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by ramanujan 5556 days ago
I used to think this as well. But if you think about things which are ridiculously expensive -- like cars or airplanes or Google's datacenters -- all of them got their start in someone's garage.

After spending some time with the Open Wetware/DIYBio guys, I realized that no one (other than the DIYBio guys) has really spent time reducing the costs of the fundamental toolkit of the molecular biologist.

Now they are starting to do so:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/DIYbio:Notebook/Open_Gel_Box_2.0...

That gel box is going to be about $200-$300 all in. You might not get a multiphoton microscope right off the bat, anymore than you'd get access to all of Goog's servers when you were just starting out with your laptop...but reducing the price of entry for the hobbyist biologist/biochemist to say $5k or less is going to be really important.

That's because the role of the DIYBio community is set to wax in a big way. With the NIH budget cuts and the coming fiscal collapse of the US Government, the sun is about to set on a ~70 year period (1945-2015) of centralized US government research. The period before 1945 was more innovative by many measures (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/business/30view.html?_r=1), and potentially the period afterwards will be as well.
1 comments
mechanical_fish 5556 days ago
I agree that the DIYbio folks et al are incredibly exciting. But saying that those projects have to do with "building a Github of science" is putting the cart before the horse. To extend my metaphor for a moment, it's as if the engineers of 1963 had decided to popularize open source software by inventing and promoting Github, instead of inventing the personal computer and Ethernet first.

(As an aside, there are fascinating historical examples of people who did invent the web before inventing the personal computer, like this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet

Of course, he ended up as many of these slightly-too-early visionaries did: His work lost all its funding and he was kind of sad.)

Build the gel box and then worry about the social network. Or better yet, don't worry about the social network at all: These gel box users will network themselves, no problem. It would be a challenge to stop them from finding each other online.

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