12. BioCurious: The Curious Case of the Community Biotech Laboratory

Silicon Valley has seen a number of tech innovations emerge from garages. However, before BioCurious, biotech was largely out of reach for those without access to a university or big biotech company laboratory. In 2010, BioCurious was established to provide shared laboratory space for professional, academic, citizen scientists, as well as anyone else interested in biotech.

Initially BioCurious could have been seen as just another, if exceptionally unconventional, garage-based Silicon Valley idea. However, a successful Kickstarter campaign, led by Eri Gentry, a co-founder, demonstrated that the idea of a shared laboratory space with an emphasis on creativity and openness resonated with an underserved community of amateur enthusiasts and career scientists alike. In addition to the financial support raised through crowdfunding, many volunteered their time and expertise and the laboratory received significant donations of scientific equipment. The world’s first hackerspace for biotech was thus born.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2010, BioCurious moved out of the garage and started a non-profit organization with a 2500 square foot laboratory in Silicon Valley. BioCurious provides access to equipment, materials, courses, and a working space to members for experimentation with new entrepreneurial biotech ideas in as well as general creative scientific inquiry. The organization is entirely staffed and run by volunteers, and for a $100 membership fee anyone is welcome to join. Amateurs, inventors, activists, entrepreneurs, students, and anyone else who would like to experiment with DIY Biology is welcome to join and become a citizen scientist. Indeed, nearly 2000 people have joined the MeetUp community and are following BioCurious and its many biotech projects.

The bioscience conducted at the laboratory is not the only ongoing experiment at BioCurious. The laboratory itself is an experimental and novel space that questions the conventions of formal laboratories and the organization of scientific enquiry. Limited in resources, the laboratory aims to do a lot with a little and thus has been able to develop a very different cost structure and culture than incumbents. The design of the laboratory is innovative in that it rethinks laboratory space workflows and equipment instead of resorting to the conventional sterile looking laboratory where “grey machine sits next to grey machine” (no unnecessary inspiration there!). Indeed, many organizations and companies have visited BioCurious to learn about open innovation and creativity. Delegations of executives and policy makers have visited the laboratory from AkzoNobel, Google, the Atlantic Council, as well as groups of Eisenhower Fellows.

The laboratory space has been used by a diverse group of experimenters. Entrepreneurs have developed ideas for their businesses, talented people without resources have used the laboratory equipment to try out ideas, and science PhDs have come in to share their research and keep their skills fresh. The diversity of the community has also made possible a “grassroots mentorship” program where members share and learn from each other’s different approaches to and backgrounds in biotech. In contrast, academic science is largely grant-driven and hinges on Principal Investigators with very similar qualifications, working in very similar laboratories. Members at BioCurious see this homogeneity as a potential limitation to the creativity necessary to solve many problems in biotech.

While there may be a perception that the laboratory caters to hobbyists, as per Fast Company’s description of DIY geneticists, “. . . Tinkering with a vortexer, an ultrasonic bath, and gel electrophoresis to create glow-in-the-dark plants, wormlike creatures that crave butter, and robots that can do your pipetting for you” (Fastcompany.com), much of the research is very serious. Some of these ideas have evolved to become globally recognized, award-winning projects and many address problems overlooked by the incumbents. Members running projects at BioCurious have also started to apply for research grants—a resource that has largely been the domain of the biotech establishment. In seeking out formal grants the laboratory hopes to demonstrate how serious biotech can be done through innovative methods with a fraction of the resources.

The whole idea behind BioCurious is to be the nexus for this transformation, by making innovations in biology accessible, affordable, and open to a diverse community. To start with, many projects at BioCurious follow a crowdsourcing model. The inclusive nature of the laboratory also leads to a talent pool that can support many different projects. Moreover, it promotes fresher ideas and a greater collaboration between different disciplines. While the community laboratory does not have a policy formal on intellectual property, many of the projects have followed open sharing models allowing people to reproduce, modify, or adapt original creations to further their projects. This commitment to open innovation is something that incumbents may find unsettling. After all, for traditional universities and big biotech companies, a commercially applied solution is the primary measure of output of research.

Safety is always a concern in biotech and it is a priority at BioCurious. BioCurious has limited itself to working with equipment and materials at BSL-1, the equivalent of what would be found in a high-school laboratory. The laboratory has a safety committee in place and the open nature of the community that reviews the safety of experiments conducted in the laboratory. BioCurious has put practices in place for training and risk reduction that have been taken up by other community laboratories in the United States and abroad. The laboratory has even led discussions with policy makers, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, regarding safety, amateur science and community laboratories, as well as thinking about issues ranging from controlled substances to bioterrorism.

Another aspect by which BioCurious stands out of the ecosystem is financial. The laboratory is a non-profit, volunteer-run organization operating in a space populated by universities and companies with impressive budgets. As such, the financial viability of community laboratories has been questioned by, for example, some media outlet. BioCurious, however, aims to punch above its weight by making the most of resources and has pointed to the tremendous resourcefulness of its growing volunteer base and community. Furthermore, BioCurious is regularly approached for guidance and consultation as others look to also start up similar laboratories to serve their communities.

The concept of citizen scientists working in biotech, novel as it is today, poses some challenges too. To start with, some may question the credibility of the research due to the fact that science is being conducted by a group of non-professionals and laypersons possibly without the formal qualifications. However, BioCurious sees this diversity as an asset and source of creativity. The issue of maintaining transparency and open innovation will also drive BioCurious and other community laboratories to standardize their unique approaches to biotech and allow for results and processes to be better communicated and understood across the emerging DIY Bio space.

There are some open questions regarding the next steps of the BioCurious model. The development of standards and common protocols will leverage the open innovation practices and allow community laboratories to be replicated globally adding diversity to the biotech ecosystem that BioCurious seeks. However, the amplification of developing new standards and best practices must be balanced with emergent ideas and creativity. After all it was the experimental nature and eschewing of incumbents’ standards that brought about the novelty that is BioCurious. Similarly, the community-based governance model, the development of safety policies, and two-person board may eventually feel stretched thin as the community and interest continue to grow and as new emergent organizations seek guidance.

It’s still stunning to me. Four years later after we opened the doors at BioCurious, it’s still energizing for me to go in and just sit. You don’t have to be a biotech expert. You just have to have been frustrated in your life before. You have to have had a job where you were surrounded by people who didn’t care. You have to have had a job where your boss didn’t care and you didn’t care either.

And when you come to BioCurious you realize it’s totally different. This is the future of innovation. People are there because they want to be there, on a Wednesday afternoon, or late on a Saturday night. Some members drive all the way to Sunnyvale from San Francisco, it’s not a convenient location, and we’re pretty far from the train station. People come because they want to try things out at this community biotech laboratory.

And I think of myself 6 years earlier, being in my apartment in Sacramento. I was trying to build a tool called a gel electrophoresis box. I was trying to glue it together myself. It’s a mess and I’m frustrated and suddenly the glue spills everywhere, and no one around and I just picked the thing up and I threw it against the wall. And it bounced off, it didn’t even break, I was hoping it would shatter into a million pieces. Being alone and working in a field where no one thinks that you should be in is difficult.

Einstein when he first did his research, he was an unknown in physics. His paper was released and no one responded to the idea that e = mc². I know what that must have felt like. And that’s why I’m so amazed to be sitting here at BioCurious.

Last month, we had the head of the U.K. Government Office for Science come to BioCurious and she loved what we were doing. And before that, we had a group of the top executives and engineers from Google come to BioCurious for a 6-hour workshop. A Congressman just e-mailed today. They want to know what are we doing and what it is like. And I just think it’s so amazing to see that all these people are able to come to work and be curious.

And what’s next is to create this around the world. BioCurious is still kind of one of a kind, though it inspired maybe a dozen or so other laboratories like it around the world. They’re all passion projects, and what I want to see is more of these. More people being able to follow their curiosity, experiment with friends, more people being able to learn from others and learn how to make discoveries just like Einstein, who wasn’t part of a traditional laboratory, wasn’t part of a physics institution.

I think it’s really important that we create spaces for people to be curious even if it’s not something they’ve devoted their life to. At the point that I threw that gel box against the wall, I wasn’t somebody with a PhD in biology. I had a full-time job doing software consulting for the California State Government, testing software for an automated welfare system. That doesn’t have anything to do with biotechnology. But biotech was my passion and it was my interest and that’s why I was alone in my apartment, at night, gluing those pieces of plastic together. At BioCurious, we’ve created a place that all sorts of biotech innovators can be curious, learn, and share with others. Come check it out!