Do-It-Yourself (DIY) biologists set up their laboratories in garages, kitchens, or community spaces. They experiment with gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, grow glow-in-the-dark plants and engineer colourful fungi. The DIY biology movement is a reminder that science is not a natural or essential entity; its boundaries are (re-)drawn in flexible and sometimes ambiguous ways (e.g., Gieryn, 1983). DIY biology’s professionalized research communities emerge outside, or ‘extra to’, institutional laboratories, which is why I theorise DIY biology as a case of ‘extra-institutional science’.

This thesis sheds light on three core components of extra-institutional science: its visions, materialisations, and policy. This project’s core research questions are: “How do DIY biologists envision and materialise extra-institutional research spaces and communities?” and “How do states and their institutions envision, support and/or regulate DIY biology”.

To answer these questions, this project utilises empirical data gained from a public policy document analysis, 32 personal interviews with DIY biologists and other stakeholders, and the 2021 DIY Biology Community Survey. This study contributes to scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that considers how innovation in science and technology is co-produced across different sociocultural contexts and in associated public policy. To do so, this project integrates a comparative dimension, investigating how three different countries, Canada, Great Britain and Germany, and their respective DIY communities, imagine themselves through extra-institutional science in keeping with their political cultures, goals and traditions.

To unpack the rationale behind DIY biology as extra-institutional science, I introduce three socio-technical imaginaries that emerged through a thematic analysis of interview and survey data. First, DIY biology is envisioned to democratize the scientific enterprise. Second, DIY biologists argue that extra-institutional science allows for greater academic freedom than traditional academic research. Third, DIY biologists commonly imagine their movement as an avenue that allows for the exploration of socially relevant research agendas. These three themes guide my investigations into DIY biology’s roots and mission thereby shedding light on the fundamental tensions brought on by the boundary-challenging activities of DIY biologists. This project shows that while DIY biologists share these key imaginaries, how extra-institutional science is imagined and materialised diverges and converges across the different country-contexts.

One of the key findings of this research project is that DIY biologists construct their movement outside of traditional research institutions, thereby challenging their authority, hierarchies, funding, and proprietary regimes. In doing so, DIY biologists carve out a space and identity outside of the increasingly neoliberalised institutional spheres of modern-day knowledge production, thereby demonstrating possibilities of doing science otherwise.

Based on the empirical work, this project identifies potential topics to improve policy-decision making, which are then translated into a set of policy recommendations that may aid policymakers and other stakeholders in future decision-making on the topic of extra-institutional science.