NIH/WIKIMEDIA COMMONSToday, citizen science is a widely discussed movement in biology. Headlines regularly report news of community residents monitoring bacteria in a local pond or playing protein-folding video games in their living rooms—all in support of rigorous scientific research. A small, but growing, number of community laboratories now offer equipment, space, and safety training to support the biocurious. Do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) has become so trendy that the predominant response to breakthrough genetic studies of the H5N1 avian influenza virus was fear that the information, if published, could be used maliciously by bioterrorists or by amateurs not following proper safety protocols.
Recognizing the importance of these trends, The Scientist editorial team decided to devote a special issue to the topic of DIYbio. The conundrum we encountered, however, was how to define a do-it-yourselfer. Most obvious are the untrained devising homemade experiments. But there are also formally trained scientists working outside a conventional research setting, or developing new equipment from a hodgepodge of supplies in the lab. And if we want to call this a new movement, we have to somehow differentiate these groups from the founding fathers of science, like the great thinkers of ancient Greece or the gentlemen scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Gregor Mendel, the posthumously hailed father of genetics, manipulated his pea plants in the garden of his monastery, where he ...
