Forbes spotlights Do-It-Yourself e-gang

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement has been growing quite significantly recently. I should say regrowing, given the fact that I recall reading Popular Mechanics do-it-yourself encyclopedias at least 15 years ago!

Anyhow, enter the Forbes DIY e-gang. Forbes has put together a short list of prominent names in the newly revived DIY movement like Dale Dougherty & Tim O’Reilly (Make Magazine), Neil Gershenfeld (Fab Labs), Jim Newton (TechShop), just to name a few.

Among the group spotlighted in Forbes is Reshma Shetty (Ginkgo BioWorks), a PhD graduate from MIT and also co-founder of OpenWetWare.

Shetty and colleagues (also MIT PhD graduates and co-founders of OpenWetWare) recently demonstrated how microorganisms can be manipulated quite easily to produce interesting results. In this case, they genetically transformed bacteria (E. coli) to produce a red glow. All this was done in a few simple steps as illustrated.

On a side note, I found it interesting that there was no mention of DIYbio, a group recently founded by Mackenzie Cowell and Jason Bobe in Cambridge, MA. Although not yet quite as grand as the DIYers mentioned in Forbes, but still noteworthy.