Things to do as a High School Student

[MattP]

I'm interested in synthetic biology, and feel like I would probably pursue it later in life, in college most likely (major in BioEng, probably). However, is there anything I can do now? I thought about starting an iGEM HS team, but the school doesn't really have the infrastructure and there's probably not enough interest. What do you think would be the best thing to do to sort of get up to speed, and what kind of projects should I possibly look into. I have experience from robotics, so actually building equipment (gel boxes, light bulb PCR, etc) would be a possibility, but other than that, what sort of things are possible? Also, what would a basic lab setup require?

[Mega]

Hey,

As I always recommend, start by watching this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sovDqqhQJx8

it makes clear a lot about genetic engineering using plasmids. I think, this is a very good start.

If you have access to a university lab (or if it's legal in your country just DIY at home) you can do this experiment.


All you need is an incubator (best: 37°C; maybe 32-37°C do the job), ice , 42°C water, and a pressure cooker.

The chemicals you'll need are the plasmids, LB Agar, Ampicillin. And E.Coli of course.
I bought Ampicillin as a bird's medicine containing amp. It didn't work. So better invest a few bucks more and get something that works.


All the best

[MattP]

I'll see if I can finagle my way into one of the local university's labs. Thanks for the pointer!

[MattP]

And in the US I am pretty sure it's legal, but I'll check. Better safe than sorry/arrested.

[Jonathan Cline]

On Saturday, April 14, 2012 1:35:35 AM UTC-7, MattP wrote:

I'm interested in synthetic biology, and feel like I would probably pursue it later in life, in college most likely (major in BioEng, probably).

Start by dropping out of high school and going straight to college.


## Jonathan Cline
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[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 1:53 AM, Jonathan Cline <jnc...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, April 14, 2012 1:35:35 AM UTC-7, MattP wrote:

I'm interested in synthetic biology, and feel like I would probably pursue it later in life, in college most likely (major in BioEng, probably).

Start by dropping out of high school and going straight to college.

And I would add, that probably means "take classes at a college", not "go through some overpriced degree mill program". But swinging it either way is much better than HS value.

- Bryan

http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[MattP]

I feel like that's not the answer. High school provides me with a relatively well rounded education, at a much lower cost than paying to take classes at a university. Now, if I were in the next city down, I would feel different. The school there subsidizes fees for college classes. But my district does not. Also, due to my schedule, taking courses like that would basically eliminate any chance of sleep, as well as cost money that isn't exactly plentiful at the moment.

[Mac Davis]

Depends on who you are and what you want. High school is a well-rounded education for some people... a sorely lacking education for others. Read everything you can on the internet and if you have a strong motivation to do so... as soon as you can get some money start putting together some projects.

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[mad_casual]

This is kinda funny because the other day I was asking advice from a friend of mine who runs a garage about doing a classic car restoration on my own. The first words out of his mouth were, "It's gonna be tough because you graduated High School." It's good to get the stark reminders that the internet and real life are only loosely connected.

With robotics, did you gain experience in a HS class or from a DIYRobotics forum or did you just screw around on your own and figure it out?

My advice:

1. Culture something... anything. Prokaryote/Eukaryote, aerobe/anaerobe, single cell/multi-cellular... it really doesn't matter. R&D in SynBio, at least for the near future, leans heavily towards algae(s) and microbes, but current application spans the range of organisms. What you'll require will largely depend on your organism(s); between a pot and soil and a ball jar with water, you can grow your own portion of about 90+% of the biomass on Earth. Automate the process; add nutrients, filter waste, cull/harvest organisms as necessary. If you get bored, find a new organism. Growing organisms has an intrinsic value regardless of your future career path, the sort of thing they might teach or 'force' you to do in High School. If you show up in a DIYBio forum asking where to start, to me, the pretty clear answer is with growing something.

2. Purify something... anything, ideally from the above. It doesn't really matter if it's oil from soybeans, capsaicin from chilis, HRP from horseradish, polymerase from Taq, or DNA from chicken teeth. Why build gel boxes when you could, using robotics experience, print out self-contained tubes of agar at various pore-sizes/densities? You're going to need DNA and lots of it to test the gel tubes. Automate the process; chuck whole pumpkins in  one end and collect purified DNA from the other. Again the process is intrinsically valuable.

3. (Re)Combine something... anything. The above two aren't a prerequisite, but they'll give you a good idea of what you will and won't want to recombine and how easy and/or fast it will be to do. I recommend starting with microbes as they're good for troubleshooting, but it's not necessary. Cloning plants is dead simple, people have been doing it for a century or more, but it takes time and there are rather strict limits to what you can clone. Fruit flys are pretty conceivable on a DIY scale. Mammals are probably out of the reach of beginners, but if you have dreams of creating actual pink bunny rabbits, moral considerations aside, it's within the reach of DIY, IMO.

If you still don't have a great idea where to start, projects for beginners can be found at sites like; Scitoys (http://scitoys.com/), Citizen Science Quarterly (http://citizensciencequarterly.com/) with a mixture of more or less advanced projects at Openwetware; (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Citizen_Science/Open_Spectrophotometer_Project). Hell, gracefully imitate some of these 'ideas'; http://www.carolina.com/home.do so that if you get stuck halfway through, you might be able to get your hands on an actual kit and see where you went wrong. Sorry if I'm undershooting your skill level, but 'Drop out of High School.' seemed like a generally poor and distinctly non-DIY answer to your question.

[Nathan McCorkle]

learn sterile technique NOW... get a small pressure cooker from
walmart or goodwill (if you're in U.S.), some agar or grain or flour,
and start cooking up things in half-pint widemouth mason jars. You
don't even have to innoculate the media (add organisms to the sterile
food)... you'll know you cooked up the media right when after weeks or
months of sitting, then don't grow anything.

so many of my peers (I'm almost done with B.S. in biotech) suck at
sterile technique its a joke. Same goes for lab safety, you gotta stay
safe, and keep your cultures safe from other living things. I started
learning this stuff exactly this way starting when I was 15... and I
can cut corners like a pro compared to my peers, who don't understand
the lab techniques, rather they just read step by step, not seeing
what the ultimate goal is. (10 people can cook fried chicken in 10
different ways, but as long as it tastes good in the end, its
considered a success.... people who have to read step by step a
chicken recipe and don't know what things they can tweak, often are
pretty far behind in knowing how to cook well)

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[MattP]

This is really what I wanted. I'm a Junior, so dropping out would be counterproductive and pretty much worthless. Hey, free education is good enough for me. 

As for robotics, I'm Captain on the school team, and fiddle around on my own time. I can do electrical work, mechanical work, and my only real gap in technical skills from that is programming.

As for the advice, that sounds like a good set of basics to start with. Doable, and within reach. I have been poking around on OWW over the past month, and have a few ideas for an automated liquid handler that I might try to explore over the summer.

Thanks!

[Jonathan Cline]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 12:09:59 AM UTC-7, MattP wrote:

 High school provides me with a relatively well rounded education

Completely bogus especially in the U.S. - where high school is basically free baby-sitting for dumb kids.  Even AP classes are grade school compared to the equivalent college classes.  If you want a well-rounded education, you can pick up books to read on your own (omg, what a concept!), and near anything will be better than U.S. high school textbooks.  This "well rounded" phrase is sometimes used to mask the real intent (oh, I want to socialize and fool around with the opposite sex and play around) which is also better at college, too - and it's often parroted by those who aren't well educated anyway (or Moms fearing their kids won't ever mate).  Hint; kids can still go to prom even though they've dropped out of high school.  And college classes take only 1/3 the time of the equivalent high school class (i.e. one year of high school history compared to 1 quarter of college history; duh!).  Hopefully all the digital/Internet curriculums (MIT, Berkeley, itunes U, etc) will even out the brain-deadening vortex of high school.  For biology though you're still left without a proper lab to work in.

[Emil Lindfors]

Thanks for bringing this up! The suggestions have been interesting and inspiring! I graduated from high school last spring and am not yet very familiar with DIYbio stuff, so this discussion is a perfect match for my skill level.  

[Cathal Garvey]

Don't take the dropout suggestions too seriously. It's an idea, sure, but there's some deep political baggage against schooling afloat on the list. It's not really about what's a good idea for you at this point, since you're already made it clear you want to finish High School.

In the end it's a different story for everyone. Some people glorify the self-made dropout, others the avid knowledge seeker, others the social didact.

I think Mad Casual has offered the best advice here: just go and grow something. Hands on learning is crucial here, often a concept it's hard to grasp until you can put it in perspective through the lens of experience.

Easiest starting project to acquire and try is probably isolating pure cultures. Yoghurt, kombucha, sourdough and other mixed cultures also offer great experience potential for learning about separation of cultures etc.

MattP <gink...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Cathal Garvey]

Don't take the dropout suggestions too seriously. It's an idea, sure, but there's some deep political baggage against schooling afloat on the list. It's not really about what's a good idea for you at this point, since you're already made it clear you want to finish High School.

In the end it's a different story for everyone. Some people glorify the self-made dropout, others the avid knowledge seeker, others the social didact.

I think Mad Casual has offered the best advice here: just go and grow something. Hands on learning is crucial here, often a concept it's hard to grasp until you can put it in perspective through the lens of experience.

Easiest starting project to acquire and try is probably isolating pure cultures. Yoghurt, kombucha, sourdough and other mixed cultures also offer great experience potential for learning about separation of cultures etc.

MattP <gink...@gmail.com> wrote:

[mad_casual]

+1, I assumed/implied this, but it's a better idea to state it explicitly.

A Post Doc in Biomedical Engineering program once asked if I could get results from gel band with "at least a couple ng of protein in it" for LC/MS analysis, saying it could be critical to his experiment. I said it was pretty likely and asked if I should come and get it. He said he'd bring it. He came back with it in his bare hands.

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[Nathan McCorkle]

Mad, is that a riddle or trick question?

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[Aaron Vollrath]

probably not a riddle or a trick question.  if the post doc was touching the gel w/ his bare hands he was, with a high degree of probability, contaminating the sample w/ who knows what proteins.  additionally, if there were only nanograms of the protein of interest in the gel the signals from the contaminated protein(s) (i.e., keratins, etc) could mask that of the protein of interest. 

[Nathan McCorkle]

ahh, I misunderstood that he was replying to my earlier comment.... i
misread and thought he was saying the protein was on his hand, to
separate with a gel then take to LC/MS...

:P

--

[sharvari deshpande]

hey ,

        good to know that you want to start an iGEM team however first of all , search for an institute or an organization which is participating in iGEM this year or next , then send your details(or resume)  to the co-ordinator who is involved in the activities of iGEM & if they think your good enough , then you may get selected . even i am interested in synthetic biology & i had tried sending them my details but no response . if you want we can start our own team but for that we require a good scientific idea ( genetic engineering related of course ) then we also require a person who is knowledgeable enough to guide us while working in the field of synthetic biology & most important of all we require "FUNDS" for our research project .

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 2:05 PM, MattP <gink...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm interested in synthetic biology, and feel like I would probably pursue it later in life, in college most likely (major in BioEng, probably). However, is there anything I can do now? I thought about starting an iGEM HS team, but the school doesn't really have the infrastructure and there's probably not enough interest. What do you think would be the best thing to do to sort of get up to speed, and what kind of projects should I possibly look into. I have experience from robotics, so actually building equipment (gel boxes, light bulb PCR, etc) would be a possibility, but other than that, what sort of things are possible? Also, what would a basic lab setup require?

--

[MattP]

Yeah, funds and equipment is probably the biggest opening hurdle for a lot of things like iGEM.

[Jonathan Cline]

The best way to do any amateur bio is in a university/college lab, because:

 - May or may not require actually registering for any classes, depending how you approach the lab.

 - Free use of large lab space.  Or near free, if you need to register for some easy class.  The biggest difficulty is getting a key to the lab - but many labs this is not a problem - depends on who & how you approach the lab.   (Some state uni professors love the idea of doing a project on the side, and possibly publishing a small paper - because state or city prof's don't typically get a chance to do research.)

 - Feds won't be calling you about the harmless stuff in your kitchen with scary names (scary only because they're uneducated).

 - Free slaves, sometimes (just convince others that your project is cooler than the instructors' and they will want to work for you)

 - Free MONEY.  Yes, there is funding available for equipment, materials, reagants, etc, with a suitable project pitched to the lab.  You don't have to provide anything out of your pocket, just your time.

 - Likely no salary.  But we don't care anyway, that's a different thread.

 - Journalists will call you and ask if you're one of those "Under 25 geniuses"  (Why yes, you say, I am.)

 - Maybe Free iGEM funding.  What you really want anyway.

 - A few hands-on mentors to provide tips (in fact, they are paid to provide assistance).

 - Better access to the university library.  Indispensable for research.  Much harder reading those borrowed textbooks without being able to check them out.

 - University software in the university labs.   You're going to need some syn bio editors and such.

 - Possibly meet people as crazy as yourself and start a company on the side.

The only downside:  Beware of who owns the intellectual property, some uni's will not allow publishing even as open source.

Fair disclosure:  I took college classes in high school.  Which is why I absolutely know that high school is a waste of time - especially for lab work.   Keep in mind the real salary distribution between those with nothing, or a B.S., or an M.S.  By putting up with some hassle and going to college early, in essence you gain back 1-2 years of your life during prime-fun years, and possibly graduate with an M.S. by the time your old friends are graduating with only a B.S.   This could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars MORE in salary over the course of your career, compared to those old friends.  (No exaggeration; $10k higher pay each year, minimum, x 20 or more years in the workforce.)


Alternatively you could start brewing beer, then sell it to your high school friends, and reap tremendous profits.  Can be done for under $300 from a kit.

Personally if I were really stuck in high school, I'd proceed immediately to the cafeteria and start taking samples to measure for publishing articles on food safety and bacterial contamination, possibly pay for LC/MS via outsourced labs.   Yikes, what kids are provided to eat today is disgusting.

[Giovanni Lostumbo]

"It's an idea, sure, but there's some deep political baggage against schooling afloat on the list. It's not really about what's a good idea for you at this point, since you're already made it clear you want to finish High School."

 I am all too familiar with that. I'm not against being able to drop-out, I'm just in disagreement with those who are actively against those who want to use practical, analytical, and speculative thinking skills (intellectualism) wherever they are (trade school, university, garage, hackerspace, etc) and try not to conform to an assumed groupthink.

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[John Griessen]

On 04/18/2012 09:11 PM, MattP wrote:
> I have been poking around on OWW over the past month, and have a few ideas for an automated liquid handler that I might try to
> explore over the summer.

I'm thinking of how to make minimal liquid handler cheaply by using a turntable as part of the motion
that is controlled and at most 2 other linear position controllers. That could be combined with
incubation to get an automatic culture-minder that "just outflows" milliliters of cultured bugs and asks
for them to be taken to the fridge by alarm clock sounds or maybe internet-toaster-like email messages.

That will have some kind of modular case so later, it can be easily attached to a mini peltier
fridge that is also built as a small lab module. Then it will just quietly fill the fridge with grown bugs
while you do other things.

John

[mad_casual]

I would advise, don't confuse a false perception of greatness with actually being great. Working in a research lab at the age of 19 doesn't make you a genius, no matter what you tell the reporters. Some great people left HS to pursue careers in a variety of fields, leaving HS wasn't what made them great. I doubt many scientists get to the end of their careers and say, "If only I'd gotten out of HS a year or two sooner!"

Fair disclosure: I took college classes in High School too (Hooray for us!) and Mom was a HS math teacher. I also tested out of my foreign language requirements entirely and two semesters of humanities requirements (thanks to my HS education) and two semesters of math requirements (thanks to Mom). I started undergraduate research at 19. The best life/career moves I ever made were; working in my field professionally while I was an undergrad, having zero debt after graduation, and finishing my degree programs early. The best advice I got as an undergrad was from an Economist, the several worst pieces of advice or decisions about "my position" that were offered as an undergrad were offered by Biologists/Biochemists. As you said, no one in academia gets anything resembling a salary. My working in industry showed me that many/most "academics", especially younger ones, are slaves and that there is a sizable amount of brainwashing.

A University might be a great place to get access to a lab, but it's a sandbox, and you're shielded from the actual responsibilities of actually running/maintaining a lab and doing larger scientific work (Contract negotiations, Quality and traceability documentation, interacting with the EPA/FBI/FDA/IRBs/etc./etc., facilities and maintenance, etc.) and you can easily be tricked into becoming a slave yourself. Doing lab work is great, but slavery isn't cool and if the product of your/the work sucks, is phenomenally dangerous, is not reproducible, or some combination of the three, the efficacy of the work is greatly diminished, to the point of being detrimental. Hell the old research adage I always heard was that a week in the lab will save you an hour in the library. On top of that, Universities never actually sell anything, their contribution to GDP comes in the form of business creation. And they are notoriously bad at that, as you said, they tend to claim the rights of the people who do start businesses and prop up journals that exploit Ph.D.s and other slaves. Not to say that all universities are inherently evil (I went to more than one) and I can't say that getting experience in ANY lab is detrimental. What I mean to say is that working in a University Lab isn't exactly DIY and evidence would suggest, for most, the University is more crippling (financial or otherwise) than HS.

If I were stuck in High School I would also brew beer and sell it. Testing for bacterial contamination is pointless as food-bourne illnesses in a HS population are easily observed and tracked with minimal testing whatsoever and 'contamination' that doesn't hurt anyone lacks a certain scientific rigor. Plus, swabbing samples and dropping them in the mail for LC/MS would be expensive and, IMO, is the anti-thesis of DIY and Bio. Now if he were looking at a career in journalism...

[Nathan McCorkle]

I dropped out of High School, not because the knowledge lacked, but
because I just hated the presentation of the material. I've been that
way since I can remember going to school, which I started a year
before kindergarten.

I remember about 20 words from German-themed 4th and 5th grade (which
I wasn't enrolled in, but they lacked space in other classes), about 2
sentences from Latin in middle school, how to say my name and a few
numbers from middle school French, and pretty much nothing but a
'joke' I made in high school Italian (la chiesa en la piazza... "the
cheese is on the pizza!" I exclaimed picking my head up from dozing on
my desk... "no, the church is in the plaza" *embarrassed, goes back to
sleep*)

I also remember my 7th grade science teacher dismissing plasma as the
4th state of matter, she was most likely fresh outta B.S. or M.S. in
teaching... I failed to be a very good student in her class after
that. Ridiculous I thought, how did they let this girl in here?

My tech shop class in middle school was sweet though, we got to use
lathes and bandsaws I think, I built a balsa wood truss bridge of my
own design and used a loading device to find the load at which it
started cracking and breaking. A robotics competition came to the
school, and quickly I was skipping everything from english, lunch,
art, and gym class to tweak with Lego Mindstorms and an MIT Handyboard
(my first foray into C, though I had known some BASIC thanks to the
DOS game Gorillas) Why the hell would I go to gym, or lunch, when I
could make things happen, create things. I put more work into those
robots than any other single student, and we won the regionals against
other middle and high schools, and got sent to Seattle for free to
compete in the nationals (where we had Windows 98 fail on us,
inhibiting us from doing much coding after we left home).

Fast forward to the end of highschool, where administrators finally
got sick of my lifelong career of often missing the first few hours of
school (because I was up late, reading stuff, that also wasn't
necessarily homework), and wanted me to repeat 11th grade. I had
already taken Community College computer courses by that time, two or
three in fact, been to a summer of CMU robot camp (middle school era),
and was enrolled in the Community College that year as well, in at
least a Java course. I dropped out in the summer, took GED and scored
in 99th %ile, took SAT and bio subject test, got something like a 1280
out of 1400 or 1600 (can't remember, that was some 8 years ago now)...
and in the Fall I was enrolled full-time at the Community college in
business and horticulture classes (my dad wanted me to take the biz
classes, so I obliged, and he had been taking hort classes and was
already into bio). I ended up dropping the biz classes because, well,
they sucked since I wasn't really interested too much in biz.

Worked construction for a few months with my dad, then got an free
trip to do trail work for a month in Idaho with the SCA (student
conservation association), which lead me to getting an AmeriCorps
position in SoCal's Mojave desert working on BLM lands. Screwed around
on a ranch outside L.A. laboring and painting movie sets for a while
after that, and took a TEFL certification class (teaching english as a
foreign language) with plans to go live in Nepal for 6 months. Got to
Nepal, hiked for a month in the Himalayas, seeing men with chicken
coops and fuel tanks strapped to their backs, being the FedEx of the
mountains, and realized people (like Elian Gonzalez's mom) die for a
chance to get into the U.S. for opportunity... and that staying an
unpaid english teacher in Nepal could be like throwing that
opportunity away.

After getting back to L.A. I wasn't sure where to go, until I started
counting how many cents I was getting paid for each shovel full of
dirt I was shuttling out of a collapsed water tank. I had been reading
a lot about algae for biofuels, and as luck had it I moved back east
because my father's heart attack called me to his bedside. Depressed
and unsure, I scoured loads of college websites, and visited two that
I had friends attending. I happened upon a professor's Innovation and
Invention class while checking out the RIT campus, and a week later
when I was heading back from Vermont past RIT, stopped and saw him
again. He liked me so much he paid me cash that day for computer work,
and offered me a paid research position if I was accepted into RIT.
Got into RIT no problem, probably thanks to him in a good way.

If I hadn't skipped all those gym classes, and english classes, and
art classes... if I wouldn't have thrown my school years down the
drain by staying up late hacking linux and reading internet forums
about programming languages, and all the late nights when I would hide
under the blanket until well past my bedtime with a flashlight reading
science and invention encyclopedias... I probably wouldn't have got
into college. If I had simply followed the rules, dealt with the
stress and conformed, I probably would be a really lame and boring sad
person today. Not conforming wasn't easy either though, to most people
that's a bad thing, and its true that from outside my family I
probably seemed no different than the rest of the screw-ups who are
now working their way up the McDonalds corporate ladder.

If I can say one thing from all of this, its that you have to trust
you instinct.

If learning how to read stresses the hell out of you, like practicing
math for a math class does to me, so be it, accept the label of
dyslexic... but don't push yourself to read if you can see and
understand intuitively how to craft and machine wood and metals. Most
people who know how to read can't swing a hammer square on a nail if
their life depended on it. Most people can't even change a flat car
tire.

That said, you've also got to be pragmatic... you should at least
learn how to read and write numbers, you don't want to get ripped off
paying $10 for a bottle of milk. You also don't want to be the guy
stuck working for the local tow truck service, changing an endless
number of tires for dumb people, working 80 hours a week to feed a
girlfriend and her two kids.

This philosophy/idealism certainly won't work for all people, but I do
think inventors and scientists of the olden days, when a single guy
can come up with something cool and novel, are by no means over.
Corporate way of life is NOT the only way of life, people in other
countries live on $2 a day and in my opinion are probably doing better
nutrition-wise than a significant portion of Americans.

Welcome to the Real World, MattP... if school doesn't stress you out,
awesome, you're here hanging out with me because you must have some
curiosity, some desire to discover, the urge to ask questions. I think
most of people can't stand being probed intellectually, can't stand to
hear another "why?" question, because I think most people just don't
think that deep.

Welcome to a group of people that love to ask "why?", keep coming back.

P.S. I'm about a month shy of finishing a degree in Biotech
concentrating in Bioinformatics, college structure sucks as much as
the rest of my school career, but overall the stress that I get from
it is definitely far outweighed by the amount of knowledge and
learning I've had access to. The DIYbio group has been my college peer
group, because frankly most of my peers are going to end up in a
really boring lab tech (bottle washer) or quality control (doing the
repetitive work of robots) job, because they don't have passion,
drive, focus, or whatever the hell the rant I just spewed out
describes.

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