Mac has written two short but deep posts, inspired by a talk by Sophia Roosth. What inspired Mac was Sophia's "anthropological insight" that DIYbio is "domesticating" Biology.

While I don't feel that it's an explicit doctrine, domestication of Biology is indeed the spirit of what DIYbiologists are up to. It's something that arises from the curiosity, openness, and tinkering that represents the DIYbiolgist "ethic." Sophia puts it in terms of "episteme" (Knowing) and "techie" (Doing).

Biology, as a discipline, is young in many ways - "science" itself is a product of the Enlightenment. And, as a focus of understanding, Biology is old - Aristotle was a biologist.

But domesticated Biology is at the core of civilization: thousands of years ago folks were breeding animals and plants, and brewing beer, bread, yogurt, and wine. These are the heart of Genetics and Microbiology and Biochemistry.

Mac made a recording of Sophia's talk. It's brilliant and really expresses DIYbio (and synthbio) as it is today and where it can lead. It's a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of Biology.

She makes a very nice story of the mind-sets of institutional and non-institutional scientists. And she pivots around the Homebrew Computer Club analogy as a way to think of the where DIYbio is going.

In many ways, she reminds me of the talks Dana Boyd gave, back in the day, as she watched the early evolution of social networking - Sophie brings together a range of threads from different disciplines to provide some coherence and understanding of the events and thinking unfolding right in front of us. Sophie has articulated what DIYbiologist just knew, just "did," in their hearts.

I think her insights just accelerate the nucleation of the "movement" at these early stages of exploration.

Go listen to it.

Image from pusgums

I've been meaning to share this for the longest time. I've had this book for ages and never tire of it.

"The Machinery of Life," by David Goodsell, is an illustrated journey through cells and proteins and macromolecules - at scale.

What I like about the book is that it attempts to show what it really looks like if you're the size of a molecule - the crowding, the relative sizes, and so on.

It's a really fascinating book for someone like me who has his head in the (molecular) clouds. :-)

There is a review of the original edition (PDF). A nice phrase from that review was "cellular numeracy," referring to the way Goodsell places things in scales, making us realize the relative sizes of molecules and cells.

At the iGEM Jamboree I saw a color image from Goodsell. After searching a bit, I now know that there is a color edition of the book (just out in 2009?), updated with new molecules, too. You can see more on Goodsell's own pages at Scripps.*

I highly recommend this book for anyone messing with molecules, to get a good idea of what the macromolecular landscape truly looks like.

Enjoy!

*It's a shame that the Scripps pages are so 1999-ish. The site needs to be more visual and more up to date.

In a previous post, I discussed how we've forgotten techniques and instruments of the past. These techniques and instruments could come in handy as garage scientists try to build their labs.

In that post, I mentioned that folks keep fruit flies in plastic bottles that look like milk bottles (well, only if you know what a milk bottle looks like, otherwise, it's just another oddly-shaped bottle). In case you're wondering, the use of milk bottles goes back to the days of Thomas Hunt Morgan, the genetics genius who chose the fruit fly as a model organism. Somehow, he and his contemporaries did a ton of great science without the kits and super equipment we have today.

What do you think?

I think these vestiges are really cool and I like seeing them wherever I can (and I have a ton of stories about these vestiges). 

Do you know of any more?

Image from wikipedia.

In this new era of natural philosophers (neo-natural philosophers?), where the cost of buying science kits and instruments can be an obstacle to amateur science, I keep thinking back to how science was done many years ago. What were the tools used? What were the different reagents of the day? How can this lost knowledge be applied today to circumvent barriers to modern reagent and instrument access?

I remember when I was a tech at MIT, back in the late 80s. There was an old Worthington molecular biology catalog with reagents and enzymes. For restriction enzymes, there were two: EcoRI and BamHI. Talking around the lab, our PI told me how "in the day" everyone had to purify their own restriction enzymes. 

To me, that was fascinating. By the late 80s, the New England Biolabs catalog was already full of a ton of enzymes and kits. And, huh, it was so easy to sequence DNA by doing nested deletions of M13 vectors and using the kit's primers. And then you could purify plasmids with CsCl gradients and gobs of Ethidium Bromide in milligram balanced tubes and a wicked cool ultra-centrifuge. 

State of the art, man!

As the junior tech in that lab at MIT, I was also responsible for keeping the fly stocks alive, transferring them on a regular basis from old bottles to new bottles. As per fruit fly science convention of the time, the flies were kept in small glass milk bottles, with cardboard plugs. I wonder how old our bottles were, but I was told that it was getting harder to find the bottles or even the cardboard plugs.

When I went over to the Whitehead to do some experiments, I saw that they all had plastic containers - in the shape of a milk bottle. It was the future, but in the image of the past. I wonder if folks today know why they still use such oddly shaped bottles to store flies in.

Straddling the past and future, that lab was a treasure trove of old stuff. I once opened a drawer at the lab and found a ton of capillary tubes with different color markings and sizes. These were actually glass micro-pipettes, calibrated and used with a mouth adapter (oh, my!), and eventually replaced by Gilsons with disposable plastic tips.

In summary, there are a ton of techniques and tools that have been knocked aside by kits and newer instruments, mostly for convenience (because I am a science history enthusiast, I have a ton of these stories). For those enterprising neo-natural philosophers, if you long for some kit or instrument, imagine back to the day when you got your hands dirty and didn't just buy your reagents. You might find some ideas how to create your own reagents and tools.

Image of pigments from hyperscholar, to remind you that "in the day" artists ground and mixed their own pigments to make paint. No kit for them!