Biohacking at Kopenlab

If you want to see an alternative way of doing science, just visit the ground floor of the old storage building (Halmlageret) at the Explore district of the Science in the City Festival. There you will find Kopenlab, the ‘hacked’ lab space, where you can do your own kind of science.

Kopenlab is a place where citizens can casually talk with local and foreign biohackers, Novozymes and University researchers, and even with the Head of Center for Synthetic Biology at UCPH (and head of the Carlsberg Laboratory), Birger Lindberg Møller.

Their aim is to promote the collaboration between citizens and individuals from academia and industry in order to collaborate and inspire each other in order to improve or develop new techniques for research collaboration, open hardware development, and open entrepreneurship.

Can I be a biohacker?

Do you normally imagine a scientist as a highly educated person with a white lab coat speaking about boring and uncomprehensible things? This is definitely not the case at Kopenlab.

Biohackers are just individuals interested in science and for that, their background doesn’t matter. The idea behind biohacking is that everybody can do science and that science can be done outside schools, universities and companies. You can do science at home, at a storehouse, wherever you have a free available space.

Do it yourself – but not alone

Even if it started with the idea of Do it Yourself Biology (DYB), right now the biohackers act more by the principle of ‘Doing it Together Biology’, since collaboration is not only more fun but also more creative and productive. The workshops organized by the biohacker community are a good example of this.

At Kopenlab’s ‘Sciencedrop’ sessions, one can get a feeling of the complex field of biohacking, where nothing is just black or white. Biohacking raises a lot of ethical and legal problems that are being thoroughly discussed at these small informal meetings.

You can check out the remaining Sciencedrop events and other Kopenlab events and find more information here.

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