A profile of several bio-hackers, who are part of a movement called DIYbio, short for do-it-yourself biology, which got its official start in 2008 with DIYBio.org, an online hub for sharing ideas.

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.

Generations of scientists, children and science fiction fans have grown up presuming that humanity’s first encounter with alien life will happen in a red sand dune on Mars, or in an enigmatic radio signal from some obscure star. But it could soon happen right here on Earth, according to a handful of chemists and biologists who are using the tools of modern genetics to try to generate the Frankensteinian spark that will jump the gap separating the inanimate and the animate. The day is coming, they say, when chemicals in a test tube will come to life.

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.

A presidential commission has released a report that recommends White House level oversight of US research in synthetic biology – but it stops short of calling for new laws or changes to existing regulations that govern the nascent field, whether in university labs or do-it-yourselfers' garages.

A team of scientists says they have succeeded in creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome. This advance could be proof that genomes designed in a computer and assembled in a lab can function in a donor cell, eventually reproducing fully functional living creatures, that is, artificial life.

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.