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Tag archives for DIYbio
Bacterial Lightbulb
Posted by Christina Agapakis on September 14, 2010 This year’s Cambridge iGEM team has made a tiny, wireless lightbulb filled with bioluminescent bacteria! There are two main ways of engineering luminescence in E. coli (I assume these are E. coli, correct me if I’m wrong!). One is to express the luciferase gene from fireflies, which adds ATP and oxygen to the chemical luciferin,…
Biology is Power
Posted by Christina Agapakis on April 12, 2010 I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less “democratized” than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier‘s work criticizing the “open” and “free” culture movements online as both…
Sassy Bitches of Science: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Posted by Christina Agapakis on March 24, 2010 Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today we blog to celebrate women in technology and science and remember Ada Lovelace, the woman considered to have written the world’s first computer program back in the 1840′s. So to celebrate, here’s a clip of an interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini, one of my favorite Sassy Bitches of Science™. At age…
Knowledge is Power
Posted by Christina Agapakis on March 23, 2010 I read R.C. Lewontin‘s Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA over the weekend and was struck in particular by one line in his wonderful diatribe against biological determinism and reductionism: “Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can…