From self-experiment to amateur ventering
In our technological culture, there’s currently a strong movement towards an amateur or do-it-yourself approach. With people hacking all kinds of devices and processes, biology and medicine–eventually life itself–is no exception.
In recent developments, we have seen cancer-patients effectively conducting self-experiments using a drug called DCA after Canadian researchers and especially a New Scientist-article had generated a huge amount of interest. One step further, projects like OpenWetWare provide frameworks for open research, enabling people outside of institutions to participate in research and application of science, especially genetics and synthetic biology. Notions which might eventually lead to a future as scientists like Freeman Dyson suggest–where “domesticated biotechnology [that] once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures”.
What would a near-future scenario in which people have the means and skills to engage with their own illnesses on an experimental level look like? Or–more provocative perhaps–one where a collapsing public health system is encouraging patients to do so, even providing the frameworks and the tools.
It currently appears that there’s two steps to it: firstly, there’s the home molecular genetics side, where patients might follow recipes they find on the web to reproduce and use zero-day research as it happens. They would isolate parts from a certain organism’s DNA and insert it into something else to produce the desired result, which has to be something that can be ingested or injected. I believe this would be more or less possible today since 2006 I participated in a workshop with Beatriz da Costa, Christopher Kim and scientist Tau-Mu Yi in which we genetically modified yeast (pictured above) using techniques that could be followed be practically anyone.
The second step is a bit further fetched, but quite interesting in terms of a scenario. It would have patients actually engaging in research, becoming active producers and contributors of information while they try to isolate information from organisms. Things like Craig Venter’s voyage on which they sampled millions of new genes come to mind. There might be a new kind of tourism in which patients go ventering, or bioprospecting, after they’ve heard that there’s animals or plants in a remote part of the world that have a certain ability which might help them cure their illness. Whole colonies of amateur scientists in areas with great biodiversity might be imaginable, half lab, half hospital.