Grassroots Genomics

The ocean is the hardest thing on this planet to keep an eye on. It is enormous, it is opaque, and almost everything living in it is too small or too quick to count. So we mostly don’t. We take a sample here, a survey there, and then wait a year for somebody to publish what was true last spring. That is the gap this talk is about: not that we can’t read the ocean, but that we read it far too slowly to act on what it says.

Every organism that passes through a body of water leaves DNA behind — shed cells, scales, waste, the ordinary debris of being alive. Filter a jug of seawater and that debris is right there, a census of everything that swam past recently. Environmental DNA — eDNA — is the practice of reading it. The part worth noticing is that the sequencer which reads it is now the size of a stapler and plugs into a laptop, which means the whole procedure has quietly stopped being a reason to build a building.

“Machine learning scientist Stanley Bishop explains why real-time understanding of the ocean is essential to protecting it. He introduces a grassroots genomics approach to measuring environmental DNA with pocket-sized DNA sequencers that read biological signals organisms leave behind, making it possible to monitor ecosystem health quickly and intervene.”

The argument underneath it comes from a strange place: cancer diagnostics. The instruments that read a tumour’s genome and the instruments that read a kelp forest’s are the same instruments. Biology does not care which question you brought. So the tools built to practise precision medicine on people turn out to work, essentially unchanged, for practising it on a coastline — and the structure that took decades to assemble for human health is available to environmental science for the price of a laptop.

Which raises the question the talk actually cares about: who gets to hold them. The conventional answer is a graduate student, eventually, after the training. The answer this work is building toward is a sixteen-year-old, in her own harbour. Not as a field trip with a predetermined result — as a real measurement of a real place that nobody has measured yet, because nobody thought to ask about that particular stretch of water. Everything we’ve seen from students doing real science says they rise to this, and they ask better local questions than the people flying in.

You can look at that as an education story, and it is one. But the reason it belongs on this site is that it is the same shape as everything else here: the people closest to a problem should get to work on it, and the instrument is no longer the thing standing in the way. That pattern shows up in rare disease and it shows up in a tide pool. The community that generates the data should have a say in what happens to it — which is why the program around this talk is being designed with governance in it from the start, not bolted on afterwards.

The program growing out of this work is the World Genome Academy — the curriculum and sequencer kits now being designed, the planned California eDNA Atlas, and a governance model meant to give the communities who collect the samples a real say in who benefits from what they reveal. If you want the longer version of the wonder, The Invisible Web Under Your Feet is the case for putting research-grade sequencers in a high schooler’s hands, and Who Owns the Data? is the harder question of who governs the answers. Everything else out loud lives on the talks page.

When this launches, anyone will be able to join — no prerequisites, no institution required. That is the whole point of designing it this way.