That's the value of the global market for infant formula. Greenup plans to wipe it out with a new formula based on 14 proteins from human breast milk reproduced in a laboratory. HIs company Bionascent is already making one of them, alpha-lactalbumin, to sell at $US1700 a milligram for use as a biotech research tool.

That will help fund the next step towards global domination. The vision? "A world where where all babies, whether breastfed or formula-fed, are equally healthy, happy and strong."

"In the future when you go into a supermarket you won't be choosing between cow's milk and soy formulas. You will be choosing between specific formulations of human protein mixture and we will be at the centre of it all," said Greenup, a University of NSW molecular biology graduate and serial entrepreneur, pitching to venture capitalists in San Francisco last month.

The pitch presentation shows a smooth curve onwards and upwards for the next five years, all the way to US FDA approval by 2021. That's the plan, anyway. And it all started at BioFoundry, Australia's first community lab for citizen scientists, when co-founder Meow-Ludo Meow Meow and an un-named friend looking for something to do dreamt up a biotech business.

"We sat down and went through a list of animal products that might have a biotech solution," says Meow Meow, a former University of NSW science student. Gelatin was taken, egg white was taken, but they saw potential in whey protein. "We did our research, it hadn't been done before." The friend dropped out but Greenup, a startup veteran best known for the debunking app rebutr, was keen. Bionascent, now based in California, backed by $US250,000 from US life sciences accelerator Indiebio, was born. Greenup is chief executive officer, now knocking on doors to raise $2 million for its next development stage.

Synthetic breast milk is just one among scores of ideas flowing from the worldwide community lab movement Dr Ellen Jorgensen and colleagues started with the Brooklyn, New York, biotechnology laboratory Genspace in 2010. For $US100 a month, members have access to a 24/7 lab facility, equipment and volunteer staff to pursue biotechnology projects for commercial or artistic purposes – or just for fun.

Do-it-yourself biology practised outside the confines of the science establishment is called biohacking. At BioFoundry, based at ATP Innovations in Alexandria in Sydney's inner west, the mission is "democratise science by breaking the cost entry barrer".  Membership starts at $120 a month.

Genspace rates are about a tenth those of commercial incubator space. Jorgensen says the aim is to "open up the practice of science to groups who may have thought they could not participate, with the hope that some good ideas might come out of that". The lab is like "a big one-room school house" used by people of diverse ages, interests and occupations from artists and engineers to biologists and business people.

That creates the opportunity for the kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration that leads to fresh thinking and breakthroughs, she says. One project led to an industrial process robot that delivers precise small volumes of liquid in manufacturing. Another is using fungus to transform waste from the beer industry into animal food. A biohacking group from a DIY lab in California is making vegan cheese based on a genetic sequence found in cow's milk and made in the lab from scratch. A member of that group, Craig Rouskey, is now the chief scientific officer of the aspiring human milk manufacturer Bionascent.

But for Jorgensen, who is in Perth and Sydney in August for National Science Week including four events at the Sydney Science Festival, community labs are more about building science literacy than discovering the next big money-making thing. Weighing up the small number of genuine breakthroughs that come out of the thousands of mainstream research labs around the world against the relatively tiny network of fledgling community labs, it's clear "you can't really expect a whole bunch of Eureka moments immediately" from DIY labs, she says.

She believes climate change scepticism and scare campaigns around genetically modified organisms feed into a "dangerous" level of ignorance about science. A frightening proportion of people think they could turn into something like Spiderman if they were bitten by a genetically modified mosquito, for example, she says. "So it's scary, people at that level of mis-perception are prey to people who are whipping up fear."

That's a threat to the public funding which most scientific research depends on, so DIY labs have an important education role. "There is definitely a call for more outreach activities," says Jorgensen. Because nothing in science is more engaging or interesting than hands-on research, it is hoped the chance to participate will help make people feel more kindly towards it.

To those frightened by the prospect of unsupervised amateurs cooking up dangerous toxins in DIY, she points to the Code of Conduct for responsible and safe practice which DIY labs are encouraged to adhere to, and the fact that it's "well nigh impossible" to create a pathogen or infectious agent by accident, especially from the harmless materials permissible in DIY labs.

"There are legal regulations we have to abide by like everybody else. We can't be sitting around here cooking up pathogens and infectious agents. If somebody wants to do that they are bio-terrorists, not part of our community, and I can't speak for them." Bad elements are more likely to be associated with nation-states, and even for them it's a giant step from making something in the lab to weaponising it, she says.

Dr Jorgensen will talk about "The Global Biohack Revolution" on a panel including Meow Meow and Andrew Gray of Melbourne's BioQuisitive in Sydney on August 18.