DIY Genetic Technology & the Truth about GMOs

The Do-It-Yourself biology movement has sprung up in the past few years partially in response to the widespread (and unfounded) criticism of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the media. But mostly because of the growing expectation that the next big revolution in industry/business is going to be biotechnology. It essentially aims to spread the knowledge and technology of modern genetics outside of its traditional home in universities and bio-tech companies to everyday people.

Due to the media/PR disaster over GMOs, genetic engineering has re-branded itself as "synthetic biology" - because the sad fact is its easier to fool the public into believing something is new and different when it isn't than it is to change their minds about incorrect information they already believe. Similar to what happened with induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) and embryonic stem cells.

This new movement has drawn the same criticism as before, but because it is not actually innovating (rather just making existing technology more accessible) it is getting a lot less media attention so the fear mongers are getting a lot less air time. Besides its a lot harder to think of your neighbour as a reckless profit obsessed psychopath than a mysterious ivory-tower scientist or a CEO of a multinational corporation.

Many of the critics are losing their influence also because their predictions/concerns have completely failed to be realized. GMOs have been around and been used for the better part of a decade and are now wide spread (90% of all corn planted in the USA is a GMO). Yet there has not been any "environmental catastrophe" nor any health issues reported from their use. The only thing they can point to is an increase in resistant weeds, which is not due to cross breeding between resistant GMOs but simply due to evolution in response to more widespread use of pesticides because more crops are resistant. Resistant weeds would have evolved anyway but use of GMOs might have sped it up a bit.

If the critics had any understanding of biology or agriculture it would have been obvious there was never going to be an environmental catastrophe.
 Firstly, crop have been deliberately bred by people for thousands of years for traits we find desirable which almost always make them incapable of surviving without us. For example, all our grain crops (rice, wheat, barley etc..) have been bred to not disperse their seeds because it is much easier to harvest the grains while they are still on the stalks than try to pick them up off the ground. As a result they generally can't reproduce themselves without some help from us. Vegetables have a different issue, they have been bred to produce ridiculously oversized fruit/seeds (eg. large peppers/tomatoes, or large peas/beans) which is extremely costly in terms of resources for the plant so they require tons of fertilizer to grow. Again they fail to survive against competition of non-domesticated species (Weeds wouldn't be a problem if this wasn't the case). This is why despite most crop species not being indigenous to where they are currently grown, we have yet to hear of one being an "invasive species". 
Secondly, it is extremely rare to get cross breeding between different species. Genes introduced into crops won't escape into the environment because most have been transported from their place of origination so there are no wild ancestors they would have the slightest chance of being able to interbreed with. Also even if cross breeding was possible it results in the transfer of more than one gene, half of the genes in the hybrid would be from the domesticated GMO which means it would also acquire many of the uncompetitive traits I mentioned above so even if the one gene resulting from genetic engineering is beneficial it will almost certainly be outweighed by the other harmful genes resulting in the hybrids being out competed and ceasing to exist.

Notably, the only exception to the above are the GM salmon because salmon have not been domesticated which is why there are so many additional restrictions on them (only sterile females to be sold and raised in land-based facilities not ocean-based fish farms used for farming wild-type salmon).

Coming back to the DIY Biology movement, since there is no telling which plants or what traits people will want to use, the domestication penalty may or may not be sufficient to prevent the creation of a new pest/invasive species. In addition, one must always consider the issue of the creating of biological weapons because fundamentally the tools required are not different it just depends what you use them for. Fortunately, biology remains very complicated and fiddly, so great expertise is required to predict the outcome of a genetic modification which has not been done before. Also, it is also reasonably expensive and time consuming if you do not order the genetic material from commercial labs (who hopefully would report anyone requesting virulence genes) and it is difficult to acquire suitable pathogens to use as a base - contrary to reports no one has actually built a new organism from nothing but raw chemicals. Considering terrorists seem barely capable of building functional explosives which are MUCH MUCH more straight forward, I don't forsee much danger from DIY genetic engineering.

Currently the projects seem only interested in creating various types of 'glowing' things which is harmless (won't confer any advantage to the organism compared to wild competitors), and also by far easiest to do since you can just look at the resulting organism to see if it worked or not. But, soon we will need more comprehensive regulation of this technology as it becomes cheaper and more straight forward to do.