A few weeks, I talked with Ryan Bethencourt about crowdfunding science, DIYbio, and self experimentation.
You can find the selected transcript here: buff.ly/TKGXKJ
If you are have read through this site, it’s probably nothing new, but it’s still a good read and goes into how we got this thing going, and what some long term plans are.
Yeah, I know, it’s been a little quiet around here. That’s because slowly going night blind isn’t that exciting or photogenic. The VitaminA2 is ordered but that’s about it.
So what have we been doing in the meanwhile?
Well, the group is restructuring and moving down to California where we can set up a workspace. Also, we have been lucky to get a few of the biohacking community to crowdsource the funds for the peachy printer beta 🙂 It’s so cute! We’ll let you know when it gets moving. There are also a few things in the background that we can’t talk about right now, but when it breaks, I’ll post it up here.
Hey there. So, this is cross posted from the experiments.com site. It has been slightly altered, but I figured everyone should have this little bit of info. It’s pretty cool 🙂
First though, a little bit of bad news. We lost one of our test subjects in the last week :/ Subject C dropped out. We’re bummed, but still feeling positive about the project. Luckily, we were up one from our original protocol, so we are still well within parameters.
Breakfast: Five eggs scrambled in goose fat, plate full of steamed broccoli.
Lunch: Corned beef from my favourite diner. Dabs of made-from-scratch horseradish sauce. Cabbage, boiled and then marked on the grill.
…8oz of steamed half and half….
Supper: Roasted pork loin, hand rubbed with spices. Steamed broccoli and cauliflower. Liberal dabs of homemade habanero hot sauce, aged 7 days. A few pieces of mature English cheddar.
I love you food. I know you’re not going anywhere.
Time to do some science.
While sitting to one of my last meals tonight (how morbid sounding!), it occurs to me that I’ve permitted a glaring error to escape my notice for several months. All scientific research is built upon the work of its predecessors, for the simple reason that working within a vacuum is both impractical and, in all honesty, impossible. One would have to question absolutely every detail of one’s experiment, and end up stumped at “but what is a protein?” All scientific research, without reservation, is built “on the shoulders of giants”, and a large part of participating in scientific discovery is working smart, not hard, by looking up and digesting the work of previous researchers in the field — and, of course, giving them credit if and when one makes and publishes a discovery. I highly recommend anyone interested in performing an experiment according to the strictures of the scientific method use tools such as Google Scholar to learn what has already been published on the chosen subject and avoid reinventing the wheel.