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Happy (very) belated New Year, DIYbioers! I want to recount some of the exciting high points of the past few months, and share some hopes for 2009.
Local groups outside the Boston area are sprouting up and folks are getting some quality kitchen table time, as my friend Justin calls it. DIYbio Seattleites had their first meetup, about which Sandy Porter published an excellent article, and Bay Area DIYbiologists met up in San Francisco. If you are looking to start or join a local group, add an entry to the Local Groups page.
There’s been a surge of new interest as several articles and blog posts were published. We’re more than 500 members on the mailing list, which is very exciting! I had an idea that there were hundreds (if not thousands) of enthusiastic amateur biologists out there, and it’s great to see them coming together. I’d love to see a DIYbio conference during 2009, and get to meet all you DIYbioers in person. CodeCon 2009 will be another great chance to do just this, with a new Biohack! track that is currently in open CFP.
Several projects have also sprung up and are progressing in earnest, including building a melamine biosensor, probiotics that produce vitamin C, cheap and open source biology tools, and the seeds of one or more DIYbio iGEM teams. Hardware projects have sprung up as well, with an open-source turbidostat, the Gel Box 2.0 project, and integration/UX research going on with Project SmartLab.
The BioWeatherMap project has enjoyed quite significant progress, and will soon become a PersonalGenomes.org project in collaboration with DIYbio. This is great news, and I hope to see the BioWeatherMap take off over the next few months.
I’m really pumped about this, and look forward to seeing all of the fantastic projects come to fruition!
Six DIYbiologists met at Frjtz in San Francisco on Saturday, January 19th for the first time. Here are some new ideas we tossed around:
DIYbiologists John, Spencer, and Marnia enjoy Frjtz fries
1. BioWeather Maps Jason Bobe, visiting from Boston, introduced BioWeather Maps. Imagine a day in April, DIYbiologists from all around the country swab crosswalk buttons in their town with a Q-tip. Each sample might contain 10 or 100 different bacteria. How do swabs from the subway in Boston differ from swabs from a hospital in San Francisco? Jason Bobe wants to find out.
2. Every Orchid is a Clone Marnia Johnston proposed a bio-art piece – take samples of orchids worldwide and show that the most popular orchids are all clones of eachother.
3. Open Gel Box 2.0 Tito showed off the schematic for a DIY kit to make your own bigger, badder, gel electrophoresis chamber
For our next meeting, we want to get our hands in some actual wet work. Marnia and Spencer are investigating public labs, as well as having DIYers teach hands-on biotech classes at the museums/science centers in SF.
Tito Jankowski: Open Gel Box, “let’s make all biotech equipment pocket sized”
Jason Bobe – BioWeather Maps, visualizing genomes
Noah Flower: the Monitor research group
Marnia Johnston: Artist, wants to start a bioart project to show that all the orchids in the world are clones of each other
Spencer Pearson: Quilt kit entrepreneur, knows about licensing, wants DIYbio as a hobby
John Cumbers: NASA AMES, all around cool guy, wants to use biotech to live forever and colonize other planets
A couple days ago, I met up with Randy Hall and Dan Heidel. I hadn’t met Dan before, but he heard about the recent Seattle meeting and got in touch. He’s this really smart dude who is currently in the process of setting up Seattle Open Biolabs, a wetlab adjacent to a hackerspace he’s a part of, Hackerbot. The lab isn’t huge, but it will be available to competent researchers that want to do their own bio R&D.
It’s pretty exciting, because I’ve been talking to the University of Washington about allowing public use of their facilities for DIYbio. That has its own set of hurdles, especially once you get into the realm of IP. So, Dan setting up his lab and needing interested parties, then finding out about DIYbio is perfect timing.
The next Seattle DIYbio meeting will be at Dan’s house in two weeks, and we’re going to advertise it far and wide. I’ll keep you guys posted, and Dan should be sending a message to the list pretty soon. Cool stuff.
IT’S ALL HAPPENING!
-Alec Nielsen
DIYbio 