Rob Carlson states: innovators are necessary to create solutions to pressing problems – and these innovators often work with or come from interest groups such as DIYbio.

The Economist: “You can do a lot in your garage – A professor of biosynthesis on DIYbio / open-source biology, buying DNA online and the problem with patents”

Rob Carlson on synthetic biology

Do-it-yourself biology on the rise - 20 Dec 2009 - SF Chronicle (pdf)

SF Chronicle reporter Juliane Guthrie interviews Tito Jankowski, Phil Ross, Jason Bobe, and Raymond McCauley about the DIYbio projects they are working on. They also interviewed Drew Endy about safety and regulatory concerns.  The article is online at SFgate.com.

One of the article’s main thrusts is concerned with safety and regulation, or the lack thereof. I know diybio-nyc has been thinking about it and is organizing a round-table in a month or so, and I’ve been throwing a couple of ideas around with people here in boston. Maybe it’s time to set up a safety working group to synthesize the community’s thoughts on the issue with pointers to relevant resources. Is anyone doing this already (there’s some info in the faq).

Happy holidays, Mac

hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray"

Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage with John Schloendorn concerning his DIY SENS lab and biotech co-working space in the Bay Area.

Andrew Hessel wrote another article called “Why DIY Bio” in which he explains his vision, based on open source & synthetic biology principles, for a distributed, open anti-cancer research collective. He calls it Pink Army.

UPDATE: slashdotted on 26 Jan 2010.