[DIYbio] Re: [diybio-eu] Modern day Menlow Park

I'm totally in for micronations. We should realize the plastic island idea of phillip boeing and team :D

http://2012.igem.org/Team:University_College_London

also compare http://anno2070.wikia.com/wiki/Techs for inspiration.

 

no seriously: in my eyes, universities could and should be the thing that we are looking for,

but due to some unfortunate development, they became an addendum to for profit corporations,

selling out the intellectual capacity of the academic workers for peanuts.

In most cases I know, the inventor had no influence on the sale of his idea by the uni and did not even get much money out.

even worse, often extremely good ideas are sold to big pharma and then locked away, just to protect less advanced products

on the market from competitors. Universities are stuck with a feudalistic organizational model (at least in germany)

with a professors being the pharaoh like masters and the rest only exchangeable minions without any rights.

In the end, only a few egocentric professors and some managers of these big companies really profit from all the inventions.

neither society has a big influence on what is being made into a product (at best indirectly through consumers choice),

nor the people in academia that do all the labour see much rewards for the things that become successful (think of Mullis).

With 50% of the youngsters in Germany going through uni today, it seems like the academics (once a priviledged class)

are the new workers. So now it's the question if universities can be reformed (many tried and failed)

or if some new structures are easier to realize. or if it's all totally pointless…

 

Recently, I had the chance to talk to Carl Djerassi, the inventor of "the pill".

He told me straight away to give up my ideas on improving contraception methods.

In his eyes( the man is 93) the capitalist pharma world is in a dead end and nothing is going to change within the next 30 years until a significant

people are going to suffer (and die) so badly again, that even this monolithic structure will see enough (financial) incentive to change its ways.

I find this prospect quite horrible. We have such an unprecedented amount of knowledge and technology at hand, with a very high percentage of the

population educated to make use of it. It will not even be very expensive to find solutions compared to the collateral costs when doing nothing

and waiting until people suffer and die. So why on earth is nothing happening to make use of this potential to really solve problems that everybody is facing (e.g. antibiotic crisis)?

 

 

 

 

Von: Andreas Stuermer [mailto:masterstorm123@gmail.com]
Gesendet: Sonntag, 17. August 2014 11:32
An: diybio-eu@diybio.eu
Cc: diybio@googlegroups.com
Betreff: Re: [diybio-eu] Modern day Menlow Park

 

I just googled menlo park and it seems amazing!! 

You're still bound to all the laws. You would really have to found a new nation like micronations so you could do anything you want and set up our own ethics senate

 

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Andreas Stuermer <masterstorm123@gmail.com> wrote:

So you want to gather several diy biologists, put them in a lab and have them work on a idea and get rich with it? 

 

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 6:12 AM, Dakota Hamill <dkotes@gmail.com> wrote:

Why don't we create a modern day invention factory, where we all suffer in a crappy wooden lab with all the old-school hardcore lab equipment we need, and create amazing things for shared profit?

 

Much of the internet seems to always chose Tesla > Edison because Edison killed an elephant, but they were both genius in their own right as inventors and businessmen.  If Drunken History has taught us anything, Edison went on to found GE, while Tesla died alone in a hotel, in love with a pigeon. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOR91oentQ)

 

All jokes aside...I honestly only know one company that was set up to "self fund" scientists doing research, and that was New England Biolabs which is close by. Obviously, there are probably many more, but the point is, many corporate structures are setup in such a way that the few on the top get a large portion of the wealth and the rest is trickle down.

 

Is having 5-20 people inventing the shit out of things a viable business model?  Or...is academia the closest thing to that?

 

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http://diyspartanbiotech.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/genetic-engineering-and-synbio-for-beginners-v1.pdf

 

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http://diyspartanbiotech.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/genetic-engineering-and-synbio-for-beginners-v1.pdf