A Look at Garage Biotechnology
Small scale efforts by a widespread people outside the academic and industry communities, and open and largely free access to plans and data are the future of biotechnology. It is a data-driven field, and will ultimately look just like the open source software community does today: "Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer in Jobs's garage, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who invented Google in a friend's garage, biohackers are attempting bold feats of genetic engineering, drug development, and biotech research in makeshift home laboratories. ... For a few hundred dollars, anyone can send some spit to a sequencing company and receive a complete DNA scan, and then use free software to analyze the results. Custom-made DNA can be mail-ordered off websites, and affordable biotech gear is available on Craigslist and eBay. ... biohackers, like the open-source programmers and software hackers who came before, are united by a profound idealism. They believe in the power of individuals as opposed to corporate interests, in the wisdom of crowds as opposed to the single-mindedness of experts, and in the incentive to do good for the world as opposed to the need to turn a profit. Suspicious of scientific elitism and inspired by the success of open-source computing, the bio DIYers believe that individuals have a fundamental right to biological information, that spreading the tools of biotech to the masses will accelerate the pace of progress, and that the fruits of the biosciences should be delivered into the hands of the people who need them the most."
You will note that the Technology Review article cannot give up its worship of bureaucracy and government-funded science when it concludes that the DIY biotech community most certainly will not make any real breakthroughs in cancer and what not. Do remember it was this magazine that held a "challenge" against Aubrey's SENS in 2005 that was entirely ideologically motivated. Their challenge ultimately backfired on them and made clear that the editorial staff of Technology Review was as ideologically compromised as that of Scientific American.
The only mass market science magazine that is not ideologically tainted is Popular Science.