KickStarting: Bio Curious and DIY POP Biotech
I’ve been interested in Citizen Science projects such as the International Hydraphone Network Stream(which I love to listen too) and data sharing projects such as open wetware for a while and so now as part of my global challenge project at Highwire. I’ve been digging deeper into citizen led science approaches to designing for sustainability such as the Bio Curious project, (a the parallel movement within science to colabs/fablabs/democratic design within in Design) Community Labs for Citizen Science. Bio Curious is a hackerspace in San Francisco set up for people to come together and experiment with bioart. Whats fascinating about this project is that has also been funded through social philanthropy on Kickstart and the founders raised over $35,000 to move the project from a garage into a 6,000sf industrial facility outfitted as a co-working space for biotech
Partly led by the garage science movement and partly by the availability of enabling technologies it offers an alternative to university or corporate research as the founders explain:
“Science was once a cultural activity, carried out by wealthy “gentlemen scholars” who had the leisure and material resources to experiment. The 20th century saw an unprecedented centralization of science around an industrial model. The plummeting costs of enabling technologies has brought meaningful biological research back within reach of the independent citizen scientist” (Bio Curious 18 July 2010, at 19:14.)
As well as providing a space for people to work on biotech projects Bio Curious also run events such as Making Algae, Extracting DNA from Strawberries, The art and science of wine and The material aesthetic of biotechnology.
The Bio Curious bring a social dimension to science as Tito Jankowski explains in an interview on the kick starter blog
“We hope our efforts will inspire individuals to pursue careers in the life sciences, create new avenues for participation, and enable citizens to be better informed about the many opportunities and challenges posed by advancements in the life sciences.” (Jankowski 2010)
Through the active participation in experimenting and testing out biotech, citizens have a hands on tactit knowledge which can provide the basis for making choices and decisions.
Tito and the others who set Bio Curious also created the OpenPCR a project to build an open source machine capable of copying DNA.
Again the project was funded on kickstart through gifting and they raised themselves over $10,500 to launch an open source PCR thermal cycler which would make it much more financially plausible for individuals to construct their own instrument. Funders received gifts depending on their level of funding starting with stickers for the lower levels!
