Video @ the bench
I saw the movie I Am Legend this weekend, and although it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of synthetic biology (re-engineering measles is a bad idea, apparently) Will Smith’s character did have a slick lab in his basement. Good to see a little Garage Biotech in action.
One component of the lab they made heavy use of was a video lab notebook. I assume this was done since Will Smith scribbling in a paper lab notebook wouldn’t have had quite the same cinematic effect. However, getting video into the lab will be important for democratizing biological engineering. A lot of the barriers to would be bio-hackers lay in the difficulty of learning biological protocols from texts. New graduate students benefit enormously from hands-on learning with a mentor in their early days in lab, and without this visual teaching getting booted up in the lab is extremely frustrating.
New science video sites like Jove and Scivee.tv suffer because labs aren’t really equipped to capture video. So at best you’ll be able to disseminate talks, but video protocols are going to be very hard to pull off. I’ve been thinking about video lab notebooks / protocols since Tom Knight brought up some clever ways you might set your bench up to accommodate video capture (cameras in various spots, foot-petal control, and smart ways to handle the data). A more nerdy looking way to do this (no offense to Will Bosworth who used to work around the Endy Lab) is the head-mounted video camera described by Saul Griffith in Make magazine.
There are also some wireless web-cameras that might make your setup cheaper. If anyone is doing a good job of taking video at the bench, please let me know about your setup.
Posted: December 16th, 2007 under Garage Biotech, Synthetic Biology.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from Jean-Claude Bradley
Time: December 17, 2007, 4:50 am
Yes, I’ve been trying to get my students to use more video to record their experiments. Every time they do it convinces me of how useful it is because it reduces the assumptions that we have to make when trying to understand what was done from a written protocol. It would be even more useful to have them describe what they are doing while recording but I think the big obstacle there is that most people are just not comfortable doing that. I’ll keep trying…
By the way I saw “I am legend” over the weekend. During the lab scene I kept thinking about how quick he was to jump to conclusions…I wanted to ask him if he had tried different dosages for those drugs that didn’t work 
Comment from Jason
Time: December 20, 2007, 8:19 am
Hi Jean-Claude, thanks for comments. How do you normally do the video recording in your lab? Is it just a standard camera on a tripod? How do you organize / browse the videos? Yeah, not clear Will Smith has the best technique 
Comment from Torsten Waldminghaus
Time: April 10, 2008, 6:56 am
I was wondering if it might be an easy start to record stuff you do on your computer. Having a video, ideally with an audio stream of an explanation of what is done, could be useful to see how people do data analysis or programming or other things. I tried to find a tool on the web capable of such ‘video screen shots’ but did not succeed.
Comment from Jason
Time: April 10, 2008, 7:26 am
Hi Torsten,
I’d google around for “screencast”, I think there are a bunch of good programs out there to do just what you’re describing.
Comment from McDawg
Time: April 12, 2008, 4:22 am
Hi Jason,
Certainly, with regards to JoVE, they have dedicated camera crews based in several countries. THEY go out and do the filming, and then folks at JoVE do the review and final editing.
As JoVE grows in size, stature and content (soon to hopefully be indexed in PubMed) it has all the hallmarks of being a really really important Open Access Journal.
Comment from Jason
Time: April 12, 2008, 7:56 am
Yeah, I think JoVE is great. However, camera crews and professional editing doesn’t really scale. It works to produce a small number of videos a day or week (and to create a new journal), but doesn’t work as well for video lab notebooks or for sharing the many tweaks that different labs have on their protocols.
Comment from Jack
Time: June 7, 2008, 6:37 am
Hi Jason — Congrats on the Ph.D! I got a Technology Day email today and had a thought to look you up — pretty good timing. Openwetware looks like a great concept and implementation.
You might want to try a “The Flip” video camera from Pure Digital. These units are inexpensive and ultra simple to use — reailistically those are key success factors for facilitating the paradigm shift you propose.
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