Hack biology in your garage

One of the beautiful things about computing is that you don't need anyone's permission. You can set yourself up to do real software engineering or computer science so inexpensively that you need no sponsorship from a corporation or academic institution. This is one of the keys to the amazing creativity that's come out of computing in the past few decades. Now, the same effect is showing up in biology. There's a whole DIY movement, described in an article in h+:

The age of the DIYbiologist has begun. With the price of equipment falling and the open source ideology flourishing, it was perhaps inevitable[.] Primarily interested in the currently fashionable trend of synthetic biology — the creation of novel organisms using genetics and other techniques — they meet in groups, in cities, and unite online.