It was an interesting conversatio when we invited all you international people to come. I want to talk with you about the activities at the Wilson center regarding DIYbio in order to try to set this culture of responsibility that Meg was just taklign abuot.

I've started a biosafety officer program. At the end of this, I want to ask you for help with this. I have partnered with the American Biological Safety Association. They are at every university and most industrial labs. Their job is to make sure that you meet all the regulations and safety requirements. The idea of this program would be on the diybio.org site, and you would submit any questions about how to clean things up, should I be doing this specific, can I eat this yogurt with methamphetamines in it, any sort of questions about the safety of your experiment, how you expose of the waste products, and we will get to in a sense, not a real-time within that minute, within a day or so an answer to those questions coming from biosafety officers across the country so you can operate in a safe manner.

What may have also.. they have also offered to provide, if you want these services, is to potentially come to your meetup groups or labs and to host sessions to sort of teach you different lab techniques or potentially what sort of regulations you need to worry about regarding disposal versus BSL 1 or BSL 2, what things you should order or not order, how to store chemicals, and all sorts of things about proper lab and safety techniques. They have a really good ability to do that, not only in person, but also in certain through WebPass and call-ins to bring this information together. We're trying to offer this to you. I would really like your input about things that you need or want, how you might thikn the best way to interact with these folks is. They see the great advantage of the amatuer community, and they want to see that people operate safely, part of my job is to reduce any sort of regulatory pressure or pressure to regulate or inhibit you guys. One way is to have these services or to promote these activities to show that you are not doing this haphazardly, which anyone in this community knows is not giong on at all anyway.

The other thing is that what I see as a new kind of influx of press coverage of DIYbio, particularly about the H5N1 situation. It's my perspective that, something that I think the community needs to be aware of, is that folks that - decisions were made that were not agreed with - and for other reasons will most likely in the future - try to use the amateur community as scapegoats for nothing that is related to the amateur community. How should DIY interact with the press? Should they interact at all? There's going to be a pnael that will talk about this more tomorrow. What can we do to sort of help, or how to deal with these situations, if a press person called you, how to talk with them, what to do when the story comes out and they get it wrong, which by the way they always do. They will either leave out the important info. Part of the issue of the amateur community is how these people view you. Some of these stories are starting to shift this, and this is a worry. How should we promote the community, with your activities, to make sure that these stories can be debunked when they are inaccurate from my perspective?

Here's all of my information. Please email me, I really like to talk. Let's see if we can get some of you to beta test it. I want to see if the community likes this or not, and hopefully operate in a more safe way than you already are. With that I will shut up and turn it over to Pierce.