Joshua Elkington DIYbio: Hacking Nature Background of DIYbio Do‐It‐Yourself Biology (DIYbio) is an emerging movement outside of academia and industry to spread biotechnology tools to the public. This movement can help stimulate the next generation of hackers to create new medicines, solve our resource crisis, grow sustainable crops, create new materials, and make new ways to modify our biology. DIYbio is modeled after the Open Source Software model. DIYbio believes in greater accessibility of biotechnology tools in order to promote biotech innovation and increased scientific literacy. DIYbio attracts people with a wide range of interests. Participants range from high school students and amateurs to PhD scientists. Many of these people have different views of the DIYbio movement. Some want to create new tools, while others want to learn basic biology or engineering and play around with basic techniques. Sometimes, there are people within DIYbio who focus on creating art out of things coming out of the movement. Around 2000, the idea of amateur biology started to begin to from around the time when the first human genome was sequenced. In 2005, Rob Carlson showed Wired magazine how easy it was to create a garage laboratory from equipment he bought online. In the meantime, Jason Bobe and Mackenzie Cowell created the DIYbio.org online forum. The site would help organize people interested in bio‐hacking. For example, people would get together to learn basic molecular biology and how to extract DNA from strawberries. Carlson was a research at the University of Washing, Bobe studied synthetic biology with George Church, and Cowell worked for the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. Around the time of the recession, DIYbio started to gain more momentum as researchers recognized the progress made in other fields such as software development that adopted the Open Source model. As biotech firms began filing for bankruptcy, used scientific equipment flooded that market and allowed bio‐hackers to buy tools at affordable prices online. By 2009, bio‐hackers moved out of their kitchens and garages to create organized lab space for DIYbio. Lab spaces such as Genspace and Biocurious took donations to create the nodes of DIYbio, “community labs.” These labs act as hacker spaces for people interested in biology and engineering. These institutions offer classes and projects for people to work on. Ultimately, these spaces are incubators for DIYbio ideas. There are at least 20 community labs in Europe and the United States. The official DIYbio Google message board has more than 3,700 members, and bio‐hacking events are held across the country. From 2008 to 2012, the movement had immense growth in membership and funding; however, lately the growth DIYbio has stalled. This problem needs to be solved because this movement has the potential to revolutionize many industries. Therefore, more DIYbio projects and hacker spaces need to be supported.