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

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!

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