Biohacking sounds like a scary proposition, but Ellen Jorgensen takes the fear out of it in her talk at TEDGlobal 2012.
Jorgensen believes that opening up science to citizen scientist will result in far-reaching and exciting results. DIYbio, as the movement is called is spurring the creation of biohacker labs around the world. She talks about the safety factors involved in opening public labs and the fact that this international network of labs recently signed an ethics agreement and noted, “That’s a lot more than conventional science has done.”
“The press had a tendency to consistently overestimate [biohackers'] capabilities and underestimate our ethics.”
When she founded Genspace, the world’s first government-compliant DIY biotech lab with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik in 2009, they faced serious opposition and hostility from the traditional science sector and from the press. But recently a report from the UN states that the positive from this technology far outweighs the risk for negative.
