"This smells weird," says one young workshop attendant.
He's pouring a solution of mashed up raspberries, salt, sugar and soap into a test tube as part of Thought for Food's biohacking session at WIRED NexGen. The workshop is intended to bring the work of organisations like the Human Genome Project to life for young people.
By 2050, the world's population will have grown to more than 9 billion people. It prompts an important question -- how do we feed them? "These problems need a multi-disciplinary approach. It's a convergence of all fields," said Christine Gould, who's helping run the workshop. "We're rethinking all the assumptions we're told to live by, and starting from scratch."
Thought for Food, and other similar organisations, are trying to inspire young people to solve these problems. By bringing together ideas from biology, technology, chemistry and other fields, they hope to innovate food security. They also run a competition for university students, asking them to come up with creative and sustainable solutions for these problems. "It's about making science more accessible to young people," Peter Bickerton -- also known as 'Peter the Science Geek' -- told WIRED after the session. He's responsible for public engagement at the Genome Analysis Centre, and is also an ambassador for Thought for Food.
Biohacking, previously only accessible to large, mainly academic, institutions, is one such technology that is now opening up. In fact, open source DNA sequencing machines are now available at relatively low cost. You can even run a sequencing programme in your own kitchen. By hacking into the DNA sequences of different foodstuffs, they could be recreated in a more sustainable way -- changing the future of food.
Back in the session, participants are mashing up raspberries in a sandwich bag. This is combined with a few squirts of a substance containing soap, salt and water and filtered into a test tube. After this, a dribble of isopropanol is inserted into the tube, and two layers form -- on the bottom, a layer of the soapy raspberry juice, on the top a layer of isopropanol. Inbetween -- the DNA. This is then scooped out and isolated into another tube. "I got some on me!" one young participant beamed. When WIRED suggested he might develop superpowers, he proudly told us "I'm DNA man!".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
