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We agreed to shorten our talks so that we had 20 minutes for Q&A, or we could
wrap it up if yuo are all tired. There will be lots of time for questions.
What I want to mephasize about diybio is that there's a unique opportunity
here, a unique set of incentives for non-professionals to refactor existing
tools to serve non-professional interests- it should be cheap, easy, a nice
user interface, maybe not as powerful. Who in here knows swhat about an
arduino? My whole point doesn't work when people don't know what an arduino.
Who made the arduino? This guy, Massimo Bonzi, is the co-developers... er,
well. wtf mac? If you replace .. synthetic biology, which is an interesting
thing to think about. So anyway, here's his book, where did the Arduino come
from? He wanted to teach interactive electronics. ..
So read that first part: most of the tools were meant for engineers and were
meant for them. So the point is that the tools that existed when Massimo
started his project, they didn't exist for amateurs. The electrical engineers
who sort of in our case, the professional biologists, had a stack of tools,
they didn't have an incentive to build the arduino. It took some outside
interest, non-professional interests, to improve the user interface. Does this
go backwards? So, I want to say that I think that the arduino exists to enable
rapid prototyping with electronics. I think that, in ways, synthetic biology
is interested in rapid prototyping tools for biology. Professionally, there
might be a common pattern where the professional infrastructure and culture,
because of traditions and time that people have to learn complicated tools and
techniques, there's not a lot of pressure to simplify it. The non-
professionals need the simplified easy-to-use tools. So I think that the
amateur community one of the incentives for building these tools that are
simpler, biological tools and rapid prototyping of biological systems. These
are not just the same tools as the tools of BIOFAB and synthetic biology.
Maybe there will be bubble-up from DIYbio people, and professional efforts by
bioengineers. The top row is kits that exist from DIYbio, the bottom row is
sort of, maybe kits that have been invented or prototyped once, but they
aren't there yet. On the far left, a microbial fuel cell, an analog patch
clamp for reading insectn eurons, OpenPCR, tito's gel box, which included a
transilluminator. THe lower left: a DIY LED psectrophotometer, and in the
middle is a biobrick trading card with integrated biobrick plasmid DNA, and on
the far right is a lego fractionator and that's from an instructable, and I
don't know who made it.
That's all an example of amateur innovation, and hopefully with iteration on
these kits, andd they might become useful for professionasls too, just as
arduino is the go-to choice for rapid prototyping in electronics. Where did
they come from? As an amateur, I can take an existing tool and make it easier
to use, and discard stuff that is useless for us. Then also there's a couple
examples of people building new things, that don't fulfill a scientific
agenda, but you can play, and gain intuition about biological systems. I think
we're going to see those coming out of diybio. Now I would like to introduce
tito- who asked me to put up this url- biocurious.org/kickstarter.
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