In 1974, the
Altair 8800 microcomputer kicked off a revolution. The kit cost $439, or around $2,000 in today's money. Assembled, it cost about 40 percent more. For between $150 and $350 on top, depending on the version, you could add a programming language,
Altair BASIC, from a newly-formed company called Micro-Soft.
In 2018, you can buy a "Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit" for around $2,000. For beginners, $159 will get you a "DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit". It includes "everything you need to make precision genome edits in bacteria at home" for an example experiment, "allowing the bacteria to survive on Strep media which would normally prevent its growth". And there's more.
What could possibly go wrong?
Right now, getting into genetic engineering costs roughly the same as getting into computing did back in the 1970s. That means we're about to see a revolution in do-it-yourself genetic body modifications, according to biohacker Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, who launched BioFoundry, billed as Australia's first community lab for citizen scientists, in 2014.
"We're on the border of lots and lots of people doing self-experimentation using CRISPR," Meow-Meow told the linux.conf.au open-source software conference in Sydney last month.
"[It's a] really interesting Brave New World. This is kind of where biohacking is now," he said during his
presentation.
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