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DIY Biologists To Open Source Research
destinyland writes "Falling costs and garage tinkering are creating a grass roots movement of amateur biologists whose research is more transparent than that of academia. They are building lab equipment using common household items and even synthesizing new organisms, and their transparency also allows the social pressure which creates more ethical research. DIY Bio.org fosters lab co-ops for large equipment and provokes important discussions. (Would it be ethical to release a homegrown symbiote that cures scurvy in hundreds of thousands of people?) This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease, fuel-generating microbes, or even a social-networked disease-tracking epidemiology. 'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves,' argues h+ magazine, which featured the article in their summer issue."
The concept isn't to doing ground-breaking research per-se, but to bring everyday biology to the masses. Rarely are people doing research in universities or with biotech firms interested in teaching and making available techniques cheaply to the masses and making it something that everyone can access. Also a severe leaning toward open source isn't common with 'big bio' research either.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Maybe they're folks who got Biology undergrads and ended up in medical or, GASP! software development because that's where the opportunities were.
There are only so many academic posts available. Also, many folks don't want to work in the "publish or perish" environment, the academic BS environment, or the simple fact that they just didn't want to be professional scientists.
To put it in perspective; how many amateur software developers do you know? You can ask the same thing about them. And we all know why one would rather be an amateur developer than a professional one!
Really, if they are THAT good at research, then why not at a university?
Because you shouldn't have to.
I wouldn't worry about "DIY biologists" cooking up some terrible superbug that wipes us all out. I would, however, worry about these biologists' personal safety. If they want to crunch data at home, no problem, but if they're trying to set up actual home labs, then there is a pretty good chance that at some point they will find their doors being broken down by armed men who are notorious for their lack of willingness to listen to reasonable explanations as to why there's all this glassware lying around.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You don't like what 6.5 billion people are doing to the world now? Wait and see how badly we'd treat it if we were all starving to death.
Historically, universities ignore "research" done by any person w/o a Ph.D. To the extent that this is a useful bias, your question is well posed and these guys will never emerge from the shadow of University research. To the extent that the usefulness of such a bias is becoming antiquated, this is how reform begins and how those that cling to dying models become irrelevant.
This is more like worrying about toy poodles going feral... in an area that's already got a coyote problem.
And yet, when you're sick, you take medicine. When you're hungry, you get food. When you're thirsty, you have clean water. That's all preventing a decrease in the population. So, claim we should keep the population down. Prove it. Walk the walk, or you're being hypocritical.
Didn't really think this one through too well, did you?
universities ignore "research" done by any person w/o a Ph.D
Academic researchers tend to ignore "research" which is not published in peer-reviewed journals. I've never had a journal ask to see my degrees.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So just from reading the summary I want to say that I have grown somewhat tired of the attitude towards academia on here. It is not a place of suppressed ideas, incompetent people, publish or perish, and faked results to get more funding. While publish or perish can be very true at the most elite universities, it ain't true everywhere. There are plenty of profs doing good research at upper tier liberal arts schools, teaching only a bit more than they would at UC San whereever. Hell, you can even go to a decent sized research school and not feel like you are in hell. As an UNDERGRAD I worked 60-80 hours a week on classes, grad school applications/related stuff (like the GREs) and working in a lab. It sucked, but I worked longer hours than the majority of professors. I think anyone that earned a decent Ph.D. to get tenure shouldn't complain when they are working less than their students.
Lack of transparency? The biomedical research industry is far worse on this issue. "Getting scooped" (idea stealing) is only a problem when you are working on a project. Once it is done and sent off for publication or discussed at a conference (or brown bag seminar in your own department) everything is way more open than it would ever be in the corporate world.
Can't get access to an article? Try scholar.google.com. Many journals allow researchers to post PDFs on their personal webpages, and such documents come up in this search. I went to a liberal arts college with a shit library, and google scholar was how I got work done (That and a zippy interlibrary loan service). No one actually pays $30 to read some article, and if you think that is how the system works then you have been completely duped.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
When it comes to research, I hate that phrase: do-it-yourself. Who else is going to think your thoughts for you?
Frankly, just like with astronomy, if you can do the research, you're part of the club. Period. I don't think there needs to be any distinction between DIY hobbyist science, academic research and industrial science. There's good research and there's not-so-good research. If you can purify a protein in your garage that no one else has been able to, then the NIH should be happy to post your procedure and contact information somewhere.
When garage developers out-University the Universities, one must ask if Universities are following their obligations towards learning and understanding. If they are not, honouring those obligations, maybe we should dispose of them and replace them with groups that can.
If I choose to write an Open Source application using my $300 Dell laptop instead of attending a university with the latest and greatest hardware, has the university failed?
Honestly, I don't understand this notion that universities should be the repository of all knowledge and research in the age of the internet. I could have a bigger collection of books in two days (probably less, but factor in the seeders too) than the local university has.
Just because the university has the expensive tools, the cheap ones still work at home.
Not sure about your local university, but the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester started with 40,000 titles and is now over the 4 million mark. And, to be quite frank with you, I regard that as being the bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for a University - especially in Britain, given that it's a day's trip to Hay-on-Wye (one of the few places you'll find more books than Amazon.com).
Secondly, sure you can write an Open Source application using your $300 Dell laptop. And within a matter of days, the local University should (if it is doing its job) have obtained a copy, and if it's an application with significant potential, said University should have dissected the logic, assigned students to work on it, and be contributing patches.
Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have said that if he could see further, it's because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. University researchers are standing on the shoulders of the best the planet has to offer, whether those "best" are at University or not. If they are not leveraging what you and other people produce, they are not doing their jobs.
This is less about being the repository of all knowledge and research and more about the fact that (in theory) they know where to look, what to look for, how to look, and what to do once they find something. If they're not looking, and aren't doing anything significant with what they find, then there's something wrong. They don't have to do everything, but they should always be doing something.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now, I'm not far enough along to have refereed any papers yet, but my impression from talking to those who have is that anonymity restrictions mean that the referees don't know who wrote the papers and certainly don't know whether or not they have even a high school diploma. So, how you get a bunch of PhDs to review something seriously is to write a good, thorough description in clear, concise, proofread prose of well done research, and not throw in any unsubtantiated or irrelevant crank-agenda drivel.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
More important, why does the article not have the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag?