The Rogue Experimenters
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Cool stuff! Can anyone who is more familiar comment on how "legit" these biospaces actually are? I also had the vague sense that cutting-edge biology is totally intractable outside of a very well-funded lab.
Also, look up OpenTrons. Lab automation is not glamorous work. There is no huge consumer market like 3D printers and drones to help push the price down. Even on the evangelism side, there has yet to be an "EEVBlog for biotechnology" (the closest are Thought Emporium and Josiah Zayner's channel). Perhaps this pandemic would change things. 80% of the expensive stuff are mostly imaging or spectrometry related. Most of the remain 20% are expensive because they are niche and proprietary, not necessarily because they are hard. There is no printer driver moment (Stallman et al.) to catalyze any mass change because, well, the entire society that brought up the poor postdoc using the printer sees nothing wrong in biomedical research being expensive and gatekept and that postdoc him/herself is a product of that system, otherwise he/she won't have made postdoc. A lot of things are niche and expensive, just ask those who had to work on video protocols like AV1. Yet they are available for free. There are a ton of biotechnology that requires, to use a gaming slang, "grinding", but are a magnitude easier than good video compression, instead they are all extremely out of reach for the casual practitioner. Just google "basal cell media". It is bread and butter of many labs but cost more than caviar. Think of bio instrumentation being like obscure fintech time series databases. They are not necessarily more difficult to build or engineer than anything else but are simply constrained by demand hence ridiculous pricing.
As for legitimacy of hackerspaces, I will frame it through your lens (from your username I am guessing that you are a quant). The FDA is essentially the SEC of anything biomed related. However it is not a true free market in the sense that anyone can enter. Hence legitimacy is a problem. The equivalent of FINRA accreditation is a PhD and/or medical school. Small independent traders are very much not a thing when it comes to biotech (which is what the various movements mentioned in the article is trying to change). Also people like Josiah Zayner are very unpopular because they upset the usual narrative about biohackers being unaccredited "they know not what they do" and merely attention-seeking stunt people.
If you want some reading resources that are hacker friendly, try this O'Reilly book:
The lack of easy commercialisation of biotechnology and regulatory capture in the name of "move fast break things and people die" has resulted in very poor understanding of biochemistry among the general population (most advocates and detractors of vaccines cannot explain how they work or don't work at the chemical level, one of the reasons for the whole Thiomersal controversy). The top minds who do go into this field often do so for the sake of medical school, where the number of places are limited by politics and gatekeeping rather than any practical meritocratic reason. The lack of money and opportunity is a fundamental problem. Currently large numbers of the general population have a damn good understanding of how computers work, thanks in part due to web dev bootcamps and the rise of FAANG driving the industry. The same cannot be said for biology or even organic chemistry. Bill Gates has famously said that he would study biology if he was to go back to school again, but in the current environment it would be doubtful any unicorn-level of fast financial gains/reward can be achieved in biotechnology. He will most likely end up as one of the numerous healthcare workers whose ultimate reward after each day of dealing with a pandemic is orchestrated clapping instead of spearheading vaccine research through his foundation (assuming of course he had not already switched to working as a McKinsey consultant given his family connections). Global pharmaceutical and healthcare research is still currently led by the United States; FDA-approval being the universal standard. Sure there are a couple EU-only projects and some attempts in Asia too, but the world's biotech research and development still operates fundamentally within the system of American capitalism. The dearth of opportunities due to politics, regulatory capture, and general lack of appreciation of biology is as much a tragedy as lack of health insurance. Most people would immediately identify with or quote the various media talking points when it comes to healthcare pricing, but hardly anyone would question why there are such tremendous gatekeeping and lack of competition.
I will also link to my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471482
Giving up in the face of ignorance is not good policy so I will continue my advocacy of more open biology and medical education even if my comments succumb to the ego of software engineer hordes.
But, to be fair, the state of the art in biology is still full of Magic and other nonreproducible effects.
Computery people get annoyed if a compilation takes 10 minutes and fails with a cryptic error message. Compare this to an experiment where (for example) you spend a full day harvesting fetal rat hippocampus cells, cultivate them for weeks, and then finally run your experiment which "fails". Did you fail the rat prep? It worked for the wizard postdoc but she has been dissecting tiny little hippocampi for years -- maybe the cells aren't what you think they are. Or maybe, due to some unknown factor (temperature? feeding schedule? co2? mycoplasma? ...), the cells are "unhappy" for... some reason . Etc. More of the same, another month, another year, another replication which may or may not be sufficient to quit the experiment altogether. The systems are not understood well enough to debug; the systems which are easily debuggable are not relevant to the real world. But, it is not difficult to do at home what one does in an academic lab. (corporate labs have a bit more money which shortens the iteration loop a bit but doesn't make it less cryptic)
Anecdotally, I got a life science PhD and went into a softwarey career because the iteration loop of biology just plain sucks. When I was in grad school, I had free reign to do absolutely whatever with no oversight (if the bills looked normal) -- and did, for a while. All those cool ideas I had, I am content to let other people have and realize them. I am content to read their papers and to hire them.
No, it's not. It's full of things that have week long design cycles (instead of a 200 ms compile loop) and are a pain, and lots of grad students that have either never heard of design of experiments, or know about it and are overeager to apply it. A friend worked at BP biofuels. The team kept waving off irreproducibility as 'biology being strange'. For months she kept saying "hey guys our feedstocks aren't defined". Then finally after a half a year they caved and let her do her experiments, and sure enough there was a limiting nutrient in the feedstock that correlated with the fluctuations. Then a few months later the supreme court ruled against BP and the biofuel project got cancelled.
I had a similar experience, and switching model organisms took my design cycle from 2 weeks to two days, and got huge results out of it. We then put the results back in the original organism and recapitulated the improvement. Then my project got cancelled.
In the end though, it seems I'm better at software and it pays better.
Very cool. If you care to elaborate on this: what were the two organisms, what made the second amenable to much faster design cycles, and how did you know that the results would likely carry over to the original organism?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23819621/
If you use the right tools and live in the right place you can get an e coli design cycle down to 48 hours. In San Diego, i could design primers in the afternoon, have them on my desk in the morning, do a pcr/Gibson assembly that was done by lunch, pick colonies in the evening, miniprep and retransform early the next day and have phenotypes soon after.
It's also robust. I trained an intern with only classroom experience in molecular biology and he made 50 mutations and biochemically tested half over the course of 10 weeks.
On one hand, I got a completely DIFFERENT view of medicine when I read the book "King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery"
The original open-heart surgeries required two people - they would stitch their circulatory systems together! One would breathe and pump the blood for both of them, while the other had his heart taken out of the loop for the time of the operation.
On the other hand, I think about the Chinese labs, experimenting on bats and the spread of covid-19.
Open heart surgery is now a thing. So is covid-19. what is the reality?