Eccentric's Corner: Science Is Sharing

On the top floor of a former Brooklyn bank building that’s become a hub for an eclectic mix of theatrical and lighting designers, interactive architects, and green-technology innovators, you’ll find Genspace, the nation’s first do-it-yourself nonprofit biotech lab. Almost anyone can come to this cluttered but efficient space to pursue research, produce bacterial art and photography, and basically get his or her hands dirty (safely) while getting up to speed on some of the most important advances of our time. Behind it all is molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen, Ph.D., whose belief in citizen science may get people to finally stop saying, “Science is just too hard.”

This may be the first time we’ve featured a biologist in our Eccentric’s Corner.

We’re terribly eccentric. My theory is that I was infected with toxoplasmosis early on and that’s why I’m one. Do you know what that is?

That’s the disease some people get from cats, isn’t it?

It’s also the stuff that makes you a risk taker. It’s what makes mice not fear cats, so it’s theorized that it might be correlated with risky behavior in humans. For me, it was certainly risky to start something that had never been done before with absolutely no resources, and put my life savings into it. This is risky behavior. Those little toxins are driving me from the brain out.

What else drove you to launch Genspace?

I was sitting at my desk at my last job, overlooking Central Park, when I read a blurb about something called “DIY Bio.” It was described as people who had labs in their closets and made glowing green yogurt—and wanted to democratize biotechnology. My first reaction was, “Wow, somebody’s interested enough in what I do for a living to want to do it as a hobby? That’s great—but I don’t know if it sounds really safe.”

How did you get involved?

I started lurking on the DIY Bio Google group. I saw a lot of amateurs, but a lot of professionals, too. It seemed like a really positive community. I had been directing a lab, but I hadn’t done any hands-on work for about 10 years, and I missed it. I saw that people would post, “Who wants to do a DIY group in New York?” and finally I just typed in, “Anybody who wants to start a group, meet at this coffee shop at 7:00 on Tuesday.”

Who came?

Three people. One was a reporter, but we assimilated him, and he became our first president. The others were students who had a burning interest to do research but couldn’t get a professor to let them into a lab. Faculty just can’t afford the luxury of training students anymore—the funding is too tight—particularly if the students are not going to work on what you’re working on. I had been in a similar position many years ago—going lab to lab, knocking on doors. I knew how hard it was, and I thought, This is just wrong.

And Genspace was the solution?

A year and a half later, in 2010, we finally found a space to do this stuff. We didn’t have any idea who was going to show up. But we knew there were people out there who might use it. And we knew that if you take people from diverse backgrounds and put them together in a neutral space, they’re better at solving problems than people with the same background.

Are you part of the larger hacker culture?

People liken Genspace to some of the early hacker spaces where people experimented with computers or shared 3-D printers. Now there’s a maker space in virtually every city. It’s a little harder with biology because it takes more time. You’re a slave to the life cycle of an organism. E.coli is going to divide only every 20 minutes. It can’t go any faster. So if you load a DNA program into it, you’re not going to see the results until the next day. That throws some people off. Also, you have to keep the organism alive; you can’t just put it on a shelf and come back six months later. These are barriers that have nothing to do with the difficulty of the science. It’s different from soldering something together. We’ve grown and killed more Arabidopsis [a plant used as a model organism in many experiments] than I can count.

Genspace was the first diy bio lab to get up and running, but there are others now. What’s the state of the movement?

In the United States, there are probably about a half dozen today. But the majority of people who identify themselves as being in the movement say they joined within the last six months. So it’s growing exponentially. It’s going to become more common to find these labs in major cities.

What’s your goal for the young students who come to the lab?

As a teenager, I knew I was interested in science, but I had no idea what it was like to go into a lab day in and day out to do research. The only labs that were available were the ones associated with the classes I was taking, where everybody was supposed to get the same answer and you always knew where you were going. That’s a lot different from research. I’d say you have to have a certain addiction to data to really find lab life satisfying. It’s better you find out before you’ve invested four years of college and suddenly discover it’s not something you want to do.

Does that apply to anyone coming here to try out lab work?

My goal is to give anybody who wants it a taste of what it’s like to work in a lab and do a project where you don’t know what the answer is going to be. Things are going to happen that you don’t anticipate, and you’re going to have to work around them. Then, see how you feel about it. We get kids in here who get really obsessed, and it becomes a very personal thing. It’s completely different from taking a lab class, because they really want to know the answer. It’s a lot more satisfying.

Who else comes to the lab?

A number of people in the biotech industry are between jobs or semiretired because of the economic downturn. They miss the lab, and they have some ideas that they want to try out. Where else can you pay $100 a month and find a space to do a proof-of-principle experiment?

What’s an example of a project that launched here?

We have a member who wanted to recreate a bacterial photography system. We had never had one, and it’s not easy to get one to run. But reverse engineering lab equipment is something this space has always been very good at. He sat down and read all the literature, put the system together, and actually got it to work fairly well. He improved the whole mechanics of making the photograph. It’s a light-sensitive operation: You have to deliver the light in a very precise way, and you also have to keep the bacteria alive. So he built a controlled environment, and now he’s turning out pictures that are really quite amazing considering that he started from nothing. That’s something he’s doing for his own amusement, but it will probably become something that we will teach as a workshop. So it adds to the community.

Artists and scientists have shared the lab space here. How do their approaches support each other?

Have you ever heard of kombucha? It’s a fermentation tea and a health drink. The organisms in it are yeast and a bacterium called Gluconacetobacter, which has this interesting property—it weaves a mat of pure cellulose on top of the culture. This is called a scoby, and there’s a designer who has made clothing out of it. It’s a sustainable design because the cellulose is produced by bacteria instead of by chopping down a tree. It’s what the bacteria naturally spin. But what if we could get them to spin what we want them to spin? It’s the promise of genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create new biomaterials. That’s a place where science meets design—biomaterials are things scientists can create and designers can use, and we can give each other ideas as to what would be an interesting next step.

People assume research can’t be a hobby. Are they wrong?

There was an age when certain people had enough leisure time to do natural-world experiments. But those were people who had money, not the general public. The difference today is the accessibility for people who don’t necessarily have a lot of money or training. It’s a consequence of technologies having become easier and cheaper. What might have been a Nobel Prize–winning experiment when it was first done is now done in high school classrooms. A lot of the things I used to do manually, like DNA sequencing, are now very inexpensive services. So you can leverage these technologies to make it easier for the general public to participate in research.

But there’s a larger mission for genspace, isn’t there?

There’s a profound antiscience feeling in the United States. Scientists aren’t respected. People don’t want to be scientists when they grow up the way I did, and it disturbs me. The anti-GMO movement and the antivaccine movement seem to come from a fear of science and an ignorance of it. So why not have centers in the community where you can do genetic engineering side by side with your teenage daughter? That’s a great way to demystify it and make it less scary and maybe even learn enough about biotech to realize that it’s a tool that can be used either wisely or unwisely. Let’s make it fun again, let’s make it accessible.

What do citizen scientists need to know?

DNA literacy is vital for the next generation, for everyone, really, so that they can participate in public debates about the technology. The best way to inform the dialogue about 21st-century science is to have the stakeholders understand it from a hands-on perspective.