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futures
Danger — hard hack area
“Sequence your genome at home, and set science free!” cry the biopunks.
Paul McAuley
any people predicted that VirCon
2010, the first open meeting of the
biopunk movement, would end in a
riot. In truth, it was as privately exciting and
as publicly dull as any science conference.
From their besieged underground culture,
the clandestine surfers of the new wave in
biology are emerging blinking into the day-
light and, dare one say, into respectability.
But VirCon 2010, held in a dilapidated
midtown New York hotel, was not without
friction. Despite the rule that no biological
material could be brought in, there was a
ruthless but futile inspection by officers of
the Food and Drug Agency. Several people
suspected of being undercover federal agents
or snoops from biotech companies were
summarily ejected, and the press was barred,
which led to strange scenes outside the hotel
as TV journalists were videoed typing into a
laptop to communicate with conference del-
egates just inside the lobby.
I was allowed to cover the event from the
inside because of personal contacts made
while covering the pursuit and arrest of
Kevin ‘Freaky-Deaky’ Miles, the man who
claimed to have turned the Amazon rain-
forest luminescent — and because I’m a
science fiction writer, and biopunks love SF.
The delegates were mostly young, white
males under 25, dressed in everything from
baggies and T-shirts, through goth black and
multiple piercings, to business suits. All had
self-inflicted gene hacks: feathers or scales
instead of hair; bands of chromatophores on
their foreheads; motile tattoos. And of
course, unlike the pasty-faced, overweight
cliché of computer hackers, the biopunks
were bursting with health, their skin and eye-
sight perfect, their muscle definition superb,
their energy seemingly boundless.
That energy was needed: the convention
operated on a 24-hour basis, and no one
slept. The biopunks took over the hotel, talk-
ing over laptops displaying DNA source
codes; poking through half-dismantled
sequencers; and attending workshops on
resetting metabolic clocks, overwriting junk
DNA, perturbing quantum effects in micro-
tubules, and, of course, meme viruses.
In many ways it was like a science meeting
in the so-called Golden Age, before research
was taken over by big business and commer-
cial confidentiality strangled the exchange of
ideas. Biopunks are, of course, scornful of
secrecy. They are pathological braggarts;
their culture is based on the idea of open
M
source, from pirated
genomes placed on servers from
Cuba to Finland, to hacks disseminated in
philes and e-zines with titles like
Triplet
Threat
and
They’re Made Out Of Meat.
The
only difference is that their published work
stands not by peer review but by utility, and
that almost everyone uses their hacker han-
dle rather than their real name.
One major exception to the last was the
grey eminence of biopunk, Professor Jack
Lovegrove, who became a legend after he was
fired from the University of Kansas for teach-
ing a practical course in evolution and jailed
for distributing pirate DVDs containing the
sequence of the entire human genome.
“Garage science is the wave of the future
for biology,” he told me in a brief interview.
“The big companies are tied down by class-
action suits and vicious regulations imposed
© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd
by frightened, short-sighted politicians. But
anyone can isolate DNA in their kitchen,
and sequence it rapidly with cheap, modern
RNA chips. Twenty years ago, DNA had to
be cut by expensive enzymes and sequenced
one base pair at a time. Now, the sequencers
found in any physician’s surgery can be
modified to run in parallel, so copyrighting
the human genome is a joke. Anyone here
could sequence it in a couple of days, start-
ing with one of their own cells.”
Lovegrove’s keynote address, “Post-
humanism and how to achieve it”, was
packed, but he was at pains to point out
that most of his ideas were at the ‘golden
vaporware’ stage. “We’re interested in radi-
cal ideas, not frost-proofing strawberries,
but the rumours that these kids have found
the cure for cancer, the key to immortality
or boosting intelligence are a crock. Any-
one who’d done any of those things would
have boasted about it by now, set up his
own company, or sold out to Cytex or Dow.
“Of course, people are trying out radical
techniques on themselves, but medicine
has a long history of self-experimentation.
This is no secret society of hyperintelligent
supermen — just idealistic kids who love
science and believe that information
should be free, not locked up by copy-
right and litigation. All our ideas are
discussed openly, although not
everyone will be able to under-
stand them.”
As for the idea that bio-
punks are using meme
viruses to modify human
behaviour, Lovegrove
was scathing. “The meme
thing is mostly over. Sure,
there were pranks. People had fun
injecting their victims with pseudo-religious
visions of Elvis or Princess Di. But now the
drug cartels have muscled into memes, the
craze has died down. Besides, changing belief
systems is a hard hack. I’d say that the virulent
campaigns against genetic modification died
out from natural causes, not from infection
by some imaginary supermeme.”
He’s right. There are limits to what kids in
home-made labs can do. But in the heady
atmosphere of the convention, with bio-
punks partying to the limit or deep in jargon-
ridden conversation, their tattoos and chro-
matophore bands flashing and blushing, it’s
hard to believe that some of their more fan-
tastic claims won’t remain science fiction.
s
Paul McAuley was a biology lecturer at the University
of St Andrews until he became a full-time writer in
1996. His latest novel is
Shrine of Stars
(Gollancz).
21
NATURE
|
VOL 404
|
2 MARCH 2000
|
www.nature.com
JACEY

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