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Social movements are important sociological phenomena because they are the key agents that provide
societies with new ideas and ideals to change people's behavior or their understanding of the world.
This thesis aims to investigate into how the collective identity of the biohacker in the Do-it-Yourself
Biology (DIYbio) movement mobilizes collective...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... understand the relationship and dynamics between how the DIYbio movement aligns collective action with their collective identity, in Table 5.1 I try to outline what could be considered three communal values that reflect the perceived conflicts as problems and the corresponding solutions as goals that align with their new values; which are given as openness, freedom, and collaboration. The effects from the proposed problem-solution framework may represent goals in themselves for some biohackers, for example some may state their goals in terms of education, social innovation, self-expression, or entrepreneurship. ...Context 2
... informal networks represent the conflictual spaces where their values of openness, freedom, and collaboration have to be defended against any intrusion of private interests to restrict participation, command projects, or seek profits through knowledge-hoarding (refer back to Table 5.1). The relationship and the subsequent power dynamics between biohackers and sponsoring institutions should be furthered studied as to ascertain whether there is a holistic integration of the hacker ethos, or the movement is at risk of exploitation as a cheap source of cognitive capital. ...Citations
... To date, despite the longstanding public interest in biosafety within DIY science, there has been little empirical research on how citizen scientists navigate biosafety issues in practice. While prior sociological scholarship has examined the motivations, values, and politics of DIY biology (Meyer 2013;Barba 2014;Delgado and Callén 2017;McGowan et al. 2017;Roosth 2017;Grant et al. 2019;Guerrini, Trejo, et al. 2020) and other work has cataloged the history of biosafety efforts within DIY biology (Grushkin et al. 2013;Kuiken 2016;Sundaram 2021;Lim 2021), this work has not examined how individuals anticipate and respond to biosafety challenges in their own scientific investigations. ...
Non-establishment or do-it-yourself (DIY) science involves individuals who may not have formal training conducting experiments outside of institutional settings. While prior scholarship has examined the motivations and values of those involved in the subset of DIY science known as “DIY biology,” little research has addressed how these individuals navigate ethical issues in practice. The present study therefore aimed to understand how DIY biologists identify, approach, and resolve one particular ethical issue—biosafety—in their work. We conducted a digital ethnography of Just One Giant Lab (JOGL), the primary hub for DIY biology during the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequently conducted interviews with individuals involved with JOGL. We found that JOGL was the first global DIY biology initiative to create a Biosafety Advisory Board and develop formal biosafety guidelines that applied to different groups in multiple locations. There was disagreement, however, regarding whether the Board should have an advisory role or provide mandatory oversight. We found that JOGL practiced ethical gatekeeping of projects that fell outside the limits defined by the Board. Our findings show that the DIY biology community recognized biosafety issues and tried to build infrastructure to facilitate the safe conduct of research.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41292-023-00301-2.
... Particularmente, es en la revista Make, en el año 2006, cuando aparece por primera vez un dossier denominado "Biología del patio trasero", identificado como la puerta de entrada a la biología amateur (o, al menos su explicitación), en donde además de presentar tutoriales, se planteaba su potencial para el (bio)hacking (Sánchez, 2014). No hay una fecha precisa del surgimiento del biohacking, Jo Zayner (2022) lo sitúa cercano a los 2000, y marca como un hito el arresto del artista Steve Kurtz por cultivar bacterias en su casa. ...
... Pero es en 1969 que el gobierno de EEUU va a demandar a IBM por intentar monopolizar el mercado de las computadoras. Como resultado de esto, IBM va a separar el software y los servicios de las ventas de hardware y a dejar de compartir su código fuente (Burton, 2002, como se cita en Sánchez, 2014). De esta manera, el software se transforma en mercancía, y es sometido a los principios del régimen de propiedad intelectual, siendo considerado patentable. ...
... A partir de allí su uso será restrictivo, impidiendo a los usuarios copiar, modificar o compartir sin permiso, y, además, desde el punto de vista técnico, incompatible con otros sistemas. Este fue el gran negocio de Bill Gates y Microsoft, impulsando la venta de software como paquete cerradocódigo objeto, binario, ya no fuente- (Zukerfeld, 2017;Sánchez, 2014). Esta situación se volvió dominante, y varios hackers alzaron la voz en contra de este modelo, entre ellos, Richard M. Stallman quien consideraba al software propietario como algo antiético, y comenzó a trabajar en un proyecto para construir un sistema operativo libre que cualquiera pudiera usar, copiar y modificar. ...
En los últimos veinte años se ha desarrollado un movimiento de (Bio)hacking, observando variadas prácticas y formas: en algunos países más definidas y comunitarias, y en otras más desagregadas e individualistas. Este fenómeno, inserto en un contexto de capitalismo informacional y Cognitivo, nace de la cultura maker y es heredero de los valores del movimiento hacker, del acceso abierto y el software libre. Este artículo se propone realizar un recorrido bibliográfico que permita dar cuenta de su origen y relación con los valores tradicionalmente asociados a la comunidad científica junto a otros movimientos culturales para, posteriormente, analizar la relación entre producción de conocimiento en espacios de ciencia abierta dedicados al biohacking y propiedad intelectual.
... 111). 2 Around the time of these publications, another subgroup of biohackers emerged, tied specifically to the rise of self-tracking wearable technology in the marketplace and the related establishment of the Quantified Self movement in 2007 (Petersén, 2018). The resulting co-evolution of these developments created a very scattered but appealing movement consisting of different influences and subgroups including within them grinders, who perform extreme forms of DIY body enhancement such as microchip implantation; quantified selfers, who build archives of self-knowledge based on self-measurement to foster self-experimentation and optimisation, and body hackers, who engage in rigorous health-optimised diet and fitness regimes (Petersén, 2019;Sanchez, 2014). Meyer (2013) argues that the jump from open science to manipulatable bodies was an inherent outcome of the biohacking movement from the outset, with the goal of making science more accessible included making "bodies and ailments more knowable, and demonstrating that one can do it yourself" (p. ...
This article is a critical interdisciplinary study of biohacking as a specific case of transhumanism and its goals of enhancement and age intervention. It focuses on the organising principles underlying the biohacking movement's relationship to ageing and technoscience. The argument traces how the historical and scientific body technologies of molecularisation, functional age, optimisation, and quantification made possible the biohacking vision of the ageing body as amenable to modification, enhancement and improvement beyond its natural limits. Conclusions consider the wider implications of biohacking by pointing out four important issues that frame our cultural ambivalence about ageing: the tension between biohacking's supposedly liberating enhancement technologies and their obeisance to a tyranny of self‐disciplinary practices and the authority of bio‐data; the social meaning of biohacking hierarchies of human value, based on modifiable fitness and enhanceable performance; the implications of the biohacking program for gendered ageism; and the ethical limits of biohacking, not only in terms of potential harms to a person but what it can mean to exceed the natural limits of life.
... To date, despite the longstanding public interest in biosafety within DIY science, there has been little empirical research on how citizen scientists navigate biosafety issues in practice. While prior sociological scholarship has examined the motivations, values, and politics of DIY biology (Meyer 2013;Barba 2014;Delgado and Callén 2017;McGowan et al. 2017;Roosth 2017;Grant et al. 2019;Guerrini, Trejo, et al. 2020) and other work has cataloged the history of biosafety efforts within DIY biology (Grushkin et al. 2013;Kuiken 2016;Sundaram 2021;Lim 2021), this work has not examined how individuals anticipate and respond to biosafety challenges in their own scientific investigations. ...
... Uno de aquellos nuevos vocablos es el biohacking, cruce léxico de biology y hacker, el cual es usado para nombrar al movimiento que busca democratizar las ciencias biológicas para un público no experto. Hasta el momento existen trabajos que han explorado la constitución y naturaleza del movimiento (Sánchez Barba, 2014), su evolución y transformación mediante métodos cuantitativos (Meyer & Vergnaud, 2020), así como denuncias de peligro y advertencias sobre sus prácticas (US Food & Drug Administration, 2017;Anand, 2018;Blazeski, 2014;Zettler, Guerrini, & Sherkow, 2019). Otros textos mencionan explícitamente los vínculos entre el biohacking y el transhumanismo (Lux, Bailey, & Reyes, 2017;BBC, 2016;Yetisen, 2018), pero no evidencian ni profundizan lo suficiente en este aspecto. ...
... El biohacking es un movimiento que intenta exportar el conocimiento y quehacer de las ciencias biológicas del mundo académico y los laboratorios privados al hogar y el público no especializado. Aunque son muchos los términos existentes para referir a este fenómeno social, tales como DIYbio, biopunk y biología amateur, la identidad del movimiento es, tal cual analiza Sánchez Barba (2014), específicamente el biohacking. Los biohackers que se definen a sí mismos como tales procuran trazar una diferencia con el bioterrorismo y los cibercrímenes, se guían por la curiosidad, las ganas de aprender y de resolver problemas, tienen una visión positiva de la ética hacker y procuran definirse como un movimiento no peligroso y constructivo, es decir, que aporta a la comunidad. ...
... Sobre la influencia hacker, recordemos que este movimiento aparece en los años 50 de la mano de un grupo de estudiantes del MIT que por primera vez emplearon el término hacker para catalogar un tipo de proyecto placentero y constructivo (Sánchez Barba, 2014). A partir de entonces, el grupo mostró interés por la informática y las ciencias computacionales y diversificó sus propósitos al punto de que en los años 90 el activismo político informático permitiría la aparición del hacktivismo, buscando usar las estrategias hacker para sus diferentes objetivos políticos (Taylor, 2008). ...
El biohacking es un movimiento ciudadano que acerca el conocimiento y la práctica experimental de las ciencias biológicas a un público no especializado. El presente artículo propone visibilizar al biohacking como un tipo de transhumanismo y no solo como un movimiento influenciado por este último. Para ello se analiza la constitución, historia, prácticas y sistema moral del movimiento. Tras comparar los resultados con la definición de transhumanismo, se encontró una semejanza en las hipótesis de ambos y una adaptación de los valores transhumanistas al quehacer biohacker. El resultado fue la identificación del biohacking como un tipo de transhumanismo.
... Interviewees' ethical priorities related to autonomy and inclusivity were endorsed by biomedical citizen scientists in prior studies. (Sanchez Barba 2014;McGowan et al. 2017;Guerrini et al. 2020b). Good science is also consistent with efforts to promote the acquisition of good-quality data in citizen science (Kosmala et al. 2016). ...
As biomedical citizen science initiatives become more prevalent, the unique ethical issues that they raise are attracting policy attention. One issue identified as a significant concern is the ethical oversight of bottom-up biomedical citizen science projects that are designed and executed primarily or solely by members of the public. That is because the federal rules that require ethical oversight of research by institutional review boards generally do not apply to such projects, creating what has been called an ethics gap. Working to close this gap, practitioners and scholars have considered new mechanisms of ethical oversight for biomedical citizen science. To date, however, participants’ attitudes about ethics and oversight preferences have not been systematically examined. This information is useful to efforts to develop ethical oversight mechanisms because it provides a basis for evaluating the likely effectiveness of specific features of such mechanisms and their acceptability from the perspective of biomedical citizen scientists. Here, we report data from qualitative interviews with 35 stakeholders in bottom-up biomedical citizen science about their general ethics attitudes and preferences regarding ethical oversight. Interviewees described ten ethical priorities and endorsed oversight mechanisms that are voluntary, community-driven, and offer guidance. Conversely, interviewees rejected mechanisms that are mandatory, hierarchical, and inflexible. Applying these findings, we conclude that expert consultation and community review models appear to align well with ethical priorities and oversight preferences of many biomedical citizen scientists, although local conditions should guide the development and use of mechanisms in specific communities.
... In addition to situating genomic citizen science values within a theoretical framework, our findings expand on and sharpen the meaning of values identified by previous interview studies involving biomedical citizen scientists. Sanchez Barba (2014) extracted three values in biohacking from various sources including interviews with seven biohackers: openness, or "[p]rovid[ing] accessible, affordable, easy-to-use resources with no entry requirements or qualifications needed"; freedom, meaning that "[e]veryone can freely pursue their own interests and curiosities"; and collaboration, which mandates "[s]har[ing] everything as free and open-source." These values align with many of those that we identified, including openness, inclusivity, autonomy, fun, solidarity, and reciprocity. ...
Genomic citizen science initiatives that promote public involvement in the study or manipulation of genetic information are flourishing. These initiatives are diverse and range from data donation studies, to biological experimentation conducted in home and community laboratories, to self-experimentation. Understanding the values that citizen scientists associate with their activities and communities can be useful to policy development for citizen science. Here, we report values-relevant data from qualitative interviews with 38 stakeholders in genomic citizen science. Applying a theoretical framework that describes values as transcendent beliefs about desirable end states or behaviors that can be categorized according to the motivational goals they express and the interests they serve, we identified nine core values of genomic citizen science: altruism, autonomy, fun, inclusivity, openness, reciprocity, respect, safety, and solidarity.
... 16, marzo-agosto 2019, e-ISSN: 2007-3607 interior (Kruavit & Numhom, 2008). En la actualidad, los desarrollos científicos nos dan la facilidad no solo de aplicar implantes subcutáneos, sino de modificar una variedad de rasgos genéticos mediante la manipulación de nuestro ADN, lo que ha dado origen a una creciente aparición de biohackers (Sanchez, 2014). ...
When faced with an event considered as magical, we are facing an event in which natural rules are apparently broken by the use of supernatural forces. Technology, on the other hand, helps us to break down the barriers of the human being's capacities, amplifying them to the point that they seem supernatural. This article aims to reflect on how advances in science and technology have made possible those events considered as magical and supernatural, and how they have been used historically to redefine the Word supernatural, and finally how magical effects can serve as a driving force for technological innovation.
... It is the movement of biohacking or the do it yourself biology or DIYBio, which is taking advantage of the advances in science and is giving way to what is being referred to as open science or the democratization of science. Sanchez (2014) tries to analyze DIYBio as social movement. Delfanti (2013;112) also perceives DIYBio as one of the manifestations of biohacking, a combination of academic norms and the hackers' ethics. ...
During the few latest years, the term “biohacker” is at the forefront. As the word implies, a biohacker is a life scientist who combines biology and technology, along with the hacking ethos of open data and open source software. This paper tries to investigate how biohackers are presented in popular technological and news websites. For this purpose we used discourse analysis to examine how four websites covered three specijc biohackers and their achievements. Namely, the biohackers in question are Gabriel Licina, Neil Harbisson and Tom Cannon. The chosen websites are “The Independent” and “Daily Mail” from the news websites and “CNET” and “Gizmodo” from the technological websites. The questions this papers tries to answer are the following questions: “How biohackers are represented in technology and news websites?” “Is the representation dimerent between these two dimerent kinds of websites”?
... When DIY brain stimulation first emerged, some suggested adopting an open-engagement approach akin to that taken to DIY Biology (Fitz and Reiner, 2015), which is a movement of makers and tinkerers doing biology in kitchens and garages (Ledford, 2010;Roosth, 2010;Wohlsen, 2012;Delfanti, 2013;Delgado, 2013;Meyer, 2013;Sanchez, 2014). The proposition has, to some extent, come to fruition: a recent open letter authored by four neuroscientists (and signed by 39 other researchers) directly addressed home users, and in measured tones, outlined the unknown risks of brain stimulation (Wurzman et al., 2016). ...
The “do-it-yourself” (DIY) brain stimulation movement began in earnest in late 2011, when lay individuals began building stimulation devices and applying low levels of electricity to their heads for self-improvement purposes. To date, scholarship on the home use of brain stimulation has focused on characterizing the practices of users via quantitative and qualitative studies, and on analyzing related ethical and regulatory issues. In this perspective piece, however, I take the opposite approach: rather than viewing the home use of brain stimulation on its own, I argue that it must be understood within the context of other DIY and citizen science movements. Seen in this light, the home use of brain stimulation is only a small part of the “neurohacking” movement, which is comprised of individuals attempting to optimize their brains to achieve enhanced performance. Neurohacking itself is an offshoot of the “life hacking” (or “quantified self”) movement, in which individuals self-track minute aspects of their daily lives in order to enhance productivity or performance. Additionally, the home or DIY use of brain stimulation is in many ways parallel to the DIY Biology (or “biohacking”) movement, which seeks to democratize tools of scientific experimentation. Here, I describe the place of the home use of brain stimulation with regard to neurohackers, lifehackers, and biohackers, and suggest that a policy approach for the home use of brain stimulation should have an appreciation both of individual motivations as well as the broader social context of the movement itself.
