Hacking and making is no longer just about hardware and software, increasingly it is about wetware - that's biology to the uninitiated.

Those starting to hack biology want to do for it what the web and easy to use tools such as the Arduino programmable controller have done for hardware hacking. That is make it easy to understand and fun to play around with.

Citizen scientists are setting up their own gene laboratories in the hope of inventing new and useful organisms. But are they a danger to us all?

Meredith Patterson is not your typical genetic scientist. Her laboratory is based in the dining room of her San Francisco apartment. She uses a plastic salad spinner as a centrifuge and Ziploc plastic bags as airtight containers for her samples. But the genetically modified organism (GMO) she is attempting to create on a budget of less than $500 (£350) could provide a breakthrough in food safety.

WIRED: How defensible is it to mess with genetically modified organisms in your spare time?

A FRIEND of mine is somewhat mournful at the end of a tutorial organised by Ginkgo BioWorks, an MIT-based startup that aims to make biology easier to engineer. “I had to throw my cool sample into bleach!” he complains.

A day later, another attendee is examining her sealed Petri dish.

Weren’t you supposed to throw this away, I ask, as I peer inside. “Oh, mine aren’t fully grown yet.”

Besides, she wants her kid to see them before the purge. They glow in the dark.

Using Mail-Order DNA and Iguana Heaters, Hobbyists Brew New Life Forms; Is It Risky?

In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.

CAMBRIDGE - In a third-floor loft where programmers build Internet start-ups, Mackenzie Cowell is talking about the tools he and like-minded young colleagues are using to fuel what they hope will be the next big thing in biology. The list includes a cut-up Charlie Card, ingredients bought on eBay to make a kind of scientific Jell-O, and a refrigerator, just scored on Craigslist.com, that chills to 80 degrees below zero.

The emergence of synthetic biology, and off-shoots such as DIYbio, make the need for a rigorous, sustained and mature approach for assessing, and preparing for, the broad range of associated dangers and risks all the more pressing.

In early 2007, the Swedish bit-torrent site The Pirate Bay launched a public appeal for funds to buy its own nation. The target of the proposed acquisition was a self-proclaimed independent state named Sealand. Perched atop an old World War II anti-aircraft gun emplacement long since abandoned by the British military, Sealand had been inaugurated by an Essex fisherman and part-time pirate radio entrepreneur, Roy Bates, in the late 1960s.

In From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner details the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network.

(I can't actually find the dissertation mentioned online anywhere...)