ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, an array of do-it-yourself biology groups, biotech start-ups and community labs have emerged in Europe, America, and Asia. These groups and spaces share the vision of a “distributed biotechnology” and are part of broader transformations of the relation between technological and scientific change and society. Distributed biotechnology includes amateurs as well as an emergent set of companies that provide laboratory equipment and digital platforms designed to foster citizen contribution to biotechnology research. It differs from traditional forms of citizen science (see Ottinger, this volume) as it draws on elements from hacker cultures and adopts molecular biology as its main scientific framework. The term “distributed” means that actors envision a biotechnology free from centralized control. They imagine biotechnology as personal, and the aggregation of individual efforts as technically and socially meaningful. Thresholds to access are relatively low, as distributed biotechnology's spaces are open to amateurs and its techniques sometimes rudimentary. Finally, connections between different actors are created and maintained through the circulation of people, materials, and information.
