[philelly]

it's worth pointing out that all of the protocols i've found on this site after a brief search are essentially late middle school/early high school science fair projects. i'm not a computer person but i assume that this is not what you would call 'hacking.'

[biohacker42]

With science fair level tools today you can splice some foreign genes into e.coli

[philelly]

i guess my issue is (and perhaps this is because i haven't read up enough on the biohacking movement) that transforming e. coli shouldn't be sold as 'hacking,' which to me implies that you'll be free to kind of build and design whatever you can imagine. in reality, you are 'splicing' nothing (as transformation does not require recombination, and the bacteria will rapidly lose whatever plasmid was introduced if they are taken out of the appropriate media), and you are limited by whatever plasmids you have the good fortune of borrowing from someone--maybe GFP to make your bugs glow or something. i suppose there might be an analogy to be made here to the early days of computer science, when one could do very little with computers, but i still think that this technology, which will be great for getting people excited about science, should not yet be advertised quite so breathlessly.

[biohacker42]

You're absolutely right, even the earliest days of computer hacking were much more predictable. The difference is like bottom up (electronics) and gray box top down (life).