Itlooks like an experimental cooking class as participants taste a green powder, pull faces and then mix it into a concoction of fruit and milk. But the event organised by Open Wetlab in Amsterdam has a more serious goal than to come up with new recipes for smoothies: finding ways to make spirulina-an algae which is full of proteins and vitamins, but tastes disgusting-more palatable. Welcome to the world of biohacking. In its original sense, hacking involves taking things apart and putting them back together again in new ways. Such tinkerers helped to create the "maker movement", which has grown into a worldwide community of people constructing things ranging from 3D-printed jewellery to robots. Biohackers have also started to organise themselves, under the umbrella of a movement called diybio. Nearly 50 cities, mostly in America and Europe, are now home to groups of biohackers or amateur laboratories where they can meet and experiment. Besides Open Wetlab, these include Biocurious in Sunnyvale, California, Genspace in New York and La Paillasse in Paris. The number of biohackers around the world is anybody's guess, but the movement's main online-mailing list boasts nearly 4,000 members and is growing rapidlv.
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