Re: [DIYbio] Re: DIYbio projects

> I had a disturbing conversation with Randy Rettberg last year at iGEM where
> he practically put his fingers in his ears and said "La La I can't hear you"
> when I asked if Genspace could contribute parts to the BioBricks library.
> Apparently anyone connected with DIYbio is taboo, at least on paper.

It's funny/sad because on their website they extol concepts like
"sharing" and "freedom" but when confronted about their lack of
sharing they give everyone the silent treatment.


> But they would probably flip out if we were to officially share them with
> everyone. This needs to be addressed and rectified, hopefully when the
> library changes hands.

From what I understand the Foundation has no plans to freely
distribute/sell their distributions to anyone outside the official
iGEM teams or university labs any time soon. The only way DIY people
will be able to get parts is through some unofficial distribution
method.

A couple years ago a few friends and I hashed out a plan to replicate
the iGEM distribution that year. It turned out to be a lot more
tedious and monotonous labor than we had hoped. Transforming and
minipreping in bulk was actually a breeze. The difficult part was the
quality control, which was basically a lot of restriction digests. I
could never come up with a method for rapidly checking the correctness
of the plasmids in parallel.

One could imagine a system where individuals who happen to get their
hands on some parts do quick minipreps in bulk, blot the liquid on
paper and distribute the paper to the recipients with no guarantee
that the parts are correct. The quality control would then be in the
hands of the recipients. It's not the ideal situation but for now
it's probably the only way for outsiders to get parts without any one
person dedicating their life to replicating the parts.


-cory

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