Meet the Flower Designer Who Built a Laboratory In His Home

In a quiet New York town, an amateur scientist has constructed a fully equipped research laboratory in which to advance plant biology research. Sebastian Cocioba wears the word “amateur” as a badge of honor. He’s an educator, molecular florist, and founder at Binomica Labs, a small biology research group focusing on providing an alternative to “exposure-driven and marketing-centric research.”

Earlier this year, we sent a photographer to Sebastian’s home laboratory. Our aim was to showcase the ingenuity behind the building of his lab from the ground up, assembling and repairing second-hand equipment. But as we pored over the photos and learned more about Sebastian’s journey, a far more interesting story emerged: one about the role of amateur science.

The word “amateur” can carry a negative connotation, but as Forrest Mims wrote in Science magazine in 1999, the word “retains the meaning of its French root amour, love, for amateurs do science because it’s what they love to do.”

Before the 19th century, virtually all science was amateur science. And even in the modern era, amateurs continue to make important discoveries. Backyard astronomers discovered 42 new planets in 2012, hobbyist paleontologists discovered the world’s largest dinosaur footprint near the Yorkshire coast in 2021, and Sebastian himself open-sourced protocols that make it easier for scientists to engineer plants.

The following essay is adapted from Sebastian’s own words. It traces his journey to construct a new research path separate from—but in dialogue with—traditional academia, while safeguarding his mother’s home in the process.

— The Editors

Flowers for Everyone

As a child, I desperately wanted to get my mom an orchid for Mother's Day. Unfortunately, the flowers were way too expensive. When I went online, though, I discovered that I could get an orchid from a cutting, and I found this entire world of plant tissue culture hobbyists who would take seeds from different orchids and cross them.

Every other Wednesday, the Home Depot near my house would throw out any orchids that weren’t flowering. So I’d go there and bring these orchids home, put them under blue light, feed them plant hormones, and coax them to flower. At one point, I even started selling the flowers back to Home Depot, saying that they were “boutique orchids.” I was basically taking their trash, repurposing it, and selling it back.

Years later, when I attended university, I stumbled upon plant genetic engineering. It changed my entire perspective on flowers. It was no longer that one could just take two plants, cross them, and hope it worked. Instead, I learned about how to use genetic tools to change plants with precision and intent. I grew obsessed with the idea of designing new plants, especially flowers.

Unfortunately, some family and financial things happened and I had to drop out. I never earned my bachelor’s degree, but I wanted to continue my studies. For the next 15 years, I hit my head against the wall trying to make science happen.

In 2008, I began to lurk on do-it-yourself biology forums. That is where I met and began chatting with Sung, my lab partner at Binomica Labs. Later, thanks to things like Twitter, I was able to indirectly find mentorship by befriending academics, learning from them, and then helping others in turn. After all, it’s lonesome to just do science by yourself. The collaboration I have with Sung makes it more enriching. From a hedonic perspective, I have way more fun with do-it-together, rather than do-it-yourself, biology research.

One year before COVID, I started an initiative called Flowers for Everyone, where I set out to document the process of generating new types of flowers from scratch. To begin, I asked myself: What, from the absolute ground up, do I need to build a laboratory? And what genes will I need to engineer these flowers?

My goal was to create something like an open-sourced diary meets Julia Child cookbook, with all the protocols inside. Initially, the goal was for people to be able to engineer the four different pigments found in flowers, but the initiative was curtailed due to a couple of bouts with COVID.

Every piece of equipment in my home laboratory has a story. I got the bulk of them secondhand and fixed them, or flipped equipment until I could afford a fancier version. I even taught myself a bit of electrical engineering so that I could repair the machines. Overall, my lab contains a mix of new equipment and stuff that is cobbled together. For example, I have a tiny dorm microwave I use to melt all my gels and an Opentrons robot that fell off a truck. My bread-and-butter device to engineer plants is a JG1000 Chinese knockoff of a PDS1000 gene gun. I use it to transform—or push DNA into—plant cells. This gene gun has paid for itself like three times over already.

I mostly use my home laboratory to do consulting work. I’ve supported projects ranging from engineering air-purifying houseplants to creating the world’s first genetically modified Olympic mascot.

I’m able to undercut my competitors’ rates because I am still learning. If a company sends me DNA, I can send them back ten engineered plants for a low price, provided they also pay for the APHIS permit to allow me to ship them across state lines. And even though my landlord is completely excited about what I am doing, nothing that's GMO leaves my lab without a permit and proper containment. Where the state law surrounding bioengineering in home labs remains gray, I think it’s essential that people follow federal guidelines. I want to ensure that if I teach something online, it's as safe as humanly possible while considering what an amateur space might realistically be equipped with.

I want to see amateur biology thrive, and while a lot of regulations exist for a reason, I’m unconvinced that molecular biology requires all the crazy expensive equipment that has become associated with it. I mean, how did people do molecular biology fifty or one hundred years ago?

If somebody really wants to learn biology, but they're in an environment without resources, I hope they will ask: What biology can I do?

It's because of bootstrapping, open-source tools, and free education that I have a bunch of students from all over the world doing small microbiology experiments or hands-on stuff for their classes. We have meetups every Tuesday night through my Petalsmiths group on Facebook. I'm just trying to make friends and help people develop the competencies necessary to design their own flowers. Then one day, maybe in 2063, I want to have this incredible flower symposium with a bunch of amateurs coming together and showing off their cool stuff…maybe on a train.

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More seriously though, I am interested in where amateurs can make real, meaningful contributions to science and demonstrate that amateur biology is not second-class biology. We need more people focusing on the intersection between participatory and actual research. This is why I am a fan of embracing the preprint as a place where amateur biology can thrive and where one can get actual feedback from real biologists who are going to suggest that you try this hypothesis, or make this adjustment.

In some ways, amateur biology is just fundamentally different from academia. We aren’t trying to produce materials in the same way that large labs or academics do. Rather, we want to generate people who generate knowledge.

It’s also important that people know that amateur biology is not pre-accelerator science, aimed at transitioning a lab, its staff, or its idea into industry. A lot of folks in the biology community poisoned the well a little by spreading the myth that it's the path to get to a startup and that one can just hack their way into biotech without any science or business experience. That’s just a recipe for disaster.

Here, it might even be helpful that biotech is going through a bear market. It's good evidence that those of us still working in this space have decoupled from this venture-creation idea wherein amateur biology is seen as a stepping stone towards biotech entrepreneurship, and now recognize it as its own thing. I am not against bio-industry or startups, rather I want to advance the idea that amateurism has its own important niche.

Building my home laboratory, and getting to where I am now, was like using suction cups to climb the outside walls of the ivory tower, trying to find cracks in the windows through which I could look in. When people ask me how to get involved in this kind of work, my number one response is to stay in school. Please finish your degree. Being degree-less has slowed me down in numerous ways and it was extremely risky to get to where I have gotten. It took me like 15 years to get where I am now, and much of my progress came from strangers giving me a chance, but also from the stubbornness of never shutting up about what I do. My journey is by no means reproducible and there are far more efficient paths that would get you there much faster.

The second most important advice I could give is not to do this alone. I am a huge proponent of do-it-together biology, not do-it-yourself. Because when you do it by yourself, you become an echo chamber and, as much as you think you're objective, you're not.

Finally, I would love to drive the message home to fellow amateur biologists that we should have respect for the natural world; not fear or reckless abandon. This work should be a labor of the same care and attention that we direct toward others, and demonstrating this is one of my largest objectives. But my other objective, just to be brutally honest, is stability. I didn't inherit a house when my dad died. I inherited a mortgage, and it just fell on me out of nowhere.

The only thing I want to do is make sure that this house, even though it's on a hill and slowly sliding down, is okay so that I can continue my work. Because I want this to be where my mom passes. I don't want her to have to move because of some financial shit. So not to be grim, but my ultimate objective is enough stability to keep this thing afloat. That's it.

— As told to David Lang  

Photography by Martin at Chineys Photo.

This article was published on July 17, 2024.