10 replies to this topic

[kanzure]

Hi all,

I am participating in the chat in the background re: stem cells, and realize that the ImmInst community does not know about my latest project. It's over at http://biohack.sf.net. Synopsis: Join the fight against diseases, aging and death -- while also doing some other really awesome projects in the process.

The goal of the project is to collect as much information on synthetic biology and DIY biotech as possible. This means gene therapy, genetic engineering, biobricks, stem cell therapy, organogenesis, tissue engineering, etc. (Soon we will be sharing genes, digitally). It contains loads of experiments, protocols and explanations as well as cached copies of important websites out there on the internet. There's also a mailing list and community growing around it.

The website was even featured on MAKE last Friday. So things are going well. I hope to hear from ImmInst members about what they think of the project and whether or not any would like to help.

- Bryan

Edited by kanzure, 03 February 2008 - 10:14 PM.

[EmbraceUnity]

Sounds awesome! Unfortunately, I don't think I personally have the skills to do much of anything with it, but I will do my best to spread the word.

Edited by progressive, 03 February 2008 - 10:50 PM.

[Athanasios]

Sounds awesome! Unfortunately, I don't think I personally have the skills to do much of anything with it, but I will do my best to spread the word.

You would be surprised how much depends solely on time + interest. It may take a bit of back reading to understand the significance of the experiments but many experiments are not technically daunting. This is because much of biology is about getting organisms/enzymes n such to do the grunt work for you.

[kanzure]

Sounds awesome! Unfortunately, I don't think I personally have the skills to do much of anything with it, but I will do my best to spread the word.

Basically the main skill is reading and pointing out where something is confusing to the mailing list. Then, other guys (myself) get to go back over all of the notes and make things easier to understand and follow.

- Bryan

[John Schloendorn]

time + interest

Indeed. And since time is exactly what you take when you have sufficient interest, it's actually only interst :-) So get to work already!!

[dr_chaos]

I downloaded the zip file and was not amused. Too chaotic for my taste and many of the html files are very hard to read. Furthermore a zip archive with other peoples downloaded web pages is not open source.

[kanzure]

I downloaded the zip file and was not amused. Too chaotic for my taste and many of the html files are very hard to read. Furthermore a zip archive with other peoples downloaded web pages is not open source.

Woah there, hold on. The 'open' aspect is in the community revision of the content. We will be quickly replacing the old material with new material, probably under the same license that Wikipedia uses for publishing (GPL documentation license). Remember, this is a sort of first announcement, designed to attract people to a vision so that we can work on this sort of project. BTW, what's wrong with downloading web pages? This is exactly what all of the search engines do: they cache the pages and give you a file. In many cases, they also give you your search results in a gzip format (much like a zip), except your browser automatically interprets it as an exact web page, so the difference is very minute. If you are concerned about any of the legal issues with this concept, please (please!) feel free to contribute and help get the project on track.

As for it being too chaotic ... that's a problem that I have been trying to solve. I have been tempted to publish an ontology to the mailing list. Perhaps something like a few folders for protocols, a few for equipment design, and then another for the cached news stories? I suspect that the real way to do it would be to have multiple files that explain certain aspects of the project and how to do certain protocols, and that would be the starting base for organization. I'd be glad to entertain other ideas too, I think we can do multiple releases at the same time or provide multiple variations on organization of the information. Whatever works, really.

- Bryan

[dr_chaos]

If you are concerned about any of the legal issues with this concept, please (please!) feel free to contribute and help get the project on track.

First I'd take out the links to the passwords for the libraries and book access services on that warez page. At some point an admin of one of the services will get suspicious and the guys who don't use proxies(i.e. most) are going to get busted. I've seen that happen several times before with various content.
If I'd have time for contributions I'd definitely make them. But I'm too much into studying for some exams right know.

[kevin]

time + interest

Indeed. And since time is exactly what you take when you have sufficient interest, it's actually only interst :-) So get to work already!!

... so true John..

[kanzure]

There is now a biohack wiki. YouTube vids are going to be posted soon.

- Bryan

[AgeVivo]

Bravo. Could it be used against aging?

To make my question more precise, here is what i roughly have in mind:

• The ideal test would be that in a petri dish, the selected organisms (which types of organisms?) are the ones who survive the longest (= get around the disease, aging in our case).
• We want to discard cancerous cells, eg by forbidding cell division (with which product? it must be reversible) and selecting 10% cells that survive the longest without dividing.
• We also want to discard scenescent cells, eg by placing the organisms in a petri dish without the anti-division product to select the new organisms (how to do that?)
• Then the overall procedure is: forbid division and wait until most of organisms have died, select survivors, allow division, select organisms which divide, mutate/combine (how?) and start over".
• Ideally, after many cycles, one would test that the selected organisms still behave 'normally', and test which gene changes allowed the organisms to get around aging; but i think we can forget about such aspects in a first step

Does smthg like this seems feasible?
Actually it reminds me Michael Rose's work on flies, except that here it would typically be on cells, so potentially much faster (not quite sure actually...???), and we would consider cancer in the equation (flies and worms don't have cancer, because adult cells don't divide), and it could (???) be done at home

Thank you

Edited by AgeVivo, 20 April 2009 - 11:09 AM.