[DIYbio] Re: Democratizing Science - What can we do?

Thanks for the tips Elisabeth.
I think one of the big detractors of DIY Bio and Science is that there has not been much accomplished yet but that is also the great boon!
It means that there is so much one can do to contribute.

I know in my personal experience it is really scary to leave behind academia because everyone in academia follow that path like a cult and are willing to endure poor pay and long hours to prove how much they love their job. What they don't tell you is that you can love what you do and be paid well and not need to work long hours to prove something.

Scientists are told that it's not as _pure_ to work in the commercial Scientific industry but why? Those in industry are the people who are actually integrating Scientific knowledge into our world.

The problem lies in that the successful academic people don't want anything changed because they want to keep their success and there is no simple way for someone to become successful. I can't just train and score more goals. It is probabilistic and stochastic.

These things need to be changed and most people know that but people are afraid, and resources are lacking. For someone in a Ph.D. program it takes alot of work and alot of risk. When you have a Ph.D., monetarily this could be tens of thousands of dollars a year. A number of people have emailed me asking why I would leave my job.

The answer is that sometimes we need to look beyond ourselves and see that maybe what I can do is great but what 1,000 trained people can do is much greater.

JZ

On Friday, September 4, 2015 at 11:08:36 AM UTC-7, Elisabeth Steel wrote:

The discussion in this thread led by Josiah is exactly what has drawn me to DIY bio. I am a PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Wayne State University. For going on 12 years of my career in academia, I've seen bright individuals get their PhDs or newly minted junior professors slave to this system of researching topics that *might* get them funding. The suggestion to stay in Academia and shoot for gaining tenure, while may sound like a supportive comment, is easier said than done. In my opinion and experience, continuing down that road ends in me running myself into the ground, not having enough time for my children, and inadvertently wreaking havoc on my marriage. My passion is biology and engineering, the future is so bright but the finding climate in academia is bleak beyond words. That's why I intend to take advantage of local resources on campus and launch a biotech hacker space in Detroit. (Actually, in Farmington Hills, halfway between UM Ann Arbor and Detroit, where I live, so we'll call it southeast Michigan to be honest haha).
Citizen science is where it's at and I want to join the movement in rebelling against this repressive environment in academia and industry, we must band together and take STEM back for the betterment of humanity and not just focusing on profit-oriented projects.

If anyone reading this is in the Southeast Michigan area, and is interested in joining STEAM Here & There, I'd love to talk more. I'm in the process of preparing my pitch for a competition at Wayne State in October. Those funds and legal services I already have free access to will be used to file a 501(c)3 to get the STEAM Here & There proverbial show on the road. We envision having a biotech hackerspace in a location easily accessible to the community, with a mobile unit that will travel about the Southeast Michigan area bringing pop-up science and tech events to schools and neighborhoods who otherwise would not have access to these resources.

Regarding competent cells, Josiah, have you made these before at work? Or are these your first try ever at home? I used to be the lab manager in Dr. Allen Liu's lab at UM in Mechanical Engineering. His passion is synthetic biology. I've made competent BL21(DE3) (for protein expression) and DH5(alpha) which may be what you're working on. I would be happy to converse about troubleshooting! I know our first few batches when Allen started his lab at UM after moving from Scripps was that we needed to snap freeze. Do you have LN at home? If not, we used to out dry ice in absolute ethanol to get a solution cool enough for snap freezing!