Twin City Shout Out - Making a new lab for educational and environmental research use.

[Destiny Z]

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to introduce myself an myself and the project that I'm working on! I am a Minneapolis based biohacker working with a non-proffit environmental education organization, using up some limited grant money to cobble together a lab. I'm new to the scene, but I've been following diy bio in the news for a long time now. I'm really excited to start using the techniques and hacks that I've been collecting from all over the internet to try and make a lab that can help bring this organization to the next level.

A huge part of the work I'm doing with this non-proffit is education. We work with high school students during the school year, but in the summer we do internships with people anywhere from high school age to collage graduate. Most of these people are hard-core environmentalists, and carry with them some deep mistrust of lab work and especially anything with genetics. I feel that by helping environmentalists access the same techniques that large companies use, they can start to understand better both the pros and cons of these tools, as well as start using them for their own cause.

Does anyone here use their lab for environmental work? Or have any stories/tips to share about educating groups like this?

This forum has already been a huge resource for me, and I will happily update on any projects/developments if people are interested. environmentalism df

-Destiny Z

[Avery louie]

Welcome!

Have you heard of publiclabs?

You should check them out!

--A

-Destiny Z

--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/4bc732e4-9900-4151-b3db-d473ac6df967%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Destiny Z]

As in labs that the public has access to? Yeah, I follow all the stuff that BioCurious puts out (I wish they would keep doing their podcast), and I keep track of the public labs that pop up around the U.S.. If you mean there is a public lab in Minnesota, then no, and I would sure love to know more!

I have been poking around trying to see if there is much of a DIYBIO community in the twin cities, but so far I haven't been able to find much.

[Ben Hunt]

Public Labs is a franchise non profit (like Engineers without Borders or whatever) with a rather vague sounding name. They do environmental diy bio stuff that's actually pretty cool. They got their start mapping out the deepwater horizon spill and have chapters in a lot of cities. They could point you in the right direction of how to interface environmentalism and technology in a useful way.

Other people I would recommend reading about would be Natalie Jeremijenko (sp?) who did work on robot dogs that sniff out chemical pollutants, and Critical Art Ensemble, who did a lot of interesting and counter-ideological biotech public education projects.

I think it is tricky for many biotech people to get into environmentalism because there is a lot of sketchy ideology filling out stuff like ecology, like, why is animal life more important than microbial life, what is the "proper" ecosystem, etc. Not that there isn't anything there that is useful, it can just be difficult to do interesting technical work in what can often be an ethical sphere. The three groups above, of course, contradict my pessimism and pulled it off.

There is also a hacker space full of nice people in minneapolis too, the Hack Factory, I enjoyed my visit there. Good luck!

[Destiny Z]

Hey! Public Labs is where I plan to get our spectrophotometer! I didn't take the time to look at their other stuff, but I'll definitely give it a read though now. I'll give Natalie Jeremijenko and the Chemical Art Ensemble a look up too. It's really good for me to stay current on this kind of thing, but since I'm a new environmentalism it's a bit hard to know where to start.

I definitely agree that a lot of people that study environmental science focus largely on a specific ideology and ethics. I'm going to have to do some work on making the more political minded group members see the value of lab work. Here's hoping I find some good models to help with that!

I had forgotten about Hack Factory. I should pay them a visit and see what's there. They could be a really good resource once I start making equipment.

Thanks Ben!