Outlaw, hackers, victorian amateurs: diagnosing public participation in the life sciences today

This essay reflects on three figures that can be used to make sense of the changing nature of public participation in the life sciences today: outlaws, hackers and Victorian gentlemen. Occasioned by a symposium held at UCLA (Outlaw Biology: Public Participation in the Age of Big Bio), the essay introduces several different modes of participation (DIY Bio, Bio Art, At home clinical genetics, patient advocacy and others) and makes three points: 1) that public participation is first a problem of legitimacy, not legality or safety; 2) that public participation is itself enabled by and thrives on the infrastructure of mainstream biology; and 3) that we need a new set of concepts (other than inside/outside) for describing the nature of public participation in biological research and innovation today. In January of 2010, UCLA's Center for Society and Genetics ran a symposium entitled "Outlaw Biology: Public Participation in the Age of Big Bio." The goal of the symposium was twofold. First to investigate the question of what public participation in the life sciences means today, after the completion of the Human Genome Project and second, to facilitate that participation by inviting people to workshops, discussions and exhibitions that followed the discussions. The event was a huge success, bringing together quite diverse approaches to the problem, and raising a range of questions about the legitimacy, danger, enthusiasm and weirdness of different kinds of participation in the life sciences—from lab work in prestigious venues, to art projects, to DIY biology. This is a revised version of the essay that introduced the event. 1