BioPunk - A Cool Word in Search of a Cool Definition

Pris is a bio-engineered Replicant from 1982's Blade Runner

BioPunk - People who do synthetic biology who don't know what they are doing. Usually bored computer nerds.

BioPunks are hacking cells to make something cool. They are actually channeling CyberPunk, which sounds like it is a group of hackers, but it is actually a science fiction genre.

When I think of BioPunk, I immediately think of the synthetic humans used as slave characters in Blade Runner, called Replicants. Blade Runner is a really old movie (1982) but there is a great scene of a guy making little gnomes as a hobby.

A lot of these people are computer hackers, like Meredith Patterson, who has a so-called manifesto on BioPunk. She has high sounding rhetoric on punk biology.

I think that DNA origami qualifies, see this older post on little DNA pictures, and these little DNA boxes.