Garage genome hackers

Skanky Vamp

Skanky Vamp

Sniffin' the Slayer
Joined
Aug 12, 2008
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Black Thorn
When I read the first few lines I immediately thought of Steve Jobs making Apples in his garage and then how he honestly helped shape the way computers are today. With that in mind (from New Scientist):

mah rag said:
KATHERINE AULL's laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. "Down here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks," she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. "The rest is just home brew," she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums.

In fact, Aull's lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism.

Aull, who works as a synthetic biologist for a biotech company by day, created her home lab after hearing about a contest on the science fiction website io9.com for "mad scientists with homebrew closet labs, grassroots geneticists, and garage genome hackers".
Click to expand...

Imagine the implications, both positive and negative for the Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers
full article
 
Sweetescape
Sweetescape
Were do you get these stories from?! :)
StuckinTraffic said:
Garage Genome Hackers? OMG....haven't these people ever read The White Plague?
Click to expand...

That would be the negative aspect I think.. very good SIT.. now lets work on the positive aspects. I think there could be some really good advancements made in the filed.. possibly... or it could be like another Large Hadron Collider and destroy the world! run for them hills, yo!
 
Eh, I'm not sure a "closet" or garage lab would have the same safety procedures in place that a large lab would have, which is what worries me. Sure, there could be a "Eureka" moment out there in the wild...but there could be mass death and destruction, too!
 
What if somebody invented something like a microbe that ate tar and nicotine? Smokers could spray a mist into their lungs. The microbe would eat the tar, and be expelled in breath.

I want home micro-biologists to invent me something like that, because the big labs aren't getting it done.

Stuff like alternating current, and the theory of relativity was discovered at home. This could be a good thing.
 
I had a discussion with a couple of my coworkers yesterday about the Komen Foundation. Don't get me wrong...they do good work and I'm not knocking that....but I've had a LOT of problems with them lately (we're a grantee, so we order educational materials from them every year) due, in part, to their being such a big organization. ANYway, the discussion concerned exactly HOW much of my donation dollar goes to actual breast cancer research (and sure, if I was so inclined and had a year to kill...and was a CPA and a lawyer) I could probably find out since they ARE a non-profit....what is it? Ten cents on the dollar? Five? My point is that, there's possibly a place for the garage/basement/closet researcher in that arena. I have a hard time believing that such a person's scientific method would be up to standard, but that's just me....maybe I'm hooked on big research happening at the academic level....grad students in white at universities with huge, gleaming labs. Possible prejudice on my part, right? I can see where you're coming from, tho. Those types of discoveries are beneficial and we HOPE that's what happens, something that benefits us all in some way. I'm just pessimistic!

And smooth on the smoking reference, you! I purposely didn't make that my NY resolution, just because it worked so WELL last year. NOT. Ha!
 
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