“
website Kickstarter.com (“A New Way to Fund and Follow Creativity”), where inventors, entrepreneurs, and dreamers of every stripe could post their wild schemes and pet projects and ask for money to fund them. BioCurious announced an initial goal of $30,000. The partners were soon oversubscribed, almost overwhelmed, with 239 backers pledging $35,319. In the fall of 2010 Gentry and her partners were looking to lease 3,000 square feet of industrial space in Mountain View, but in the end settled for a 2,400 square feet in Sunnyvale, calling it “Your Bay Area hackerspace for biotech.” In December 2010, meanwhile, another DIY biohacker lab, Genspace, opened in Brooklyn, New York. The founders referred to it as “the world’s first permanent, biosafety level 1 community laboratory” (genspace.org). Many others soon followed, in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. With free synthetic biology kits, DIYbio, Livly lab, BioCurious, Genspace, and others, the synthetic biology genie was well and truly out of the bottle.
”
”
George M. Church (Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves)