DIY biology

A scientist with a rather unusual name, Meow-Ludo Meow-Meow, gave a talk at linux.conf.au 2018 about the current trends in "do it yourself" (DIY) biology or "biohacking". He is perhaps most famous for being prosecuted for implanting an Opal card RFID chip into his hand; the Opal card is used for public transportation fares in Sydney. He gave more details about his implant as well as describing some other biohacking projects in an engaging presentation.

Meow-Meow is a politician with the Australian Science Party, he said by way of introduction; he has run in the last two elections. He founded BioFoundry, which is "Australia's first open-access molecular biology lab"; there are now two such labs in the country. He is also speaks frequently as "an emerging technology evangelist" for biology as well as other topics.

Background

Biohacking was started in response to the belief that academia is slow and expensive. The knowledge and thinking is "siloed"; people on the same floor of an academic facility may not know that they are working on the same problems. It excludes people who have an interest but lack the higher degree that is considered required.

So biohacking came about because non-professionals wanted to participate in molecular biology, he said, but didn't want to do "citizen science". Going out and collecting data points for "real" scientists so they can publish papers "is boring". The biohacker movement wants to turn citizen science into "civic science".

The civic science term came about during the Fukushima disaster when MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito ("who also doesn't have a degree, by the way") was trying to figure out how to use hacking and hackers (in the original sense of the term) to help out. There are things that hackers do well, such as moving quickly and thinking outside of the box, that might be applied to the problems faced by the disaster victims.

Out of that came Safecast, which was an important moment for Meow-Meow because Safecast made the transition from citizen to civic science for him. The Japanese government ran out of Geiger counters and other devices to measure the radiation levels from the disaster, so Safecast worked with hackers to build their own—reducing the cost from $6000 to $600. These devices were then used to measure radiation levels throughout the region. This was civic science because the users were doing more than just collecting data points; they were also interpreting and processing the data and making decisions based on it. The maps generated by the project were much better than any others, to the point that the government adopted them after three months.

Having all of this open data led to innovation, he said. He showed a video of a biohacker from Fukushima who linked the color of some lights in the wheel of his bicycle to one of the Geiger counters. So as he traveled around at night, he could get an idea of the radiation level of the area.

Biohacking consists of microbiology, molecular biology, building your own equipment, bioinformatics, and grinding, which is "the act of putting technology inside your body". Some of that might be done in an academic setting, but in general it is not. Biohacking takes a more "tinkering kind of approach", rather than "hypothesis-driven" as academia tends to be.

He founded BioFoundry three or more years ago and "it has been a wild journey". The first BioFoundry lab was in a small space in an artist coop near the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) campus where LCA was held, Meow-Meow said. He and some folks that he had been meeting with for several years gathered equipment out of dumpsters and built some other equipment for the 16m² lab. The space was pretty dodgy and they outgrew it quickly, but "the cool thing is we were doing some really fun science".

Two iterations later, the lab is larger and better equipped. The lab has Physical Containment 1 certification, which allows researchers to work with viruses and "hack bacteria". The certification "enables us to do most of the cool things except genetic modification on plants", he said.

Biohacking projects

The key project being worked on currently at BioFoundry is Open Insulin, which was started by another biohacking group in Oakland, CA. Biohacking is generally aimed at making the world or people better, he said; Open Insulin is about "making open-source insulin" using processes that are not covered by patents. Insulin used to be made in pig pancreases, but is now mostly made by bacteria that have been combined with a human gene. Prices of insulin are going up and production of it is going down, to the point that people in third-world countries and even China do not have access to it, which is "criminal", Meow-Meow said.

He then took attendees on a bit of whirlwind tour through some of the projects that are being done in the biohacking world. David Ishee is a dog breeder in the US who has become "one of the best biohackers in the world". He wants to fix genetic errors in dog breeds, many of which were introduced by humans using selective breeding. Ishee has run into problems with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trying to classify what he is doing as creating drugs, "which is completely bizarre". At the time of the talk, the US government was (briefly) shut down, which made Ishee "very excited", Meow-Meow said, to a round of laughter.

Sascha Karberg is a biohacker who had a problem with waking up each morning to fresh dog poop on his lawn. "Instead of doing what any normal person would do, he decided to overengineer the solution to the problem". He took tennis balls to the local dog park and threw them for each dog, collected the saliva from them, and did basic DNA sequencing on each at a local biohacking space. After sequencing the poop, he was able to find out which dog was making the mess, confront the owner, and stop the poop problem. It is an example, Meow-Meow said with a chuckle, of how biohacking can be used to solve a problem.

Another part of the biohacking movement is the creation of equipment to be used as part of the experiments or for data collection. People who can write code, do electronics, or run a laser cutter can contribute to efforts at local biohacker spaces to build this equipment. Much of it is "upcycled computer gear"; instead of a basic setup costing $20-30,000, it can "be built for like 500 bucks", he said.

Another way that people without a biology background can help is in providing ways for visualizing the data. Some of his favorite projects are ones where people from different skill sets get together to see what problems they can solve. One of those is a river watch project [Google Translate link] by an Indonesian group called Lifepatch [Google Translate]. The group made simple coliform bacteria detectors that were used to measure the amount of sewage reaching various waterways. That data is collected and displayed so that people can determine which parts of the rivers are safe to drink from. Each biohacker space in the world seems to focus on a different kind of problem, he said.

Another example is Josiah Zayner, who is "solving very different problems". He had a problem with his digestive tract, so he did a fecal transplant, which was so successful that he quit his job with NASA to do molecular biology full time. Zayner is perhaps most famous for his web site "The ODIN", where he sells reagents and kits to anyone as part of the "democratization of science" movement. He got in trouble with the EU for shipping CRISPR kits for bacteria to Germany; the EU claimed he was shipping pathogenic E. coli bacteria, but that turned out not to be the case. Zayner also has kits for use on humans ("though I wouldn't recommend that"); Zayner has used the kit on himself, however.

We are at the point where "lots and lots of people" are doing experiments using CRISPR, he said; it is "a brave new world". A "kind of sad story" is that of Tristan Roberts, who is infected with HIV. Roberts was frustrated about the advent of various experimental drugs for treating HIV that he did not have access to. So he recently injected himself with a therapy that looks promising and stopped taking his anti-HIV medication (Meow-Meow said that discontinuing the medicine was not popular in biohacking circles). It is too early to know the results, but there are a number of ethical questions that arise: should Roberts be allowed to do that? What if people in a country with socialized medicine start treating themselves that way; should the medical system be required to cover that?

Opal implant

Meow-Meow then moved on to his experiments on himself. The Opal card, like other RFID cards, consists of a chip and an antenna. The antenna is quite long in the card because it goes around the edge of the card many times. RFID works by the terminal providing an RF field that causes power to be generated by induction in the antenna that then powers the chip; the terminal and the chip can also communicate via the RF. When he first started talking with folks about implanting the Opal chip, it was the antenna that everyone thought would be the biggest problem. He actually has three different implants at this point (two for Opal, one other). One Opal implant is in his thumb, but doesn't work well because the antenna is not the right shape to interact with the Opal terminals.

So getting the right antenna was key, but the designer of the antenna, Amal Graafstra, lives in Seattle, which made it somewhat time-consuming to do. Graafstra started trying out different kinds of antennas, some of which ended up in some his own implant projects. Graafstra eventually settled on a small (roughly 3x1cm) printed circuit board with the antenna looping at one end; the Opal chip was dissolved out of the card with acetone and soldered to the board. The board was laminated with a bio-compatible plastic coating and was implanted into the side of Meow-Meow's hand on the side opposite his thumb.

Meow-Meow showed video of using the implant in his hand at an Opal terminal. After that video appeared on television, "I got in trouble", he said. The Sydney transit authority wanted to cancel the chip in his hand, which made him leery of actually using it. When the Opal system was first put in place, various folks asked why the transit authority needed to collect personal information as part of the sign-up process. The agency said "you can trust us, we'll never misuse your data", but "the first fucking chance they got to misuse my data, they did" by shutting down a different Opal card that he had in his name—on the day he did the TV story.

He said that he personally does not trust the government with his metadata "as far as I can throw them". But this incident does give him a way to talk about metadata retention as part of his campaign in the next election cycle. It is a good demonstration of why governments should not be allowed to retain metadata. Due to his offense (having an invalid ticket, which carries a $200 fine), he has to go to court on March 16. It will be the "first cyborg law case in Australia", he said with a grin; "it will be a bit exciting".

The other implant he has is a "little glass bead" in his hand. It is similar to the identification chips that some dogs and cats have and was also designed by Graafstra. In the future, Graafstra will be selling the VivoKey, which has roughly the same form factor as Meow-Meow's Opal implant, but will do two-factor authentication. The VivoKey has a megabyte of space, "which is huge"; the chip in his thumb has 868 bytes of storage by comparison.

He pointed to an article in ScienceDaily about the longevity of batteries in devices such as pacemakers (foreshadowing, a bit, Karen Sandler's keynote later in the week). The incentives for device makers are to reduce the warranties on battery life in order to make more money, he said, since "they can't make people more sick". The medical cost to replace a pacemaker battery in the US is $135,000, so he thinks we will see more efforts by patients and others to find alternatives. If someone gets an "off-brand" battery, though, will that violate the terms of service or warranty of their pacemaker? There will be many ethical and other questions along those lines in the near future, he thinks.

There are also efforts underway to implant more functional computers, with sensors, actuators, and wifi/Bluetooth communication, rather than the relatively dumb RFID devices. Beyond that are implants for decoration, like an LED implant that displays moving star patterns under the skin. Or using implanted magnets coupled with external sensors to simulate the echolocation ability of dolphins. And so on. The people behind these kinds of projects would seem to agree with the "Bioquisitive" slogan on Meow-Meow's t-shirt. He encouraged anyone so inclined to get involved with BioFoundry or their local biohacker space to "help us make cool science".

In the Q&A session, he noted that his Opal implants were not something he was going to keep permanently, but that they had opened up an interesting conversation. The Opal chips are proprietary, which is what the audience member was asking about but, he asked, why do they need to be? If he wins his court case, he thinks that will change how people are allowed to interact with this technology.

The advantages of an implant over the card or other mechanisms are numerous, he said. "It is 100 times cooler to implant it than to wear it". He can't lose the implant and he can swim with it. In addition, it is not obvious that he even has it, so people wouldn't even necessarily think to steal it (which would also be hard, of course).

There are some tricky ethics and safety questions surrounding these uncontrolled biohacker labs, he said. But the BioFoundry lab is subject to the same regulations as any other lab. BioFoundry works directly with the government and informs it of what the lab is doing. That may or may not be true for other labs, however.

A YouTube video of the talk is available.

[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for travel assistance to Sydney for LCA.]