Visualizations of DNA strands. Pink Army Cooperative aims to sequence personalized cancer treatments using open-source principles. Creative Commons image via Wikipedia user Zephyris.

Andrew Hessel

The Pink Army is preparing an ambitious invasion, and Andrew Hessel is its general. This is one war you can actually feel good about supporting, though: namely, the fight against breast cancer.

Hessel is the founder and managing director of Pink Army Cooperative, the world’s first open-source synthetic biotechnology firm. Founded in Edmonton in 2009, Pink Army is pioneering a radical new way of researching breast cancer treatments, built on the same free and open software principles that drive huge firms like Mozilla, developers of the open-source Firefox internet browser. Pink Army is fully member-owned and democratically run; anyone can join for just $20. Using that grassroots support, the firm will work on developing custom cancer treatments, tailored to patients’ individual DNA. The idea is to affordably create bespoke treatments that definitively cure a single patient, instead of one-size-fits-all drugs that merely treat millions.

Hessel, a University of Calgary-trained biologist, is now a world leader in the new field of synthetic biology, a hybrid of traditional biology and engineering. Practitioners in the field see cells—the building blocks of all living things—as tiny computers that can be modeled, manipulated, duplicated, and more. “Cells are processors; DNA is a programming language,” Hessel said in a 2009 presentation. “We can look at biological systems much like computer networks. And because we have so much experience today with hardware, software and large scale computing, we are actually learning about our biology through the building out of these systems.” The same forces that drove the price of a desktop computer from $10,000 to $299 have also made it increasingly possible to quickly and cheaply sequence DNA. Once you can untangle a cancer patient’s genome, Hessel believes synthetic biology will point the way to a personalized cure—essentially a way to find the glitch in your cellular software and rewrite it.

Hessel acknowledges it sounds like science fiction, but says most of the technological pieces are already in place; what’s needed is a better, faster, cheaper research method. That’s why Pink Army is an open-source co-op: with no secrets, no patents, and no profits, Hessel believes he’ll be able to duplicate the enormous success of open-source software, but for biotech. Currently numbering 500 members, Hessel believes the co-op needs 2,500 to synthesize its first treatment, so it may be a few years before Pink Army is ready to treat its first patient. But their first shot may mark the start of a medical revolution.

Four NYU students recently decided they’d had enough of heavily centralized, corporate-minded social networking sites. They took on the task of developing a social network to prove that online sharing and privacy should go hand in hand. What they came up with was Diaspora.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the team and its project:

(They) intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.

Though the creators of Diaspora have not come right out and slammed Facebook, they have credited a talk by Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University, as the inspiration behind the project. Mogden is no fan of Facebook or its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s a gem from Mogden’s talk in New York City last February:

Mr. Zuckerberg has…done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age…[H]e harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time’.

Will Diaspora dismantle what Mogden calls “a Panopticon built out of web parts”? We won’t know that for sure until the software launches next September, but a few critics aren’t totally convinced.

Regardless of the speculation around its potential to effect mainstream change, Diaspora has generated a sturdy support base in a short time. Thanks to media coverage and buzz from the blogosphere, Diaspora fundraised more than ten times its stated goal in two days. At this point, Diaspora’s Kickstarter account shows that more than 2500 backers have collectively put up over $100,000 to get the grassroots project underway. While we wait for Facebook to be crushed by a user uprising, however, uh, maybe you’d like to click the “Like” button at the top of this post?

Google Map's incomplete data for Kibera, among the world's largest slums. An open source mapping project aims to provide a clearer picture.

Kibera, one of the world’s biggest slums, is a “glaring omission” on Google Maps, says Erica Hagen, member of the Map Kibera team. Indeed, Kibera remains a blank spot in relatively well-mapped and densely populated Nairobi, the economic hub of East Africa.

When I first heard of this project, my first thought was of the potential harm that mapping this area could do. Would the government highjack the data, mapping and labeling households by ethnicity? Of course, all technology has pitfalls. Remember the use of cell phones during the Kenyan election crisis to spread hate? It would serve Map Kibera well to monitor how the government and local political groups use this new information and for what means.

Regardless, mapping Kibera does have some expected benefits. As Hagen points out, community groups are willing to participate because they think having a geographical marker might make service claims to the government easier. There would be a visual representation of where schools, clinics and water delivery services, for example, are missing.

In a community saturated with development organizations, mapping might also better situate who is working where and potentially help avoid overlaps between groups. For Westerners, it is a practical matter of being able to navigate the complex community they do not belong to, but so desperately want to volunteer in.

Google Maps brings us visual representations of the nooks and crannies of the world we would probably never have time or money to visit. This points to another advantage of mapping Kibera. Hagen is working with a group of youth who produce short clips of their community and upload to YouTube. By linking these clips to different areas of Kibera on a map there is the potential to better educate and situate Kibera for the aid-giving Westerners who see the region as in need of saving.

Kibera has been mapped before, says Hagen, who met with volunteers who had mapped the whole district for another non-governmental organization. However, they never saw the results. This time, Map Kibera wants to do things differently. Hosting the map on Open Street Map (an open-source software which the public can edit) allows others to contribute to the mapping of Kibera.

Map Kibera has also hired twelve local youth, most having just finished their high school degrees, to walk through the community with GPS devices and identify the streets, alleys, clinics, schools and so on in the area. She hopes that after this training, they will be able to spread the word (both through printed maps and the off-chance of Internet access) and ensure community engagement. “Sustainability is always difficult,” says Hagen, but she assures me that Map Kibera is working with local organizations like Ushahidi.

Stay updated for further initiatives after the initial mapping to be completed in three weeks on their website.