Biohacking

The Economist has published an article discussing the fact that the "cost of sequencing DNA has fallen from about $1 per base pair in the mid-1990s to a tenth of a cent today, and the cost of synthesising the molecule has also fallen."

There are groups like DIYbio, that currently are not really biohacking but mapping the spread of bio-organisms.

The real progress might be made with competitions like International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem), held annually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This challenges undergraduates to spend a summer building an organism from a ‘kit’ provided by a gene bank called the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Their work is possible because the kit is made up of standardised chunks of DNA called BioBricks.

The results: "A team from National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan conceived a bacterium that can do the work of a failed kidney; another, from Imperial College, London, worked on a ‘biofabricator’ capable of building other biological materials."

Read full article (Economist)