Silicon Valley has sprouted numerous "hacker spaces" in recent years, where software geeks get together to program and build new Web creations. Now there's a hangout for "biohackers," too.

A look at the growing, worldwide network of “biohackers” dedicated to creating pop-up labs and doing biology outside the traditional environments of universities and industry.

The word "biotechnology" conjures up white coats and elaborate glassware, big sterile labs and expensive equipment. But there's a group of amateur scientists that believes it shouldn't be that way — that anyone with the ability and a few spare parts can start tinkering with the building blocks of life. They call themselves biopunks, or biohackers.

The growing movement of "biohackers" say things such as bioremediation, cancer advances, genetic tests and cheap DNA sequencing, should be freely available and not just for academics and big corporations. They aim to do for biotechnology what hackers did to computers in the 1970s — open it up to the massed creativity of do-it-yourself scientists.

Rapid advances in bioscience are raising alarms among terrorism experts that amateur scientists will soon be able to gin up deadly pathogens for nefarious uses.

The growing market for preassembled DNA and public access to genetic blueprints for smallpox, Ebola and other diseases have raised concerns that an individual might build a devastating biological threat from scratch.

Some researchers and law-enforcement officials have raised red flags about biohackers, and have called for better oversight of "synthetic DNA," an ingredient widely used by professional biologists and hobbyists, saying it could theoretically lead to the creation of harmful viruses like Ebola or smallpox.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering. Critics of the movement worry that these amateurs could one day unleash an environmental or medical disaster.

The author argues that the current rate of scientific advances is leading to a convergence of "biological, algorithmic, and micromechanical innovations necessary to build a desktop gene printer." He calls for more careful assessment and regulation of these technologies.

Recent technological advances in so-called genetic circuits have brought closer a world where cells and viruses could be modified to more effectively serve humans, but also have raised concerns that programmable life could lead to a host of tailored threats similar to Internet worms.