I sit on the advisory board of an art gallery that exhibits contemporary artists who engage with science and technology. Last December, the curator had some exciting news in his end-of-year email: His gallery was proposing to join forces with a number of other organizations to create a multi-use venue that would offer small-scale fabrication facilities for makers, hackers, hobbyists, artists, and entrepreneurs; classroom space for workshops and educational programming; and exhibit space for art.
And I had a great idea—several months off the pace, but a great idea nonetheless. Why not add a wet-lab to the mix, to encourage amateur biologists? I knew that the iGEM program (see "Brick by Brick") engages dozens of teams of students from around the world in synthetic biology manipulations, so it didn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest experimentation beyond the professional lab. The proposal was a simple one: set ...
