Review: Biopunk: Solving Biotech's Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages

Biopunk: Solving Biotech's Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages by Marcus Wohlsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very enjoyably written set of articles on home-brew biology as it exists in the early 2010s. Reading through this book felt like reading a long pop science magazine focused on this topic. There are lots of anecdotes about the people doing this. It actually starts off quite tame, describing people building diagnostic medical tests to test their own families and building inexpensive equipment or finding expensive equipment for sale second hand. Only as you go on in the book do you see DNA manipulation and the like. The book ends with a discussion of the risks involved.

I just attended a TEDx conference that included a speaker running a local biohacking lab. The talk focused on what they could do, how they share information with other researchers, and how they were using equipment that was home built for cheap or purchased for a fraction of what the functionality cost just a few years ago. Many of the advances talked about came about after this book was written (its copyright date is 2012). The cause of the strength of this area of “non-corporate” research, according to the speaker, is the continued lack of regulations. This continues to be a fast moving area, and on that will get more interest from the general public as time goes by and as “things happen”, good or bad, based on this research. “Biopunk” remains a good introduction.


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