nematode theory of Barbie

Why I’m quitting peer review – The Academic Health Economists’ Blog

You may not think of grantmaking as jet-setting, but Stuart Buck makes it sound like being James Bond. More seriously, a fascinating look at the life and times of the most active “metascience venture capitalist”, who ”funded some of the most prominent metascience entrepreneurs of the past 11 years, and often was an active participant in their work.”

And another, from the archives (so to speak): A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology 

Our experiments consisted of inoculating exponentially growing bacteria into a given medium and following bacterial growth by measuring optical density. Samples were taken every fifteen minutes, and the technicians reported the results. They were so involved that they had identified themselves with the bacteria, or with the growth curves, and they used to say for example: “I am exponential,” or “I am slightly flattened.” Technicians and bacteria were consubstantial.

So negative experiments piled up, until after months and months of despair, it was decided to irradiate the bacteria with ultra-violet light. This was not rational at all, for ultra-violet radiations kill bacteria and bacteriophages, and on a strictly logical basis the idea still looks illogical in retrospect. Anyhow, a suspension of lysogenic bacilli was put under the UV lamp for a few seconds. 

… 

It was a very hot summer day and the thermometer was unusually high. After irradiation, I collapsed in an armchair, in sweat, despair, and hope. Fifteen minutes later, Evelyne Ritz, my technician, entered the room and said: “Sir, I am growing normally.”

Willow maybe-illegalism

When You Give a Tree an Email Address:

Being a Lizard — a response to Adam Mastroianni’s invitation to a secret society. The author describes the process of setting up a DIY biology lab, including thoughts on location and instructions on how to spend cents on the dollar for your own lab equipment. We only wish there were more detail, maybe even a complete guide to help others set up their own labs, but maybe that will come in a future post.

One biohacker in particular I got in touch with told me to aim to spend 1-2 cents on the dollar against new pricing on the equipment I needed. At first I thought he was being hyperbolic, but then I started looking in some of the places he told me to, and before I knew it, I was finding and buying thousands of dollars worth of equipment for literally hundreds, making the initial cost barrier I’d perceived negligible. 

You’re probably wondering why this is the case. Well, because the people that are liquidating these items see it as junk that is taking up rentable space, especially large items like biosafety cabinets and CO2 incubators. If you’re patient, these items can literally be acquired for free. Just last week I bid for a $9,000 incubator for < $50 and a 4 hour drive to Iowa State University.

So why isn’t there more demand for this equipment in the open market? According to the NIH, the average research project grant size is over a half a million dollars. You can spend up to $25,000 on a single piece of equipment under a grant budget without even needing to ask for approval. Academic labs and companies with funding have every incentive to buy the coolest new piece of equipment on the market to do their research, and are under time constraints that don’t warrant cutting costs by searching the secondary market. 

Independent biohackers on the other hand are working under the opposite set of constraints. We may have a surplus of time to answer our research question outside of other commitments, but are constrained by resources and expertise to do so.

“Wernicke‐Korsakoff syndrome is the partial destruction of the brain resulting from a lack of thiamine (vitamin B‐1).” This sometimes comes to pass as a result of malnutrition, but it’s more stereotypically associated with severe and long-term alcoholism. Fortunately, treatment and prevention are quite simple — just give people thiamine. So in the 1930s and 1940s, people started to experiment with adding thiamine directly to alcoholic beverages, and found that it was stable in several favorites, including beer, wine, and whiskey. This seems like the ideal public health measure — vitamin fortification in a product that will go directly to people at risk of a terrible disease resulting from a lack of that very vitamin. However, in 1940 this idea ran afoul of our arcane legal system. In Irish mythology, there are magically binding vows called geasa, and the doom of heroes often comes from having multiple geasa that come into conflict. For example, Cú Chulainn has a geas never to eat dog meat, and he has another geas always to eat any food offered to him by a woman. When an old crone offers him dog meat, he’s trapped. Federal rulings have the same problem (modulo dog meat). You have to list all food additives on the label. But you also aren’t allowed to list the vitamin content of alcoholic beverages — that might imply that drinking alcohol is healthy. So we really dropped the ball in 1940 and we should really consider a return to the idea of adding thiamine to alcohol… reports this New York Times article from 1979. Maybe there were good reasons we didn’t, or maybe this is several millions of dollars in public health savings just lying on the sidewalk. You decide! Here’s a 1978 N Engl J Med article on the same idea if you want to learn more.