I think equating biotech with medicine is an error, made here both by the article and by commenters. Yes, it's true that most ideas in biopharma don't work, they require superexpensive trials to figure out which are worth anything, that you have tons of expensive tests to pass and licenses to acquire before anyone lets you give your product to people.

But biology is not just medicine. Life itself is an advanced nanotechnology that was not build by us, and that we don't control yet. Replace "biotech" with "nanotech" and suddenly, whole other fields of potential applications appear, many of which may not (yet) require the amount of testing and care you need when dealing with patients.

Obvious areas include manufacturing and chemistry. We already genetically modify organisms to produce chemicals we need. There are people working on reprogramming bacteria and viruses to fabricate nanostructures for better batteries and solar panels. Recently on iGEM a team of students designed bacteria that can extract rare earth metals from the soil. There are many other potential fields - grown textiles, biofilters, materials that regenerate (potentially cutting down infrastructure maintenance costs), computational matter...

I wouldn't discard the DIYBio movement just like that. There are many areas in which it could shine.