Biohacking or is the practice of engaging biology with the hacker ethic, and the associated movement that first emerged during a period of rapid development of ideas around non-institutional science and technology development that first emerged the mid 2000s .

There is a great variety of technological approaches and subcultures associated with biohacking, which encompass a wide spectrum of practices, both inside and outside of professional and amateur laboratories.

In many traditional biohacking circles, amateur biology is closely associated with citizen science and prioritises the education of core concepts and experimental techniques of molecular biology. Further, the movement incorporates a great many elements of the Open Source movement, in the form of "Open Biology". For instance the 2008 DIYbio movement espoused the idea that wider understanding off, and access to, biotechnology would generally benefit greater society.

The concept quickly resulted in the development of DIYbio / public labs all over world, including La Paillase in Paris and Genspace in Brooklyn.

As the movement developed offshoot specialist movements or organisations were founded, each focusing on a particular aspect of open source biology, such as Open LabWare which created a wide variety of open source laboratory tools, and The ODIN, which provides access to reagents.

 Other biohacking groups focus on the incorporation of non-living technologies into one's own biology, or experimenting directly with oneself. The debate on which form of biohacking is the purest is largely irrelevant as there simply has yet to be clear definitions set by the community, which is diverse and evolving rapidly.

 

 

Biohacking Organizations

Hackteria

Hackteria encourages collaboration of scientists, hackers and artists to combine their expertise and share ideas to work with life science technologies and cooperate on organisation of workshops, labs and meetings.

DIY Bio

At diybio.org you can meet people in your city, get to know everything about biolabs and get started!

Local groups and biolabs