Bunch of Amateurs - A Search for the American Character

Excerpts from the new book Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character by Jack Hitt - The next big breakthrough in synthetic biology just might come from an amateur scientist

America has always been a place of ambitious amateurs. And the latest in the long line of them are self-taught biologists like Patterson. These synthetic biologists, so called because they try to engineer new forms of life, are trying to do for the chromosome what Steve Jobs did for the computer. In the bigger cities, they have started to form “synbio” clubs, the same way radio enthusiasts did in the early 1900s or computer programmers did in the 1970s or robotics amateurs did in the ’00s. A few of those clubs have even opened brick-and-mortar labs where members can practice tweaking various genomes as a group.

Ask most people about the amateur spirit, and they’ll say, well, that was then. It’s almost common wisdom that the golden age of the self-invented upstart ended sometime about a generation ago. But the fact is, we’ve been hearing this line for at least a century, and it’s always wrong. The time of outsiders and amateurs and cranks is not a bygone era, but rather a cycle that comes around just when you think it’s over. This cycle is an essential part of America’s history—arguably the country’s genesis story.

Ever since Ben Franklin left Boston for Philadelphia, and continuing right up through when Mark Zuckerberg abandoned Harvard Square for Palo Alto, there has been this sense that a certain kind of creativity happens on the fly, often on the lam, after beginning in one of those proving grounds of American ingenuity: the dorm room, the weekend hobby club, the garage. For Patterson, that proving ground happens to be a tabletop lab situated in the breakfast nook just outside the kitchen of her apartment. She had invited me out to check out her rig—a collection of mostly repurposed and (fairly) common household devices that she uses to fiddle around with the building blocks of life—and to help her with the next step of her latest project. She wanted to insert a plasmid of jellyfish DNA into a bacterium so that later she might cultivate a modified form of yogurt, one that tasted great but also glowed in the dark.