OUTLAW BIOLOGY?

The Outlaw Biology essay that I wrote for this event is now a publication!

Videos and transcripts to come soon, we promise!

     It’s been a couple months since the symposium now, and I am still contemplating the complexities and mysteries of the world. Most of those thoughts however, have been dedicated to issues of public participation in science (okay, okay, maybe this is an exaggeration- I have been mostly thinking about what in the world I am going to do with my life after graduation, but that’s for another time). I recently finished my paper on the Personal Genome Project and its structure of participation, and it helped me to think about public participation a bit more concretely. Well, sort of – I think I just have even more questions.
     One of the first questions that I started pondering about was the kinds of political philosophies that inspire our current notions of participation. On one hand, there are some theorists like Mill that believe that participation should be used to educate citizens (Mill, 1972). On the other hand, there are philosophers who argue that participation should be allowed only once citizens have been educated. I would also imagine that there is some sort of hybrid model of these two as well. Where then, does public participation in the world of science fall today? (When I discuss science here, I mean everything in the bio community, from the big research projects down to Outlaw Biology. Whether the bio community should be classified this way could be another topic of discussion.) In my initial empirical observations of the world around me, it seems like the purpose of modern day participation in science is indeed to educate or to learn more, at least from the perspective of the average joe. However, it also seems to erect some sort of barrier that prevents some people from participating. For example, the symposium would have excluded anyone who did not have a basic grasp of biological and genetic concepts (admittedly I did strawberry extractions with a four-year old, but is this true participation on his part?… another question for the ages). Also, this correlates with the fact that most of the people I met at the symposium were academics in biology, philosophy of science, biochem, etc.
     In the above, I am assuming of course that the public refers to the entire population of the US – which brings me to my next question of “What is the public?” Professor Kelty raises this same question in his essay on Outlaw Bio (Kelty, 2010). I believe that the “public” as defined by science is narrower than the normal idea of the entire populace; I believe that another requirement for the “public” in science is that they must also have some background which exposes them to an interest in biology. My initial gut reaction to this is that the public should include all members of the populace capable of making their own decisions. But then again, bio participation is different from participation as a US citizen. Or is it?
This brings me to another question, which is how much can citizens affect the structure of participation in science, and what are the best methods for doing so? In other words, is the current participatory structure of science set up so that participants get a say in what goes on? Does Big Bio really have a grasp on science? Are Outlaws chipping away at the structure of Bio? How does participation as an Outlaw differ from participation as a patient in a research study?
     I could go on and on with such questions, and as I mentioned before, I think I have even more now, especially after writing this. But I think it serves as a great springboard for more discussions, just like Prof Kelty’s piece. In other words, maybe y’all could help me tame this wild bronco of a subject known as public participation in science. Yeeehaw!

Jtheil

References
Mill, J.S. 1972. Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. London: Everyman’s Library/Dent.
Kelty, C. 2010. “Outlaws, Hackers, Victorian Gentlemen”. From www.outlawbiology.net.

       In taking on any new endeavor, one never really knows how their expectations will overlap with what really happens. Going into the Outlaw Biology Symposium, I did not realize what my expectations were until meeting with Professor Kelty to prepare for the Outlaws. As a control freak, I was caught off guard when he discussed the spirit of the symposium and the workshops. The event was to embody the essence of public participation in biology; as planners of the event, we were going to get everything set up and prepared, but then let the participants take it in the direction that it was meant to go in. Uh oh. That was the last thing that an obsessive planner and organizer was anticipating. It was at this point that I realized that my interpretation of my academic experience at UCLA was one of a carefully controlled and planned outcome. I had the same expectations for my work as a research apprentice on the symposium. This idea of relinquishing power to others on a project was a novel idea.

       The Outlaw Biology experience inspired me to rethink my expectations and what it meant to be a participant in the event. If the participants were given control over the direction of the symposium, what might they do with it? Would they expand upon the ideas presented in the symposium? How would they add their own experiences? What exactly was my role as an organizer? What did it mean to be involved in the planning of the event? Was I to be a participant as well? Would my role be merely to teach people how to do DNA strawberry extractions and inspire them to take the lesson in a new direction? Or would they do nothing with the information?  Would I suffer an existential crisis from all these questions?

       In my experience at the symposium, I began to understand the importance of participation and meaningful discussion in science. So much so that I have begun working on an essay and research project involving some of the issues for the capstone seminar for the Society and Genetics minor.  It is still a work in progress, but these questions began to stem out of the aforementioned ones discussed above. After a discussion with my classmates and professors, we narrowed in on an interesting question: What kind of ‘knowledge subject’ is being constructed in this Age of Bio? In other words, what kinds of knowledge become accessible/inaccessible to people, and how are the presentations of such knowledge made to the public? Do people walk away with the same understanding that researchers, project leaders, etc. intended, especially when it comes to informed consent?

       Some of my initial thoughts on this (especially as an undergraduate researcher that teaches genetic concepts and the social implications of biotechnology to high schoolers in Watts — shout out to all my King Drew students!) are that biology, especially genetics is not an easy subject. It’s quite complicated, and researchers still don’t even have the full picture of it. Yet public participation in regards to science is necessary in order to understand it more and hash it out. But this can be tricky when informed consent issues become involved, and thus you come to an interesting Catch-22.  As a participant, you should probably be informed, but how can this be when you need more participants to get more knowledge (at least when it comes to research subjects.) While admittedly, participation in science can be embodied in many ways, such as getting a science education, going to a symposium, donating tissue samples to participate in a research study, etc., it nonetheless remains … participation in science, with all the typical bells and whistles. Or does it?

       And that wraps up Part Deux. Until next time, adieu.

 Jill

 PS. Please share any comments or thoughts. After all, the topic IS participation!

       I spent most of my Outlaw Biology experience covered in guts and smelling of alcohol. Well, it was strawberry guts and rubbing alcohol. But I stand by my argument that it was a hootin’ an’ hollerin’ good time. On my day journey into the wonderful world of Outlaw Biology Workshops, I got to extract strawberry DNA, witness molecular gastronomy at its finest, and work with E.coli. The best part of it all though was mingling with other Outlaws. Outlaw biologists, that is.
        I was in charge of the Welcome Wagon and the Strawberry DNA extractions. The gang and I probably performed over twenty different extractions with symposium participants ranging from four to seventy-four. The process was quite easy, quick and required only a few common household products. In five minutes, one can acquire strawberry DNA by simply smushing strawberries, adding soap, and then slowly adding a little bit of rubbing alcohol. To get down the exact method, you can just Google “strawberry DNA extraction.” I had a lovely preschooler assist me with the undertaking and reveled in his glory as he squished the DNA in his fingers like a booger. Strawberry DNA really does look like snot. Although to be precise, the precipitate was not just DNA, but other proteins as well. I was kindly informed of this by a gentleman who was more experienced in the subtleties of DNA extraction.
       In my lunch break from the Welcome Wagon, I experienced the magic of Chef Richard Delerins, molecular gastronomist extraordinaire. He set up his laboratory- I mean, kitchen- and demonstrated for all us food nuts how one can create something that looks just like caviar out of carrot juice, blood orange juice, and a few lab chemicals. All 100% human safe, of course. Philip Lukeman, another Outlaw, kindly schooled us in the reactions taking place at the molecular level. The juice mixture balled up into the caviar-like form thanks to the hydrophobia induced by the added chemicals. After adding a little bit of seasoning to taste, we had –voila! — a gourmet science experiment. As a college student, I am most inclined to the suggestion that Chef Delerins’ masterpiece and the Velolab be combined to make one of those portable food carts. Cheap, fast cuisine to go!
       During my break I also meandered up to take a look at some of the other Outlaws’ work. Hoards of fellow Outlaw biologists were huddled around workstations and presenters, exchanging different knowledge about DIY bio. I joined up with some people by the Paint-by- Microbe! workstation. Here I got to cut out a picture of a Mexican wrestler from the Daily Bruin, our school newspaper, and apply a solution of E.coli and agar. I don’t know if it worked though, because I am still waiting for it to turn red. I am proud of my own little arts-and-crafts project regardless. Although my roommate wasn’t too happy when I brought it home. She threatened to throw it out when I told her there was E.coli, even though I explained a million times it was a perfectly safe, nonvirulent kind.
       After lunch I returned to the Welcome Wagon and continued with my strawberry slaughter. A teacher was quite impressed with how easy it was to do a DNA extraction. Another woman seemed fascinated that she was holding all the instructions for growing a strawberry plant.
       “Can you use other things besides strawberries?” she asked.
       “Yup,” I replied.
       “Can you do this on human tissue?”
       “Yup”
       “Well, ok now that I’ve got the DNA, now what do I do?”

        That one was a little more complicated to answer. But for me it triggered some interesting possibilities in my mind. How difficult would it be to amplify DNA in your home? To create recombinant DNA? What would I see if I took this DNA upstairs to Mac’s workshop on DIY Microscopy, where he converts webcams into microscopes? To be perfectly honest, my whole experience released a flood of questions and “what ifs?” Much of it was due to my interaction, discussion and interrogation of other Outlaw biologists. And so now as I sit underneath the stars on the ranch, with the warm fire poppin’ and a sizzlin’ (ok not really – I am in the reading room at Powell Library), I look forward to exploring some of the many thoughts triggered by my symposium experience. I hope that some of you will share some of your stories as well. Stay tuned until next time for more questions and reflections.

Jilly the Kid

These notes were compiled by Mac Cowell, Charles Fracchia, Marcus Wohlsen and others who attended the event, I’ve re-posted them here from DIYbio.org

This cowboy hat is acid-proof and recommended diybio safety-wear.

Chris Kelty just kicked out the Outlaw Biology Symposium here at the N(c)SI center at UCLA. “Outlaw is not the same thing as criminal,” he said.

Marcus Wohlson and I live-blogged it here, with help from Charles Fracchia.

There is a live stream.

Some of us are taking living notes here: http://ietherpad.com/ZxNM3bq5zh

Photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macowell/sets/72157623185479749/.

Panelists

Each panelist gets 2 slides. Starting w/ Jason Bobe’s 2nd, I’ll try to take a picture of each one.

Hugh Reinhoff – tons of sequencing and searching for the mutation causing his daughters’s disease, narrowing in on the target. May start biochemistry in mice models soon.

Philip Lukeman – made 100nm wide gear out of DNA origami. Working on nanoscale devices. Demoing open-source software tomorrow that takes in a drawing and spits out oligo strings that will self-assemble via the origami techniques into the shape. I’m thinking… we should fold some DNA into cool shapes and send the results to ASPEX for free electron microscopy.

Meredith Patterson – “work in linguistics, data mining, computer security, and biology all have something in common: finding patterns.” She shows a picture of Lactobacteria acidophilus. “Come to the demo tomorrow to get some of it’s plasmids.” She mentioned the crypto-crusade of the cypherpunks in the ’90s and read from an updated cypherpunk manifesto, roughly “biohackers are dedicated to putting the tools of scientific enquiry into the hands of everyone. Come, let us research together.”

Gaymon Bennett – an ethicist and theologian focused on synthetic biology, “how is biotechnology contributing to the good forms of life?” Bios Technika. “I think the kind of moral life we would be engaging in when doing diybio is very different from the kind of moral life one would engage in when doing big bio.”

Victoria Vesna – artist at UCLA. http://artsci.ucla.edu.
Visiting professor at Parson’s School of Design

Gravitated toward university setting because bioartists have had trouble finding a place in the gallery system. After arriving, she says she “started slowly moving toward the other side of campus [i.e. toward science labs].” Not only because there were “more money and toys there,” she said, but because it was “like walking into the most amazing sculpture studios.”

Shows a slide of piece she did called “Blue Morph”. The flashes of light were translated into sound, flashes from the metamorphasis of a blue morpho caterpillar into a butterfly.

She talked about her new HOX project. She’s thinking about turnining different animal’s homebox gene’s into sounds, or taking samples and making them into poker chips (since Chris is from Nevada). I think she should use our k12 E. coli button technique to make

The way art is done, taught, critiqued has also changed. Looking for public input for next HOX project: The best idea gets $1,000! Comment and suggest at http://artsci.ucla.edu/hox/.

Roger Brent – Badass Basic Scientist. Ran the Molecular Science Institute,/a>. Drew Endy and Rob Carlson were hanging out there in the early 2000s.

Patterson: Yeah! I love http://www.seedinglabs.org/.

Audience: ScienceShops, like in Europe!

Me: any tools that speed up the interaction with biological devices. Interactivity is key to play, and play is key to intuition, and intuition is key to innovation.

Lukeman: Doing stuff in silica versus doing stuff in the real world is different. “There will always be speed limits to doing stuff in the real world.” (Narrator: let’s make an xbox game of “the inner life of the cell” then)

Patterson: The hackerspace movement!

Narrator: Hackerspaces are becoming “centers of inquiry for anyone who just wants to walk in.

Discussion turns to the patient-driven research movement.

In the audience is Alice Wexler of the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which began four decades ago as a family effort to trace the genetic origins of Huntington’s disease.

Audience: Why are we interested in diybio? Is it for entertainment, or for survival? I started a small lab for artists at UCI. But in the end, we didn’t have the people power. I’m an artist. I didn’t have enough time to maintain the equipment and to figure everything out. So where are the situations where the Space and Equipment and People come together? I see a lot of really cool geeks here… but I see everyone alone. Working in isolation.

Brent: Well, I just want to say a person who wants to do art would be welcome in my lab.

Rienhoff: It might seem like a solitary activity, but I am connected to a very large community. I don’t feel like I am working in isolation.

Me: Roger, could you describe a page in a cloning manual and how much those publications cost?

Brent: Full subscription to “Current Protocols” used to run $1,200 a year. Anyone in UC system has access electroincally. Everyone knows someone.

Me: And there are torrents! But my point is that these protocols are often just a little too technical or telegraphic for the beginner to actually be able to use them. They are written for grad students. We need new manuals. We need books with the same technicality but written for high school students.

Bennett: The real test is to go home and boot up our Internet and see if we can learn how to do this. But why should you care about diybio? Find this essay: Weber’s Science as a Vocation. Science is hard and takes incredible enthusiasm and drive. We need to think about the why! It’s not just to do something cool. (Narrator: we might have missed the nuance of his discourse).

Audience: a sociologist, compares “outlaw biologists” to buffalo soldiers, i.e. outsiders who at the same time have connections to powerful institutions. Asks panelists to reflect on connection.

Rienhoff: When you’re outside the institution, you’re allowed to speculate and connect. The dots can be much farther apart. You can go way out and not take professional risks doing that. Being on the outside is “stretching the scientific method.”

Patterson: You have the freedom to look into questions that haven’t seen a lot of focus because projects would generally benefit marginal populations. Much of the resistance I’ve seen to my work comes from “upper-class liberal white people” who fear genetic engineering but lack sensitivity and awareness to its potential to benefit the poor and marginalized.

Lukeman: Who remembers “The Island of the Misfit Toys?” I think a bunch of the scientists you see here could be described as being from the island of the misfit toys. Scientists are not homogeneous, but often “deeply weird” people who have useful and not-so-useful ideas.

Bennett: A concrete example of the adjacencies between big bio and so-called diybio: consider the work of iGEM teams. It’s generating new kinds of participation, proliferating around the world. Getting some purchase on the movent among and across these places… should help us answer the question.

Audience: As exciting as outlaw projects are for lowering barriers to participation, how do you envision the work changing the interaction of the broader public with the science?

Meredith: If I could llive in my ideal world, it would be one in which people actively realized how much they use the scientific method every day.

Brent: Americans idolize the autodidact, the tinkerer, the Thomas Edisons. If biohacking captures the public imagination, regardless of technological achievement, a broader dialogue about science will be opened.

Bennett: The kinds of things we can do well in labs today can seem boring. What goes on at the bench every day is not the grand story about the human genome and the code of codes changing your life. A real problem: Combining a frank discussion of what we can and can’t do with fostering enthusiasm for trying.

Lukeman: Hard to convey to people what we’re doing without resorting to the five-minute montage. (a la CSI).

The conversation switches to citizen science

Audience: I want to point out http://scienceforcitizens.net/ (any maybe http://citizensforscience.org/ ?), and tell you that I’m going to a citizen science literacy conference later this year run by http://www.copusproject.org/. What messages do you want me to bring to that conference?

Kelty: I encourage you to just focus on enabling citizen science. The literacy will follow.

Audience: I am a gerontologist here at UCLA. Most citizens don’t have any science understanding at all… but I think it’s changing. Someday there will be science experts who are high school students. Freeman Dyson’s Domesticating Biotechnology.

Jankowski: I think we would all agree: biology is hard. We’ve talked about the available electronic resources, and the cheap ways at getting lab equipment. So let’s talk about how to develop access to experts who can teach us.

Fracchia: We’re running periodic classes at the bosslab in Boston.

Littrell: And tomorrow we’re starting DIYbio-SF here.

Audience: We’ve talked a lot about DIYbio practice, but I’m more interested in the theory. I’m a scholar who studies 19th century renegade scientists. I want to know what the big ideas are or will be coming out of this community and knocking on the door of orthodox science.

Lukeman: Outlaws don’t need your stinkin’ metaphysics.

THE END.

We’ve posted the program and schedule for the Symposium and Workshop this coming Friday and Saturday.

If you’d like to come participate, please do… bring your beakers and your gelboxes!

We are incredibly thrilled that Henri Lucas from UCLA Design | Media Arts created the poster for Outlaw Bio.  This image doesn’t do justice to the real thing… you’ll just have to come to the event to see it…

Three weeks to go. A website. A poster. An essay.
Yet to come: a program of workshops, a discussion, and maybe a backlash?