Artificial Life

- Prithwis Mukerjee

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.

Given the very wide range of possibilities within biosciences, biohacking means different things to different people but there is one common thread. Just like his better-known computer cousin, the biohacker generally works alone or in small groups and usually outside the regulated confines of a university or corporate laboratory. So his—or