Melina Fan just wanted a few plasmids. In 2004, the young biologist was wrapping up a PhD in the lab of Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She was working on a project to identify proteins that interact closely with PGC-1, a protein involved in mammalian metabolism. Fan wrote to 20 laboratories asking for plasmids—pieces of DNA that encode individual genes—for each of the proteins she was targeting.
“Maybe only half the labs got back to me,” says Fan. “And even then, I never knew if or when they were actually going to send [the plasmids].” It took 2 to 3 months on average for a plasmid to arrive at Dana-Farber, and some of the ones Fan received turned out to code for the wrong genes. Her project slowed to a crawl.
Instead of bearing a grudge, however, she bore an idea. “I figured other labs probably ...
