About DIYbio.org
DIYbio.org was founded in 2008 with the mission of establishing a vibrant, productive and safe community of DIY biologists. Central to that mission is the belief that biotechnology, and greater public understanding about it, has the potential to benefit everyone. That means building mechanisms for DIYers to grow their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts and peers, a code of ethics, and leadership on the issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.
DIYbiosphere is DIYbio.org’s current, active project. This page is about the organization behind it.
How it started
DIYbio.org was co-founded by Jason Bobe and Mac Cowell, tracing back to a single meeting: on May 24, 2008, in the back room of a Cambridge pub, roughly 25 people gathered to ask whether molecular biology could be a hobby — Mac led off the night asking, “Can DIYbio.org be the Homebrew Computer Club of biology?” A dozen graduate students, several software engineers, a journalist, a few Harvard and MIT professors, and one teenager who came with his software-engineer father sat through a night of pub chatter to talk about backyard DNA extraction, $10 PCR machines, and whether amateurs could ever meaningfully contribute to biological engineering.
The essays that followed over the next two years still hold up as a statement of why the organization exists. Jason Bobe, in Science without Scientists (2008), predicted “a renaissance in science” taking place “outside of ‘science proper’… funded out-of-pocket by enthusiasts without PhDs.” A year later, in The Bigger Picture: Domesticating Biotechnology, Mac Cowell sharpened the framing: DIYbio’s role wasn’t just building tools for amateurs, but slowly proving that “the cultural barriers to practice science… are imaginary,” building a familiarity with biotechnology the way musicianship or cooking is familiar. MIT anthropologist Sophia Roosth, presenting her own research on the movement, put it as a shift from institutionally-sanctioned “Knowing” to domestic “Making” — “think of the personal computing revolution, but for biology.”
That vision was tested almost immediately. In April 2009, iGEM closed its doors to amateur teams, citing safety liability with no formal framework for teams working outside institutional labs. Rather than treat this as a setback, the community read it as the actual work: organizing a safety working group, and a symposium to bring the community together and “present a collective snapshot of their work… to the world.” That thread ran through Outlaw Biology, a January 2010 UCLA symposium where biologist Roger Brent offered a number that’s stuck ever since: roughly 300 people had hacked DNA by the time of the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA; by 2010, more than 350,000 had. “The locus of technology is not hardware,” he said. “It’s the people.”
The movement’s engagement with federal policy started early, too: on September 14, 2010, Jason Bobe testified before the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in Philadelphia, presenting “DIYbio: Origin, Activities & Scenarios for the Future” — barely two years after that first pub meeting. The Commission’s final report, New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (December 2010), took the testimony to heart:
Groups such as DIYbio are loosely organized networks of self-described “citizen scientists” coming together because of a common interest in the tools, methods, and applications of synthetic biology, rather than shared professional affiliations or policy responsibilities. In this way, the “do-it-yourself” community embodies a “do-it-together” ethos. These kinds of collaborations are commendable; they strengthen notions of citizenship and community at the core of a democracy. They demonstrate that science and its oversight do not belong exclusively to experts, highly trained professionals, or government officials. Science is a shared resource, affecting and belonging to all citizens.
By late 2010 the movement was substantial enough to argue with itself in public, in good essays: Daniel Grushkin (later a Genspace co-founder) interrogated the term “biohacker” and the power-reversal fantasy embedded in it; Todd Kuiken of the Woodrow Wilson Center wrote about engaging regulators — the FBI, the EPA — as partners rather than adversaries; and two guest essays from Charlie Schick made the case for fermentation as practical microbiology and asked hard, still-unresolved questions about who owns a microbial strain pulled from a commercial yogurt.
In 2011, DIYbio.org organized congresses in London and San Francisco, bringing together regional groups — ARC, BioCurious, BOSSLab, Genspace, LA Biohackers, and delegates from five European countries — to draft the movement’s first codes of ethics. Read them on the Code of Ethics page.
In 2013, the organization partnered with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Synthetic Biology Project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to launch Ask a Biosafety Expert, a free volunteer Q&A service for the DIYbio community. The program ran for several years.
In 2014, DIYbio.org formally organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation in the United States (Federal EIN: 45-4471203). See our IRS determination letter. See Support Us to contribute.
By 2018, the community’s activity had outgrown a single WordPress page of local groups. DIYbio.org launched DIYbiosphere as an open, GitHub-based successor — read that story on the DIYbiosphere project page. This information resource has become the primary program of the organization today, with a significant overhaul of the site taking place in 2026.
In the press
DIYbio.org and the broader movement it helped organize drew coverage starting in 2008, including The Boston Globe, Seed Magazine, The Atlantic, New Scientist, an AP wire story picked up by outlets including Forbes and Wired, and a segment on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Contact Us
Mailing address
contact /at diybio.org