Abstract

What is ‘biohacking’? In fact, it refers to multiple things. Firstly, it refers to ‘hacking the body’, artificially enhancing one’s own body by technology and tinkering. A good example is the ‘grinder’ movement. Secondly, it also refers to ‘hacking the biology’, aiming to appropriate the methods and objects of the life sciences for our own benefit. This is at work in ‘Do-It-Yourself Biology’, inspired by synthetic biology. Both strands, however, share the same ambition to emancipate ourselves from traditional constraints of biology and evolution – but they might also share the same problems.