BioCoder #2

Do Biohackers Dream of GM Sheep?

Ryan Bethencourt

Where do we go to dream? It’s a question I asked myself as I heard the news about the FDA cracking down on 23andMe, a service that dared to dream outside of our regulatory system’s confines. As we travel down new and unexplored paths, where do we go to move away from the understandably conservative thinking of our industry and think about biotechnologies that will, as Astro Teller from Google X labs says, make a 10x improvement to our world? I grew up reading mind-expanding sci-fi from Asimov, Sagan, Bear, Heinlein, Egan, Stross, and many others, and yet I couldn’t find a list for those of us who wanted to dive deeper into the oddities and possible futures of the technology of life. So after a discussion with Kyle Taylor, the head scientist for Glowing Plants, in which we discussed one future possibility of engineering crops to grow on the surface of oceans to feed the hungry billions of the world, I thought it would be worth reaching out across the Web to compile a list of other future possible biotechnologies.

Hopefully some of the books and short stories in this list will help inspire the next generation of biohackers, scientists, and DIY biologists.

Short Stories

• Ribofunk, by Paul Di Filippo, is an excellent short-story collection.
• BioPunk, edited by Ra Page, is a short-story anthology penned by different authors. The short stories were commissioned to be based on actual current research, and authors were paired up with a scientist ...