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Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life
By Marcus Wohlsen (Current/Penguin, 2011, 240p, £18.99)
Reviewed by Lars Schmeink
In 1988 Bruce Sterling presented his readers with the fictitious review of Dr. Felix Hotton's book Our Neural Chernobyl, written in 2056, which in retrospect describes the advent of non-professional genetic engineering at the end of the 20th century and its dire consequences for society due to the eponymous biocatastrophe of spliced RNA leaking into nature. The reviewer explains how the book revisits "the rise of 'gene-hacking'" (3) and how the "white coatedsociopaths of the past" (2) gave way to "a hacker subculture [...of] ingenious, anomic individuals, often led into a state of manic self-absorption by their ability to dice with genetic destiny, [who] felt no loyalty to social interests higher than their own curiosity" (3) . Of course, this hacker scene is then, by accident and ignorance, responsible for introducing their hack to the North American fauna, which results in the creation of ultra-smart animals now competing with humans in their natural habitat.
Aside from the obvious ecological message of incalculable risks in scientific endeavors, Sterling's story is interesting in that it likens developments in bioengineering with computer sciences and thus predicts the establishment of a biohacker scene similar to that of 1970s and '80s cyberculture. So it seems like a case of prophecy for Sterling when in 2001, Annalee Nevitz claimed the arrival of the biopunk revolution in an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:
Biopunks are the visionaries whose imaginations were set on fire by the knowledge that we had finally sequenced the human genome last year. Biopunks get off on creative genetic engineering, RNA research, cloning and protein synthesis. Biopunks hack genomic data, lining up human genomes next to mouse genomes to find out what the two species have in common and what they don't, (n.pag.)
Nevitz goes on to describe a full-fledge subculture of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, intellectuals, writers and artists, that have committed themselves to a liberated biology, allowing open-access to DNA and research in genetics. Biopunks, Nevitz claims, rally behind the battle-cry: "Free our genetic data!" (n.pag.)
Over a decade later, the gene-hacking scene has grown and come into sharp profile. It can tell heroic tales of young...