By Holly J. McDede, KALW
When we think of garage scientists, eccentric, gray-haired Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future might come to mind. But these days, garages seem a little old-fashioned — especially when you can work in a tricked out DIY Bio Lab.
DIY, or Do It Yourself, labs are for citizen scientists to collaborate. Rather than for profit, the projects are for learning — things like building robots and printing live cells from 3-D printers. Collective membership dues make the fancy lab equipment affordable. And that’s the goal: make science more accessible, and less intimidating.
Recently, four scientists at BioCurious began experimenting with making glowing seeds. But they needed money, so instead of keeping the seeds for themselves, they decided to promise them to anyone who backed their project on Kickstarter. It was their way of democratizing biology.
After eight weeks, the project had more than 8,000 backers — all expecting glowing seeds. And all those backers caused a backlash from people worried that distributing the seeds could have unintended, and dangerous, consequences for ecosystems around the world.
The Container Lab, parked in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district, was once an actual shipping container. These days, though, it’s a molecular biology lab. Which suits Kyle Taylor just fine.
Read or listen to the complete story at KALW.
