When Breakthroughs Begin at Home

[groovedaddy]

Cathal Garvey’s home laboratory in Cork, Ireland, is filled with makeshift equipment. His incubator for bacteria is an old Styrofoam shipping box with a heating mat and thermometer that he has modified into a thermostat. He uses a pressure cooker to sterilize instead of an autoclave. Some instruments are fashioned from coffee cans.

In the burgeoning world of citizen science, where the ethos is closer to scout manual than peer-reviewed journal, Mr. Garvey, a 26-year-old geneticist who worked in a cancer research center for about four years after earning a graduate degree, is something of a hero. He is perhaps best known for inventing the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer. His plans are freely available online, so anybody who has the desire and the resources to make one can do so.

He and other scientific improvisers, or bio-hackers, are part of a movement called DIYbio, short for do-it-yourself biology, which got its official start in 2008 with DIYBio.org, an online hub for sharing ideas. The site has grown to more than 2,000 members since its inception.

“I want to generate the sort of tools that make it easy to do DIYbio at home,” Mr. Garvey said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/science/for-bio-hackers-lab-work-often-begins-at-home.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210

[Javaman]

1. In other news: boyscout trys to build nuclear reactor at home...

Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout.
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, Mich., some 25 miles outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, where the only thing lurking around the corner is an ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.

Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.

Huddled with a group of neighbors, Pease was nervous. "I was pretty disturbed," she recalls. Publicly, the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that day said there was nothing to fear. The truth is far more bizarre: the shed was dangerously irradiated and, according to the EPA, up to 40,000 residents of the area could be at risk.

The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

More at link...

[Warpy]

2. The kid didn't look good, either

As I recall, he was a spotty teenager and it looked like the spots had been there for some time, his body incapable of healing them quickly. He's probably shortened his life doing this without taking proper precautions.

However, the way he assembled materials was sheer genius.

[varelse]

3. Very cool

thanks for the link

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Check out "Biopunk" ...

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781617230028-0