DIYBio UK Summit

This weekend sees the UK's first DIYbio summit take place at Manchester's Madlab, founded my good friends – Hwa Young and Asa Calow.

The DIYbio movement intends to democratise biology and enable "citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety" and the summit is part of Manchester's Science festival and includes speakers from Genspace, Hackteria and Transit Lab.

I've been following the work of synthetic biologists like Drew Endy and the Open Wetware Lab for many years, but it was back in Spring 2009, when Asa and I attended the Real Hackers Program RNA workshop at ETech in San Diego, that I saw that Asa had the bio bug too. Over the course of a couple of hours, we were taught how to hack E.Coli into various bio applications, by Ginkgo BioWorks' Reshma Shetty.

Through Hwa's been running various DIYbio meetups recently – includng an octopus dissection workshop! – it's great to see high impact work like the summit being concieved and delivered by the Madlab crew. Indeed, as Monica starts to formulate the 2012 edition of LSxJunior, Asa and I are keen to run a workshop on 'genetics and DNA sequencing for kids'.

Find out more about the DIYbio Summit at the Madlab site.

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I wonder if any of the outputs from the DIYbio summit will find their way across town to ian Forrester's Last Weekend Dining Club…