Now You Can Genetically Engineer Living Cells with a Home Kit. Should You?

November 13, 2015

(MIT Technology Review) – Perhaps the best existing analog to Amino is the popular open-source electronic engineering kits made by DIY pioneer Arduino. “Only instead of playing with wires, circuit boards, and programming languages,” Stinson writes, “it’s bacteria, DNA, and incubators.” It’s also, of course, a living system. Even if bacteria aren’t held to the same cultural and ethical standards as, say, puppies, they’re very much living things. A world where everyone can build their own electronic devices seems like an unalloyed good, a proper democratization of science and engineering. But a world where everyone can muddle about in bacterial DNA?