> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.

I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p

good thing we live in real life and not a movie

Reality is often stranger than fiction though! :-)

Less in keeping with the anti-intellectual witch-hunting political agendas of Hollywood, though.

Don’t worry, synthetic life doesn’t work very well without evolution to tune it into a useful ecological niche. Venter already did something similar.

Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.

In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).

This is incredible. I have a biochemistry and bioinformatics background, and I've always been curious about how easy and cheap it could be to do various experiments at home. Godspeed!

a literal home lab!

My favorite piece of lab equipment is the bed.

Wow this is very exciting! Always makes me happy when I see your comments on HN, you're always up to something interesting! Are you hiring developers or aspiring bioengineers? (I'm a developer and an aspiring bioengineer)

Someday hopefully soon when I raise a seed :)

I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.

How about free labor? Are you interested in people who want to work for free?

Definitely, producing open source works that would help me! Feel free to send me an email and we can talk about what makes sense to you. Also put some more above.

That's encouraging! The barrier of entry for BioE feels very high compared to software. What do you think is a good way to make a transition between them?

Also, I second what Dig1t said. I would gladly get involved and volunteer my time and skills, just to get my foot in the door. Would contributing to dnadesign be a good place to start?

Definitely! If you're willing to help, throw me an email so we can talk where it would best fit for you :)

some sets of problems I have right now (on the hardware / software side):

Hardware: It'd be great to have an open source plate gripper. I wrote a little bit about the general problem of transferring here - https://keonigandall.com/posts/transfer_problem.html . I have a uarm lite6, but wanted to investigate building an arctos robotic arm to move plates between machines. Just need the gripper! This is something I cannot do myself - I have software skills, and can build things with my hands, but have zero skills on designing new hardware.

Software: A lot more here, but depends on interests. I have some general life-improvements I'm looking at doing, but also some wild ideas that need prototyping

Very impressive work. Are you still able to proceed with operating your lab despite the injunction passed against you for theft of trade secrets? [1]

[1] https://www.sideman.com/ronald-fisher-and-ellen-leonida-achi...

yep, nothing in there prevents me from doing work. That article is mainly their legal team fluffing their own feathers for their clients, which I'd hope that one would be able to read between the lines for, considering it was published by the lawyers themselves. The lawsuit itself is quite frivolous and accusing me of stealing and using source code I didn't steal/use, so just have to go through the legal motions to prove that. The more details you know about the case the more absurd it becomes

I hope you win and get some big cash rewards for these kinds of accusations.

Very cool, I wish you the best of luck. Fuck Trilobio