With a formal education in biology, I've always thought the industry was much like the computer industry a few decades ago. Jobs & Gates arguably took something that was limited to corporations and Universities, and brought it to the masses. It's a matter of time before there's a startup that revolutionizes something from their garage. Just think where we were before PCR was around, imagine what's next? With open source tools, OpenWetWare, etc, it's lowering the barriers to entry. Who says it's restricted to pharma and human clinical trials? There's plenty of room for innovation in many other areas (GMOs, synthetic bio, methods, tools).

Plus, Bill Gates (loosely) agrees. [0]

[0]: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biolo...

The difference in biotech is that you have very little room for mistakes. In most cases (at least the ones that really matter) you have patients to deal with, not users which is a different target group. It bears a different kind of responsibility.

I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio-entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it.

While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving the way for that visionary future.

But actually, the more I think about it, I enjoy your analogy. The missing tools for sure in "DIYbio" are consumer-oriented lab technologies. Something like a 3D printer for budding biologists to gather themselves around...but nothing really comes to mind. Even a homebrew qPCR machine or sequencing platform leaves out many cruicial components like incubators, ultracentrifuges, etc. Can't even get started on mass spectrometers, flow cytometers or other "Core" technologies that not even every lab can own.

To stretch the analogy more, though, I don't think there is a "Homebrew Biotech Club" in the same groovy, sharing sense than that which Jobs and Gates had way back when.

While I agree with you with health-related biotech, not all biotech is in this area. There are quite a number of industrial uses for biotech that would not require the extensive testing and validation required for drugs.

Examples might be isolating novel enzymes for biocatalysis from the vast microbiome that remains to be explored, novelty decorative plants, etc...

Your examples are intriguing, but I wonder precisely how much they would cost. "Enzyme isolation" means a suite of biology tools, which you could store in a garage, but aren't cheap like a laptop, server, internet connection or AWS might be.

Thinking to the most basic biology research I know, that's got to be at least $25,000 to get started. And as a scientist I don't know how much I'd trust results from someone's unregulated garage.

That said, I once heard a legent that the founder of New England Biolabs sold the first restriction enzymes out of a cooler in the trunk of his car in the 70s. I wonder if they were produced in a garage, too?

Enzyme isolation might be tricky, and unpredictable, but the equipment isn't particularly expensive. You can buy top-of the range equipment from various suppliers, or literally build it yourself. You could build a system like ÄKTA [0] yourself if you have a minimum of engineering knowledge. Or share a second-hand version with some other "biohackers".

The advantage that a bio-hacker might have, though, is in the ability to patent novel proteins or processes, and then trade those for further investment. The time-to-market for novel biological processes/inventions is far too long to expect a significant first mover advantage without significant financial backing and IP protection.

[0]http://www.gelifesciences.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/cata...