India must create an ecosystem—biohackspaces—so that our biohackers can lead, not just follow, the herd into the future.
THE UBIQUITY OF computers and smartphones and the pervasive presence of digital technology means that everybody who is reading this article is familiar with hackers. Hackers, as we all believe, are evil people, who either create viruses that ruin our machines or access our computers to steal confidential information with the intention to cause harm. We also have ethical, or white-hat, hackers, the guards and policemen, who with the same level of skill, try to beat the evil black-hat hackers at their game and keep digital assets secure. But the original meaning of hacker was someone who is so intensely immersed in computer technology that he knows much more than what a normal, non-hacker user would ever know about what can be done with computers. The hacker was the ubergeek, in whose hands a computer could be stretched to perform tasks that it was never meant for and deliver unexpected results. The hacker was a genius, not necessarily the evil genius that he—and it is generally a he—is portrayed to be. He was someone who could, in a sense, disassemble and reassemble the hardware and software in ways that no one else can even think about, to create new functionality. This same kind of behaviour when seen in the world of biosciences is called biohacking.
This story is from the April 2017 edition of Swarajya Mag.
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This story is from the April 2017 edition of Swarajya Mag.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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