Sci-fi blog io9 is running a contest to design cool new “lifeforms”, from the site:

The important thing to remember is that this contest is about creating cool new lifeforms that are also, in some way, entertaining. So each entry will be judged for plausibility (i.e. whether it is scientifically justifiable), creativity, usefulness, and entertainment value.

There are two categories and you either win a trip to the Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference in Hong Kong (where you can hear me ranting about reference standards or see lots of other cool stuff) or 1,000 bucks and a comic rendering of your creature.

I already listed some of my favorite synthetic “lifeforms” maybe one of those will be submitted - apparently you get bonus points if you’ve actually implemented your lifeform.

The judges include Drew Endy, Michael Eisen, Spore game developer Jason Shankel, and biology researcher/io9 “ask a biogeek” columnist Terry Johnson. So get designing!

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under Consumer Biotech, Garage Biotech, Synthetic Biology.
Comments: none

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