A Community Bio-Tech Lab Offers a Crash Course in Designing Life — Open to the Public
By Adam Wernick,
PRI
| 06. 05. 2015
Untitled Document
“Scientists in general are awful at communicating their work to the general public,” says Jorgensen, the director of Genspace. “The consumer is already using genetically modified and genetically engineered products in their daily life. So, wouldn't it be nice if the end user were also someone who could have a say about what this technology was used for?“
Genspace, which opened in downtown Brooklyn in 2009, is the world's first community bio-lab. It offers a three-class crash course in synthetic biology to anyone who is interested. It also has a working lab space where the general public is invited to come in and learn how to do genetic science — hands on.
At Genspace, Wetherell experimented with her own DNA. Here her DNA is suspended in an agarose gel that is charged by an electical current that separates the proteins
Credit: Julia Wetherell
For $100 a month, Genspace members have access to the standardized gene sets that are the building blocks of synthetic biology. If that sounds daunting, consider this: Non-scientists make up a big part of...
Related Articles
The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 08.19.2025
Human eggs are incredibly rare cells. The ovary typically produces only 400 mature eggs across a woman’s life. But biologists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University — a group that’s never content with nature’s limits — just got a...
By Editors, Nature | 08.15.2025
A technology that played a key part in saving millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic1 should be feted to the skies. Instead, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced last week that the US federal government is...
By Zusha Elinson, The Wall Street Journal | 08.12.2025
BERKELEY, Calif.—Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon.
Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting...
