In mid-August, the head of Biocurious, one of country’s premier community biotechnology labs, very publicly quit her post. “I’m seeing lots of political maneuvering and divisive finger pointing at a time when we should be banding together to turn things around,” Kristina Hathaway wrote in a resignation letter on the lab’s message board. “It’s sad, and it’s shameful.”
The first community labs opened three years ago and became embodiments of the nascent Do-It-Yourself Biology community, a grassroots movement of enthusiasts seeking to popularize biotechnology just as programmers working from their garages popularized computing in the 1970s. Do-It-Yourself practitioners who were working in garages, closets and other makeshift spaces began to coalesce around these shared labs. Some 14 community labs now exist globally, providing benches and equipment for people with a range of experience to work on any biotech project—once it is deemed safe. Such labs have become a source of provocative bio-artwork and DIY equipment, along with a wellspring of biotech outreach and education.
Biocurious, which opened in 2011, is the largest of these community labs, and has a list of firsts to its name: the first community biotech lab to crowdfund its startup costs, the first to build a bioprinter, the first to sprout a company that Kickstarted almost half a million dollars. Now, Biocurious may become the first to close. The lab is struggling to meet its meager monthly expenses of roughly $6,000 to $8,000. “Over the history of Biocurious, we lose money every month,” Hathaway says.
For the past eight months, lab members have been battling over how to pull Biocurious out of financial jeopardy, while the four founders have seemed to wrestle each other for control. With just a few months of rent left in the coffers and no resolution to the conflict of personalities, Biocurious faces a crisis. “Is this the break up of the Beatles? I don’t know,” Hathaway says.
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