[DIYbio] Sounds Like a Bad Biotech Business Idea or Not? Color Changing Flowers

I think it is the responsibility of Scientists to question and police and have certain standards when it comes to interacting with the public and selling products online. To this end I tend to be critical and I hope you all can be. Besides being a dick, I think it helps the companies and people proposing ideas to really think about them and have a clear plan to what they are doing.

With projects like the Glowing Plant Project being way behind schedule, how much would it suck if the first 5 or 10 crowdfunded biotech projects failed to deliver anything? It would make us all look bad and makes us look like charlatans when unreasonable things are touted as reasonable.

At SXSW I met Nikolai and RevBIo and I am pretty skeptical of their project(https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/color-changing-flowers) and did not completely understand how they plan to do what they wanted to do so we decided to do a question and answer

You can read the questions and answers here:
http://doitourselfscience.blogspot.com/2015/03/genetically-engineered-color-changing.html

This first round is just to get a general idea of how they plan to do what they are doing. The second round of questions I plan to be more technical and critical.

I encourage you to post technical questions that you want to ask and be critical. I will make sure Nikolai, Kiera and Revolution Bioengineering address them when we do a second round.




Josiah Zayner, Ph.D.
Space Bioengineering Branch
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035