Nature is a Language; Can't You Read?

Thirty years ago, almost no one could have imagined that computers would one day be so commonplace that enough CPU power to launch an Apollo mission would fit easily into a trouser pocket—except for the handful of visionaries who put Silicon Valley on the map, working from their garages to bring about the dream of personal computing. Garage engineering is still alive and well today, but its boundaries have expanded from silicon to carbon. Across the globe, hundreds of curious hackers have taken up the challenge of bringing bioengineering out of the ivory tower and into the hands of citizen scientists. From "weather maps" that chart the biodiversity of microbes, to open-source lab equipment, to crowdsourced reagent exchanges, all the way to novel techniques for genetically modifying organisms, DIYbiologists are rapidly redefining the landscape of biological research. In this talk, we'll explore how the DIYbio community emerged, its current state of the art, its near-term goals, and its impact on our understanding of the chemical language that encodes the living world around us.