Garage Biology and Open Source Biology: Twenty five years ago, kids flocked to computers, pushing the limits of what they could do. Similarly, the next generation of genetic engineers won't need laboratories or even PhD: they'll have laptops, cheap mail order DNA synthesis, and, thanks to Google and Wikipedia and open journals like PLOS Biology, access to mountains of free biological data. They'll work in basements, garages, and cafes, and they'll trade ideas and collaborate on genetic designs the same way open source programmers now write computer code. Keep in mind that it was only 30 years ago that a little company called Apple started out of a California garage.
Thanks to Bill Hooker's blog response for calming me down a bit about how brilliant this quote is. The main issue I have is that there are risks associated with genome engineering that are different and more substantial than those associated with piecing together computers here and there.
And a big thanks to the originators of the fully open-access DNA and protein sequence databases, and to those who have ensured that new sequences (including genome sequences) continue to be deposited there.
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