Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Curing Cancer in a Garage?
This is the first time I've seen someone happily exclaim, "I'm curing cancer in my garage!"
Biocurious, a new hackerspace for biotech based in Mountain View, CA, has just been born. Founders Eri Gentry and Joseph Jackson started this community lab space for citizen science, expanding the trend of hackerspaces like Noisebridge and HackerDojo into biology. They are crowd-raising $30,000 to help get their garage lab off the ground.
We've seen the seeds of this before. Marina Gorbis' post on a society without money mentioned Kickstarter as a new platform for raising micro-capital, Anthony Townsend's post on Lightweight Innovation called out desktop biotechnology as a new disruptive technology, and the recent Health Horizons conference on the Future of Science, Technology, and Well-being identified DIYBio as a key trend.
I don't know if cancer will be cured in a garage, but I'm happy to see a middle ground between high school science labs and formal research labs emerge. Plus, now I have somewhere to take my daughters on a random Saturday afternoon to teach them how to split cells, pipette serum, and transform bacterial cultures. True, maybe it's not everyone's idea of fun, but just think, what if we did make a major discovery that impacted cancer, or life extension, or chronic pain? Having fun and doing good - it doesn't get better than that.
- Alexandra Carmichael