I envy Drew Endy’s vision on Synthetic Biology. I personally think that IGEM and the Biobricks Foundation starts because of Endy’s personal will to open biology and make it easier to engineer, because he himself was not a “life sciences-trained” academia. Nevertheless, in Endy’s plenary talk (2008), there are two solutions to make this dream happens: (1) involves more people, and (2) development of better tools. And I think it did well. The growing SynBio community has driven innovation to accessible tools and open repositories such as wetware.org. The need for ‘standard exchange format’ has been solved as the SBOL through collaborative attempt from the community members (Galdzicki et al., 2014).
The promise of Synthetic Biology was one of the driving power of DIY-Bio movement in the past decade. But, it’s not just the affordable tools or the “easyness” of Synthetic Biology that drives the DIY-Bio movement. The concept of boundary (Meyer, 2013, p129): between amateurs and professional, big-bio and small-bio, is an important drive for the rise of open biology movement. These DIYBio were the expression of breaking this boundaries.
Current DIYBio communities were mostly born from the previous established hackerspaces or makerspaces, which are mostly have background outside biology. As Jorgensen (2012) said, “...the press had a tendency to overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics”, due to limited access to technology and different regulations around the world, I wonder how many DIYBio group actually did Synthetic Biology?
DIYBio community was shaped by its members, each with different background and visions but shared through Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) principles. What I found interesting from Meyer (2013), is that the European DIYBio states that they found themselves different from the US community. So, how does the geography affects the cultural differences between each DIYBio movement? Were there really a different view between the US, EU, and Asia communities? Will it affect the practice of sharing and openness, or even safety and security approach, in each DIYBio communities
0 comments :
Post a Comment