Aggregated News
It was a school night in November, and a ragtag band of self-appointed biologists was trolling the Web for discount lab equipment, the way some people scan Gilt for designer deals. Coming across a new NanoDrop Spectrophotometer, a device used to measure quantities of DNA, they perked up.
“Ooh, that one’s 30 percent off,” said Sung Won Lim, 22, who works the graveyard shift at a 24-hour grocery in Elmhurst, Queens.
He spoke too soon. “That only applies to the service plan,” said Russell Durrett, 23, who happens to be a lab technician at New York University’s Center for Genomics. The actual price, he noted, was $10,650.
The group was hanging out at GenSpace, a new do-it-yourself biology lab carved out of an old office building in downtown Brooklyn. Its members, who call themselves “garage biologists” or “biohackers,” are trying to do for modern biology what hackers did for computers: turning geek into chic.
Aided by Web sites including OpenWetWare.org, which give laypeople access to the same information as Ph.D candidates — not to mention the easy availability of computers...
“Ooh, that one’s 30 percent off,” said Sung Won Lim, 22, who works the graveyard shift at a 24-hour grocery in Elmhurst, Queens.
He spoke too soon. “That only applies to the service plan,” said Russell Durrett, 23, who happens to be a lab technician at New York University’s Center for Genomics. The actual price, he noted, was $10,650.
The group was hanging out at GenSpace, a new do-it-yourself biology lab carved out of an old office building in downtown Brooklyn. Its members, who call themselves “garage biologists” or “biohackers,” are trying to do for modern biology what hackers did for computers: turning geek into chic.
Aided by Web sites including OpenWetWare.org, which give laypeople access to the same information as Ph.D candidates — not to mention the easy availability of computers...