How has COVID-19 affected biomaking?
Written by Sangita Vasikaran, Melody Wu and Jenny Gao of the MIT BioMakerSpace, with guidance from the BioMakerNetwork.
I have just got off the red-eye from Boston for this conference, and it’s a balmy day in downtown San Francisco. The date is February 22, and in this new city, in one of the first human interactions I experience, I extend my hand warmly to a woman I’ve just met. She politely declines.
I am a bit stunned, and I have to take a minute to process what just happened.
After some of my initial awkwardness wears off, she explains to me that coronavirus infection was spreading not only in Asia, but other parts of the world, and that we were being careful at this event for that reason. I had only briefly heard of this disease at this point, so I had learned something new.
Let’s back up a bit for context. This was Catalyst, a biosecurity summit dedicated to fostering conversation about the future and resulting safety of biotechnology — and in attendance were people from all over the biosphere: life science academics, community biolab pioneers, Effective Altruists focused on bioethics, iGEMers, and scientist-turned-policymakers. Melody and I had attended with interests in many of these areas.
One of the first questions we were asked as we all sat in a room was: “raise your hand if you think biotechnology will completely revolutionize our future for the better”.
I raised my hand almost immediately, feeling excited at the thought of being among people who felt the same way. But as I looked around, only a few hands were up.
“Raise your hand if you are unsure, or you’re nervous about the way biotech will affect our future.” To my surprise, a lot more hands went up.
As much as I felt at home amongst a sea of other people fascinated by biology like myself, through many eye-opening, paradigm-shifting conversations that weekend, I came away with the notion that democratizing biology comes with its own host of both excitement and fears.
Just like the denial of a handshake and survey questions that were so jarring at first, quarantine and social distancing, as we probably know well at this point, can initially make us think we’ve lost a big part of human connection — what seemed to be the lifeblood of ideas and initiatives like biomakerspaces. That can be scary and disappointing.
But we have to keep with it — COVID-19 is changing the way we’ll learn and live. As biomakerspaces, we are at the crux of this new era; we have both great power and responsibility.. This article delves into how COVID-19 has affected the MIT BioMakerSpace and others within the network, as well as the unique opportunities and attitudes we could adopt to make the most of our abilities.
COVID-19 came as a great shock when it swept through the world in the early months of 2020, and the MIT BioMakers student group was also not spared the confusion of uprooting and adjusting to the changes forced upon us by a rapidly evolving public health crisis. We were given mere days of warning to pack up everything and end all in-person campus activities, including all the independent and community projects taking place in our biomakerspace. Dorm rooms packed, HL-60s spun down and frozen, flights back home taken, and here we were, supposedly away from everything we had learned we could make change from. We checked in on our people, yet undeniably, things seemed bleak. Friends of mine often described feeling powerless, meaningless.
But if there was anything that the bioengineering community had shown us, it was that we were a community filled with a spirit of doers. Within 2 days of the virus genome being sequenced, Moderna Therapeutics had formulated their mRNA vaccine candidate. Ginkgo Bioworks compiled a dashboard of community responses to COVID-19, dedicating $25 million of their platform to free access for COVID-19 partner projects. Here at MIT, the Center for Bits and Atoms, some of the same people behind “How to Make Almost Anything” and sustaining maker culture at MIT remotely put together rapid scale prototypes of ventilators and masks through GitLab, mailing lists, and Google Docs.
“People are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks — they did some of the best physics ever.”
— Richard Hamming, inventor of the Hamming Code
In fact, quarantining could very well be a wonderful stimulus to innovation. Think about it — how many loaves of sourdough have you made or seen photos of? The mere fact that we spending time in different places — the fact that we weren’t able to access proper labspace — meant we got to be creative. It meant we got to stretch ourselves and collaborate like never before. Through JoGL, I personally worked with a team of chemists, public health analysts, designers, and educators repurposing an idea they had learned of through iGEM to develop a cell-free SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic. When certain protein parts couldn’t be ordered to parts of certain countries, team members from all over the world shared data via Sheets and took care of what sectors they could. In Zoom calls, I gained glimpses into peoples’ MacGyvered home labs set up in their living rooms.
When classes started again, COVID-19 also became an ever more present part of our daily online conversations — if not in class where we might talk about diagnostics or therapeutics for COVID-19, then in Zoom rooms with friends (shoutout to Prof. Weiss and Dr. Deepak Mishra of 20.129 and Dr. Noreen Lyell, Dr. Leslie McClain, Dr. Becky Meyer, + the rest of the 20.109 staff and professors). We would talk about everything from the rising cases in our area to the health inequities shown by systemic racism in the healthcare system to the lack of availability of tests, and to the concern of being able to come back to school of our friends who are international students. That discourse is valuable in any community, and especially one filled with minds who are not just thinkers, but doers, like all of you biomakers!
So what could we do, as biomakerspaces?
Hearing about all this work happening in our MIT community, we started the MIT BioMakerspace and BioMakers’ COVID-19: BioMaking Solutions Series with the help of our space director, Dr. Justin Buck. We’ve been able to feature some really amazing talks including:
- Dr. Andrea Carfi, Head of Research, Infectious Disease at Moderna Therapeutics — “Rapid Development of mRNA-1273: a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2”
- Dr. Mariana Matus, CEO and Co-Founder at Biobot Analytics — “Tracking the COVID-19 outbreak through wastewater epidemiology”
- Dr. Pranam Chatterjee, Molecular Machines Group, MIT Media Lab — “Computation-Mediated Protein Engineering of Robust Genome Editing and Anti-Viral Tools Against SARS-CoV-2”
Moving into Fall 2020, we personally know it’s going to be tough. There aren’t any seniors in the MIT BioMakers executive team, so likely no one will be in the space, but we are still brainstorming ways we could work to send at-home lab kits to those in our community looking to develop projects or new ideas — even while remote. Dr. Justin Buck, our space director, has been brainstorming some ways freshmen can participate even remotely in a potential research opportunity (what we call “UROPs”) as well and also help us with developing educational videos for the future of the biomaking community at MIT. We have also gotten the chance to start a newsletter series to keep everyone informed.
And as such — after reading “The Rogue Experimenters” article in the New Yorker — we reached out to Alec Lourenco, a prior acquaintance, and so then began the building of the BioMakerNetwork, a collection of biomaking groups at universities across the U.S. It’s this particular experience of suddenly discovering a community almost and creating with these groups that we’ve been really grateful for while in quarantine.
Other biomakerspaces and groups in our network pioneered similar, amazing initiatives that have expanded the ways we can learn together, even at home:
- Stanford BIOME’s virtual seminar series, focused on introducing core techniques and concepts in biology, all the way from ELISA to patent law; as well as potentially partnering with community labspaces
- Johns Hopkins’ Agara Bio investigating collaborations with Bento Bio kits for experiments like local environment barcoding, genetic geocaching, and even potential remote involvement from high schoolers!
- UC Davis’ BioInnovationGroup holding “Lab Speed Dating” and virtual journal clubs (as well as looking into safe protocols for resuming in person lab work when the school year begins)
- Stay tuned for an inaugural BioMakerNetwork Ideathon this coming semester!
Certainly, while we aren’t able to experience working side by side with our friends in the lab, we’re offered instead with a larger amount of time to learn the computational side of biomaking but also network with a wider community unlike ever before. As case in point, iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, rather than fully cancelling the season (which typically culminates in a Jamboree in Boston each fall), recognized this boon, and kept going virtually. They have encouraged students by creating an opening festival and seminar series focused on educating students about dry lab project tools. Shoutout to all the iGEM teams working on improving our world — you all are superheroes. Starting an iGEM chapter as part of your university or biomakerspace is a great way to grow a community dedicated to ameliorating global challenges.
With things being remote and everyone in quarantine, access to opportunities to learn from conferences to free courses has also allowed us to delve further into the expansive knowledge of the world. Many conferences now offer a webinar version that allows us students, who previously didn’t have the money or experience to justify attendance to a conference, to learn about work at the forefront of science, public health, art, and almost anything we could dream, allowing us to synthesize interdisciplinary connections and new ideas for our community going forward. As biomakerspaces, and especially moreseo as a network, we can publicize and share these opportunities with our own members and each other.
With all this innovation and growing interest in bioengineering, there are concerns that we should critically think through policies surrounding it for ways in which we can fuel innovation without forgetting the disparities or risks it may compound upon. From rumors that the virus was man-made, to public disbelief in, AND conversely, hospital shortage due to the hoarding of masks, it’s easy to see how fear or unfamiliarity can both unnecessarily scare and prudently guide human perceptions of biology’s progress. Let’s work to use that for the better.
We thus need to be intentional with the actions we pursue, thinking about what they mean for the future and others around us. For some, these actions may not be the ones we are usually comfortable with in associating with our notions of progress. At the same time, we should appreciate the unique opportunities that unique circumstances allow. Zoom’s widespread adoption has shown us that we can likely break down accessibility barriers like travel cost for many events in the future, collaborating and conversing with ease in a variety of settings. Society’s scientific literacy has generally widened, or atleast opened doors to become more informed and thoughtful about best practices. And lastly, with current events in creating equity in human rights, be it rooted in the pandemic, the tragedy of our brothers and sisters like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the international-student-inhibiting ICE rulings (overturned thanks to some wonderful schools!) this time has been especially important in realizing what our end goals are in biomaking and science as a whole: to love humans, and to make the world better. These past few months, if anything, have been a reminder of these truths. We, as innovators in biomakerspaces, will keep this in mind.
And we will keep going forward, responsibly.
