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Couple days ago I saw a video posted of Derek Jacobys TEDxVictoria talk on Hackerspaces and Biology, at first glance I was really happy to see the two terms in the same sentence. Hackerspaces, HackerHouses, or the more media-friendly, MakerSpaces, have been popping up exponentially everywhere in the last 10 years.  It’s a fantastic movement in bringing like-minded individuals of all sorts of walks of life, professions, trade and hobby together to talk shop, network, and divulge into interests, experiments or take part in large scale projects.  Mixing know how, resource and project management they are hyper-generators...incubators even of ideas and sometimes...game changers.

Like when you are able to put the words Biology and Hackerspaces in the same sentence.

Biohacking.

This is where the real magic starts happening. Man/Woman will always be curious. It’s how we create. It’s how we thrive.  It’s how we evolve.  With technology decreasing in not only price, but also in scale, we begin to be able to brush the threshold of the very building blocks that make you and me what we are. I previously had no idea that by the end of 2012 it will only cost $1,000 to sequence an entire human genome. 300gb of DNA code.  Less than $3.50 per gigabyte of your human DNA decoded. The kicker is that price is down from $10,000,000 in 2005.

There are however the caveats, the ethical boundaries.  Where would they lay?  Designer babies are already possible. We can take cells and replicate them to create entire organs using organ scafolding structures.   But these are the questions people will be asking very soon.  And all and all, it’s exciting that we get to see these human innovations of direction and stride.  We just need to make sure all our hands are on the reigns, not necessarily to hold back...but to hold on tight.