but they have found ways to monetize their science or use it for social good. Back in June, a group of DIY scientists in California raised nearly $500,000 to develop and sell a bioluminescent plant. Last year, three Dutch scientists won a $52,000 design competition for the development of a handheld malaria diagnostic tool, which they plan on testing in Mali early next year. Grushkin says he thinks that within a few years, experiments designed in DIY labs could hit toy store shelves or make their way to classrooms.

“One really popular one is a sort of remote-control paramecium,” he said. “You use a joystick to control it. I’m not really sure if it has any applications, but it’s certainly an educational tool. I could see someone buying something like that for their kids a few years from now.”

DIY biology’s growing popularity and the fears expressed by some in the scientific community have the Obama administration watching it with “prudent vigilance,” according to a 2010 report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. But so far, the government has seen DIY biology as a potential economic growth area and has avoided regulating it.

Grushkin says the administration has taken a “watch but don’t touch” attitude towards it, one that DIY biologists seem to support. 43 percent of respondents said that the industry should be regulated by the government “in the future,” once the capabilities of DIY biologists are better known. Three quarters of DIY biologists said that their work should be shared and that their methods should be transparent.

As technology improves and DIY biology becomes more mainstream, people will try more advanced experiments and some of those fears might be worth worrying about. Once your average DIY biologist is able to synthesize DNA and write entire genomes, it could be time to worry. But for now, it seems like Ellen Jorgensen, a cofounder of Genspace, was right when, in a TED talk, said that it’s mostly a harmless hobby.

“The press has a tendency to overestimate our capabilities,” she said. “And underestimate our ethics.”