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Re:Biotech in the Garage by DaveWalk on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:54PM (#9847688)
I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio-entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it.

While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving the way for that visionary future.

Re:Biotech in the Garage by DaveWalk on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:29PM (#9847876)
But actually, the more I think about it, I enjoy your analogy. The missing tools for sure in "DIYbio" are consumer-oriented lab technologies. Something like a 3D printer for budding biologists to gather themselves around...but nothing really comes to mind. Even a homebrew qPCR machine or sequencing platform leaves out many cruicial components like incubators, ultracentrifuges, etc. Can't even get started on mass spectrometers, flow cytometers or other "Core" technologies that not even every lab can own.

To stretch the analogy more, though, I don't think there is a "Homebrew Biotech Club" in the same groovy, sharing sense than that which Jobs and Gates had way back when.