ABSTRACT
Distributed biotechnology includes amateurs as well as an emergent set of companies that provide laboratory equipment and digital platforms designed to foster citizen contribution to biotechnology research. Since the early 2000s the possibility of re-appropriating biotech through distributed and participatory research has been explicitly presented as a critique of the political economy of corporate biotechnology. Distributed biotechnology is rooted in attempts at transforming molecular biology into a personal technology by making biotech equipment, processes and knowledge accessible to individuals. Distributed biotech adopts a specific set of forms of openness as the main framework that governs decisions about which information must be circulated freely, who can access DIY labs, etc. Despite recurrent rhetorics that construct distributed biotech as autonomous from corporate and academic institutions, processes of increasing institutionalization are at play. Although it could be considered marginal if compared to major fields, distributed biotechnology has been central to recent political transformations in the relationship between biology and society.
