This article was taken from the July 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
The well-to-do residents of Paris's deuxième arrondissement have a new hobby: "It's called 'biochiner' -- chiner in French means antiquing," says Thomas Landrain. "It's going into the street and finding old biology lab equipment." Landrain has spent the last two years flea-shopping for centrifuges and PCR cyclers to assemble a new "zero-euro laboratory" -- La Paillasse ("the bench"), which opens this month. Open to all, the DIYbio lab will also be home to more traditional makers. "So people can prototype objects from classic materials such as wood, plastics and material, and newer kinds of materials that we can produce locally."
Landrain, 29, started a weekly synthetic biology club in 2009. "There was such freedom. There were engineers, mathematicians and biologists and we were all working on bacteria." He decided to join the then nascent biohacking movement, so he went to a hackerspace called /tmp/lab to learn. "I arrived at this very strange place in a Paris banlieue, which is in a squat. It's everything you think of when you don't know anything about cyberspace -- you arrive in a cave with computers everywhere." Landrain built the first iteration of La Paillasse there, sourcing used equipment from university labs.
It opened in March 2012, hosting projects including algae bio-reactors and Landrain's own initiative, a pen loaded with bacteria that produces its own ink. To build the next iteration in the heart of Paris, Landrain created a wiki for genetic equipment, which works as a toolkit for anyone trying to set up a lab. "At the end you have a decentralised inventory for material." Enthusiasts around France have already used the database to set up five other DIYbio labs. Allez les biochineurs!
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
