BioCoder #10

Chapter 2. The Biohacking Landscape in Latin America

Strategies from a region that wants to put its own flavor on the movement

Edgar Andrés Ochoa Cruz, Oscar Joel de la Barrera Benavidez, Manuel Giménez, Maria Chavez, and Marie-Anne Van Sluys

When you feel that you should have been born in the future, the only option is to build the future, so you can finally get to where you belong.

Andrés Ochoa

The Beginning

DIYbio democratized genetic engineering, a technology known by many names, including molecular biology, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. An early promoter of DIYbio was Rob Carlson, who in a 2005 Wired article showed that $1,000 was all it cost to start using this technology and pointed to online resources. In 2008, DIYbio.org launched as a channel of communication for DIYers who wanted to build a community around it. In 2010, the first biohacker spaces opened in California (BioCurious) and New York (Genspace). Today DIYbio.org maintains a list of the biohacker spaces around the world: 35 in North America, 28 in Europe, 5 in Latin America, 3 in Asia, and 3 in Oceania. In six short years, the movement has become a global phenomena.

Here is where the Latin American story of DIYbio begins. Focusing on the cultural similarities of the region (from Mexico to the Patagonia), we will describe the landscape of the biohacking spaces and the open-science initiatives that are expanding there. Also, we will describe the formation of the movement and the strategies that it has ...