BioCoder #10

Chapter 1. Bento Bioworks

Glen Martin

DIYbio may be expanding rapidly in popularity, but things are still sketchy when it comes to equipment. Enthusiasts work with what they can afford or scrounge, and make do. Perhaps that’s appropriate, particularly if you celebrate the movement’s garage ethos and think its current state is analogous to that of home computers in the 1970s, just before everything mushroomed and changed the world forever.

Still, you need basic, functional equipment, even if you’re working in a garage, basement, or small, co-op lab. And that’s central to Bento Bioworks cofounder (with Bethan Wolfenden) Philipp Boeing’s vision: To build that equipment and provide those standardized components so DIYbio enthusiasts can spend their time on projects, not scouring the Internet for used centrifuges.

“It’s DIYbio, not DIY build-your-own hardware,” says Boeing. “We realized that lots of folks interested in the field, including high school teams, citizen scientists and makers, we’re having difficulties finding equipment. You’d get together with them, and the conversations inevitably revolved more around hardware than biology. The equipment issue was getting in the way of the actual science. So we decided to do something about it. We wanted to put some infrastructure together that was both appealing and affordable.”

The result is the Bento Lab: a lunchbox-size DIYbio lab. Though compact, the Bento Lab has all the hardware a budding do-it-yourselfer needs to get hacking: ...