Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science

Preface

Every year a different Italian city hosts a large and important hackmeeting. In 2007 hackers were gathering in Pisa at the Rebeldia social centre: the centre’s rooms were filled with weird computers, cables, hackers, political activists and free culture advocates. The hackmeeting is a place where people share knowledge, and workshops are organised in a completely open way with a wiki. That year, my friend Tibi and I held a workshop titled Hack Science, in which we intended to discuss with hackers the various ways in which social movements had got their hands dirty with science: used it, contested it, commissioned it, conducted it according to their political needs. That was perhaps the first time in which I explicitly linked science with hacking.

However, the description of the workshop said: ‘when activism knocks on labs’ doors’. Naïvely enough, our idea was not to talk about active hands-on intervention on the natural world, but rather the use of science for political purposes. Hackers were eager to discuss how to hack science, but despite the significant politicisation of the hackmeeting – workshops that year ranged from conspiracy to cryptography, from Linux to VoIP privacy – they wanted to discuss the possibility of getting their hands dirty with science. Then, and only then, science politics might follow, with its corollary of expert panels, independent research and protest.

Three years later, I was packing up my stuff and heading to the US West Coast to meet DIYbio (Do-It-Yourself Biology), a network of amateur biologists that in many ways is related to the traditions, myths and practices of hackers and who even share physical spaces with computer hackers (they set up wet labs for citizen biology in hacker spaces). Shortly before leaving Italy, I asked a friend to give me some classes on basic biotechnology tools and practices in order to refresh my knowledge from my days as a veterinary microbiologist and cytologist. The main piece of advice he gave me was about chemical and biological safety. He wanted to make sure I would not use dangerous chemicals such as methyl bromide (which he believed to be poorly regulated in the US) in an environment as creepy and unsafe as an amateur lab set up in a garage.

Yet when I visited hackerspaces in Seattle and Los Angeles I found myself extracting DNA from strawberries with a buffer solution made out of dish soap, or trying to use free software to resuscitate a ten-year-old polymerase chain reaction machine. I quickly realised that the science conducted by DIYbio might be very basic, and certainly not dangerous at all. Hacking in the sense Italian hackers gave to the word was only one part of their activities. On the other hand, I saw DIYbio members dealing with the FBI, organising conferences on open science, launching start-ups, looking for funding and writing letters to the US Presidential Commission on Bioethics. Politics for DIYbio were as routine as they are for any other social movement. Yet it was a very different type of politics compared to the radical tradition of Italian hackers.

These two stories illustrate how hacking can be a complex and multifaceted technical and political concept: that’s why I believe that referring to hacking to explore biology helps make sense of some of the transformations that life sciences have gone through during the last decade. During and after the two events mentioned above, I have continued working on the edge between open science and forms of resistance to the new enclosures represented by intellectual property rights. As a crucial part of my political experience I knew that information and knowledge, far from being a common good freely created and shared by collective intelligence, were being increasingly privatised. Indeed, intellectual property rights have emerged as one of the main battlegrounds where the long-standing clash between privatisation and redistribution of wealth takes place. Scientific knowledge has been, together with the cultural industry, the main object around which this clash has revolved. Think about the problem of patents on genes. Yet, I also knew that the opposition between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ science was not enough to understand these clashes.

Profit, the organisation of labour and production, hierarchies and participation are problems just as important as access to information and knowledge. Thus, this book is not intended to be merely a sociological account of open science, but rather a proposal on the complex evolution of biology and its relationship with society and the market. Furthermore, I hope it will contribute to the debate about openness, free culture and hacking that has left the inner circle of practitioners long ago and has become diffused on a global scale.

I consider myself a member of the open access and free culture movements, and I am aware that my book runs the risk of being biased. Yet I also firmly believe a different viewpoint on open science has long been needed. Hacking, open source, piracy and free culture are all parts of the battles over information that are among the most important in contemporary societies. The radical request for transparency that characterises Wikileaks and governments’ response to its practices, the rise of the Pirate Parties in Europe, the ghost of the hacker group Anonymous and its global actions, the incredibly harsh juridical clashes around intellectual property rights we have been witnessing over the last few years and the global regulations emerged to control them – all these phenomena testify to the growing importance of struggles around information control in our time.

Who controls the creation, distribution and appropriation of information and knowledge? This question is bound to become one of the key questions of our times and has deeply affected my work. Several years ago, while I was studying a transformation in the public image of scientists, I ended up (much to my surprise) tackling the relationship between cultural change and biocapitalism’s evolution, where intellectual property rights and access to knowledge and information are crucial issues that have a deeper and more complex role than issues of public image.

But this is also a narration made up of three stories. In order to witness and report them, I undertook a journey whose stages included an animal health research facility in Padua, hackerspaces on the US West Coast, university rooms in Berkeley, pubs in Silicon Valley and finally dozens of webpages, online forums and listservs, as well as a long analysis of the Italian and international press and a study of two genetic databases. This journey has been curiously intertwined with my personal story. I began working on Craig Venter and his ship Sorcerer II while studying for my Masters in Science Communication, which was the first contact I had with research in science and society after a career in a completely different world. In fact, several years ago I briefly worked at an Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale (IZS). Visiting the IZS delle Venezie, interviewing Ilaria Capua and writing Chapter 6 somehow reunited my current and my former professions. As a former colleague, I enjoyed meeting an Italian veterinarian who has acquired such an international dimension and yet keeps on working for an Italian public institution. Meeting the DIYbio crowd and hanging out with them was incredibly interesting and fun, and it allowed me to use some of my forgotten vet lab skills. As Mackenzie Cowell once noted, as an ex-biologist, open science advocate and hacking fan, I match perfectly the profile of your typical DIYbio nerd.

I am grateful to the groups and activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Seattle for sharing their curiosity and their time with me. Adam Arvidsson, Yurij Castelfranchi, Christopher Kelty and Nico Pitrelli had a special role in the genesis of this work and I cannot thank them enough for their advice, the intellectual challenges they posed me, the time they spent helping me, their support and their friendship. I would also like to thank Anita Bacigalupo, Michel Bauwens, Blicero, Beatrice Busi, Mariella Bussolati, Andrea and Mauro Capocci, Anna Casaglia, Gabriella Coleman, Magnus Eriksson, Andrea Fumagalli, Alessandro Gandini, Nikolaj Heltoft, Katie Hepworth, Marc Herbst, Steve Kurtz, Marina Levina, Paolo Ligutti, Lars Bo Løfgreen, Marco Mancuso, Federica Manzoli, Rachel Moe, Bertram Niessen, Helga Nowotny, Edoardo Puglisi, Roberta Sassatelli, Giulia Selmi, Johan Söderberg, Giuseppe Testa, Sara Tocchetti, Alan Toner, Penny Travlou, Fred Turner and many other friends and colleagues for helping me, sharing their ideas with me and commenting on earlier versions or parts of this work. David Castle at Pluto Press was an invaluable resource and believed in this project from the beginning, while two anonymous reviewers provided me with incredibly valuable suggestions and critiques. And of course this book would have never been written without Valentina Castellini’s love, patience and support.

Parts of the material that now compose this study have been published during the last few years in New Genetics and Society, the Journal of Science Communication, the International Review of Information Ethics, Studi Culturali and the edited volume Activist Media and Biopolitics. The doctorate programme in science and society at the University of Milan and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory at SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, gave me the space, the resources and the intellectual environment I needed to develop the ideas that compose this work. The Center for Society and Genetics at the University of California Los Angeles, where I spent six wonderful months, provided me with a relaxed and committed environment that was crucial for the materialisation of my PhD research. The Journal of Science Communication gave me the opportunity to work in an international project – something rare in Italy – and to contribute directly to the Open Access movement. Editing what is most likely one of the few open access journals in the field of science and technology studies was a crucial part of my professional growth. Finally, the Genomics Research and Policy Forum at the University of Edinburgh gifted me with a peaceful month away from my daily duties, allowing me to work on the first draft manuscript of this book.

I am also in debt to many people and experiences outside the academic world. The San Precario group and the EuroMayDay network are not only grassroots political projects on labour, precarity and welfare: they are also wonderful places where theoretical reflection and daily intervention walk hand-in-hand. I am grateful to the Italian hackmeeting community and the Los Angeles Bicycle Kitchen for showing me what an anti-authoritarian approach to technology means in practice, and to the Autistici/Inventati collective for providing me and thousands of others with free software tools and anonymous mailboxes, and for keeping online their more or less reliable services regardless of police searches, shutdowns or lack of money. The LASER group (Autonomous Laboratory on Science, Epistemology and Research) was for a few years an exceptional experience of contamination between different types of critical knowledge, and its work deeply influenced me.

Finally, I would like to remember Franco Carlini. He was a great journalist and public intellectual with an incredible political instinct and true commitment. Franco gave me a space in Chip & Salsa, the pages about technology of Il Manifesto, where I started working as a journalist and learned to keep a critical and political stance while writing on science, culture and technology. All these people and collective projects fuelled my interests in biology, intellectual property rights and information politics not only as intellectual challenges but, more importantly, as crucial political issues. I hope this work reflects how my view on science has been shaped by both the academic and political environments in which I belong.

Milano, Autumn 2012

1

Cracking Codes, Remixing Cultures

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

‘The hacker manifesto’ (The Mentor 1986)

Crack the code, share your data, have fun, save the world, be independent, become famous and make a lot of money. There is a link between contemporary scientists devoted to open biology and the ethics and myths of one of the heroes of the computer revolution and of informational capitalism: the hacker.

In this book I show the existence of a confluence between the Mertonian ethos, the famous account of scientist’s norms of behaviour proposed in the 1930s by the science sociologist Robert Merton (1973) and the hacker ethic, a very diverse and heterogeneous set of moral norms and cultural practices whose foundations are based upon the desire to have a free and direct approach to technology and information.

The hacker ethic emerged in the 1960s within the first hacker communities in the United States and while different versions of it have been formalised in several books, manifestos and writings, what makes hacking interesting today is exactly the wealth and diversity of practices and cultures it represents. The emerging open science culture I point out is influenced by this wealth, as it mixes rebellion and openness, antiestablishment critique and insistence on informational metaphors, and operates in a context of crisis and transformation where the relationship between researchers and scientific institutions, and their commercialisation and communication practices, are redefined.

In this book I refer to biohackers – life scientists whose practices exhibit a remix of cultures that update a more traditional science ethos with elements coming from hacking and free software. It is well-known that cultures related to hacking and free software are indebted to the modern scientific ethos. Yet what I want to show is how hacking and free software are now contaminating scientific cultures, in what we could somehow be defined as cultural feedback. This process of coevolution is linked to the widespread and deep influence computers have on the scientific enterprise. In fact, the stories this book contains are related to the creation of genomics databases and community labs, and the use of online sharing tools and open source solutions.

Beyond the analysis of communication tools, I will explore a world in which the emergence of new scientific communities and new alliances between different actors are changing the landscape of scientific production. The sharing of genomic data through open access databases, the cracking of DNA codes, the standardisation of biological parts or the production of open source machinery for biomedical research represent one side of a process that also involves institutional change and challenges some of our assumptions about the relationship between research, commerce and power. A cultural shift lies at the centre of these transformations. Therefore, while one of the main problems analysed in this book is the widespread adoption of open access and open source solutions by biologists, my goal is to show that their relationship with hacker and free software cultures is deep and in some cases straightforward. In this way I tackle two main problems, one of which is the role of open science within the framework of informational and digital capitalism. The complexity of open science politics goes beyond the opposition between openness and closure and pushes us to look for a deeper understanding of today’s transformations in biology. The other is the evolution of scientists’ culture and how it interacts with the way science is done, distributed, shared and commercialised.

The three cases I present in this book are meant to exemplify the many different directions open biology is taking. Craig Venter, the US biologist known for his role in genetics’ commercialisation and subjection to secrecy and intellectual property rights, sailed the world’s oceans in order to collect genomics data and information he would then, for the first time, share publicly through open access databases and journals. The Italian virologist Ilaria Capua challenged the World Health Organization’s policies on access to influenza data by refusing the institution’s offers to upload its research group’s data on avian influenza genomics on a password-protected database. Both Venter and Capua founded their own independent open access databases, although their goals were completely divergent. The rise of a do-it-yourself biology movement in the United States, DIYbio, was based not only on the American amateur science tradition, but also on explicit references to hacking and open source software from which it borrowed practices that it then applied to the life sciences.

I must stress that I do not use ‘hacker’ as a native category; in fact, most biologists that use open science tools and practices do not define themselves as hackers. Among the cases I present, only DIYbio has explicit relationships with the hacker tradition. In other cases, as will become clear in the following chapters, hacker cultures represent a source of innovation and contamination of scientists’ cultures. Yet all three cases represent a move towards a more open informational environment and also a critique of the current system of the life sciences. Finally, they all have very different relationships to issues such as commercialisation, profit, or autonomy from institutions.

These cases are not meant to be interesting from the viewpoint of their scientific output – that would somehow go beyond my capacities. Also, it would be difficult to compare the scientific output of high-profile individual biologists such as Venter and Capua with such a diverse and decentralised movement as DIYbio, which may never become an important place for innovation. While I am aware that my choice could be seen as asymmetrical, I believe the juxtaposition of these three cases helps me to reach the main goal of this book. Indeed, by analysing both discursive strategies and socio-economic practices of contemporary biologists who use open science tools, I investigate their role in the changing relationship between science and society and try to give a multidimensional, stratified picture of the politics of open science.

The case studies I analyse are not impartial and are not generalisable, nor do they represent the whole spectrum of new open science practices, yet I argue that these biologists can all be a rich model for current transformations in both life sciences and informational capitalism. In particular, the culture to which I am referring gives scientists tools they can use in order to solve some of the political and societal problems raised by the increasing privatisation of genetic research by means of patents and other restrictions on accessing biological data. It can also be considered as an expression of a change in the institutional and socio-economic settings of contemporary biology: life sciences innovation now takes place in increasingly complex and mixed configurations, in which open data policies and open access tools coexist with different, and more strict, sets of access policies and intellectual property rights (IPR). Further, life sciences are now open to the participation of new actors, such as citizen scientists, start-ups and online collaborative platforms. These biologists have a role in hacking biology.

Hacking has an active approach to the shaping of the proprietary structure of scientific information – to who owns and disposes of biological data and knowledge. But it also poses a challenge to Big Bio¹ – the ensemble of big corporations, global universities and international and government