DIY: Too Close for Comfort...

...Unless you know what you are doing of course.  This subject has left me divided; prior to reading Biopunk, I would have been completely against the idea of experiments in the home.  If I were to come home and find my roommate had embarked on a DIYBio mission and transformed any part of our home space into a lab, I would probably be disturbed.  First of all, I would hope my roommate would have the courtesy to call me before embarking on such a mission.  Secondly, I would probably feel a little bit disrespected because although they have every right to privacy in their share of the space, the idea of chemicals and experiments being conducted in a place where two people live in close proximity to one another and are not both voluntarily consuming any type of side effect of their experiments is kind of rude.  Although I believe it was never ruled one way or the other exactly what caused the heart failure of Hope Kurtz in Part IV of the Biopunk literature, I would still be very concerned about the possible implications of having biological agents of any kind in close proximity of where I am living.  Not only does this pose a possible health threat (the fact is, you never know what exactly might or might not kill you when experimenting with this stuff, what about viruses and various bacteria?), but I would also be concerned about Steve Kurtz' run in with the law.  We live in a very skeptical age, especially in regards to bioterrorism, at least in the government's eyes, and I would be worried that even if my roommate had the best of intentions, they could easily be misconstrued.  

Now that I have all of my negative reactions out of the way (as I am a very emotional person and they would likely be the first to come out), I can now discuss what I actually might appreciate about my room mate's endeavors.  Galileo did not buy a telescope, he built it.  As they mention in Chapter 8: My Life of Biopunk, Benjamin Franklin used a kite and key to discover the power of electricity.  Marie Curie's work in radiation was not sponsored by the school she worked for, but yet she received a Nobel Prize in her work on radiation...and the list goes on.  If many individuals had not had the self determination and will to explore science the way they did, without government assistance or harassment, where would we be today?  The spirit of hacking the sciences has long been a part of our history and I sometimes do believe that everyone should have a right to participate.  The bigger the brain pool, the better, right?  So believed Andrew Hessel...we should have a cure for cancer, or in his terms, we should have many different treatments for cancer tailored to their particular kind (Chapter 8: My Life of Biopunk).  As our book has pointed out so many times, there should always be an easily accessible alternative for those who wish to participate in biological research, if not just for their own understanding of themselves, but also for the possibility of a break in research.  You just never know!  In this sense, I do support the spirit of bio hacking.  

Everything comes back to laws, safety, and security, however.  I would request that my roommate have a clear understanding of what they are handling, and if not, to not conduct the experiments at all.  Actually, I have to admit, I would probably not be comfortable at all with the lab in the apartment and respectfully request that they attempt to find somewhere local that they could convene with like-minded bio hackers and utilize equipment in a safe environment supervised by people experienced in the field.  I would try to be understanding, as well as educated myself on what they are trying to accomplish (not to a great extent), and probably help them in a search for a place they could practice safely and legally.  I imagine I might want to take a class with them (MIGHT), just out of curiosity, but I do not see myself picking up bio hacking as a hobby anytime in the near future.  In the end, I also do not imagine that my current room mate (my boyfriend) would be conducting any kinds of these experiments without my knowledge; for that I am grateful. 

Citizen Science!

I found this week's online lab portion to be a great deal of fun!  Actually, what I think really made it fun was the fact that I am paralleling in my Astronomy class lessons on galaxies.  I had been learning about the composition of galaxies, the types and characteristics, the physics, etc.  Being able to go on the Galaxy Zoo website helped me in that I got to get some practical application in.  My Astronomy class is online so it is kind of tough sometimes to get the hang of the stuff (especially the physics), but the website we got onto to classify the galaxies showed me that this kind of stuff can in deed be somewhat simple.  Like I said, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I got a little giddy when I was able to identify some characteristics in the pictures, as well as different objects within the pictures or even outside of the galaxies, such as binary systems and so forth.  

This leads me into the rest of our project this week.  I chose the project on the Zooniverse website of exploring an ancient Greek community.  Really, the website asks for help in deciphering the transcripts that they have found of an ancient Greek city.  Here I was thinking that this kind of stuff was only left up to the "professionals", and they want my help?  Cool!  Let us get to it then!  At first, the process was a little confusing, and since I know just about nothing when it comes to the Greek language, some of the writing was a little difficult to look at.  There are a lot of similarities in our language's letter and theirs as well, though.  You can tell that they have put a great deal of effort into helping the average citizen understand the task, though, as there was a click-through tutorial.  Also, the letters on the keyboard would show different examples of written versions of the letters if you hovered over them so you could kind of get the gist of them.  I think I did pretty well, considering I was trying to read an ancient language.  If it was impossible to see the letters, I was happy to see that they let you move on and they have options for you to chose that lets them know that.

Overall, I think citizen science is a great way to get the average public more involved and interested in science.  On the few projects I had skimmed through, they made it really easy for someone who knew nothing about the subject to understand what their task at hand was.  The advantage for the scientific community is obviously having more eyes and brains on the thousands, or millions of pictures and records experts would have to go through in the specific area.  Different view points is also an advantage for the scientific community.  Advantages for the public are that you do not have to have a doctorate in an area to help conduct research and I just think that is so cool!  Who knows?  Maybe someone would stumble upon a project they become really interested in and wish to make it their career?  Maybe even if someone does not take a liking to the project they work on specifically, it would inspire a "tinkering" spirit in them to work on something else, such as DIYbio!

Fantasy vs Science Fiction

Science should equal reason, right?  Then reason should be common sense?  At least this is what we are taught in the ideologies of our society.  However, if this is the case, then it should be peculiar why with all of the time and money we put into scientific research we seem to prefer fantasy over science fiction.  What I would consider once being a method to teach children morals, ethics, and basic life lessons by using their imagination (hence, the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis) has become a common indulgence even among adults in the forms of Harry Potter and Twilight.  The profession of "cryptozoology" has seemingly been developed from a pastime of fantasy.  The more we become acquainted with science and "reason"...reason being what we want in life...the further we push away from it.  There are several hypotheses that I can explore here, though.  First, we can take a step back and study trends in society over the past century.  You know there is no secret in the rise of the consumerism culture after the birth of the industrial revolution that eventually gave rise to mass produced products and, eventually, mass entertainment via mass communication.  I imagine that novelists, artistic creators and movie script writers were searching for ways to capture the human imagination.  Maybe fantasy has been a way that we have coped through some of the roughest times in humanity, such as World War II, the period in which the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written.  Producing fantasy I am sure up to that point seemed to be silly.  However, fantasy has long been a way that we have managed to let our minds escape the ugliness, like the Korean War, JFK's assassination, Vietnam War, the Cold War, Embassy Bombings in the 1980's, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the list goes on.  With the rise of the television of the 1960's, writers needed new script, and what was once considered "low culture" became mainstream.  

I could talk all day about the effects of consumerism on generations X, Y and Z, but I can also explore other options.  I feel as though maybe once there became a greater divide between the scientific community and the general public, things might have become too technical to capture readers.  Cryptozoology had long been a tool of the past to unleash playtime upon the imaginations of the public.  Just like hoaxes, people love a good story, whether it is true or not.  I believe this was the ground work of fantasy and as science fiction became too technical for many people, they instead turned to this type of fantasy.  Are there vampires that exist among us?  Are there witches and warlocks?  Most people would say "of course not" but that first, does not keep us from enjoying the chase, and two, you will most likely still find a fanatical following that wholeheartedly supports the fantasy.  We know there are no witches as prescribed in Harry Potter, but it is easier to ignore the complicated science behind it and unleash our minds in a completely uncomplicated way.  This I think is the real reason behind the growing interest in fantasy fiction and the general population's recent repulsiveness of science fiction.  I cannot completely ignore that there is actually quite a large following of science fiction but there, I think, is even a larger group that would rather read textbooks than science fiction and would consider those followers "geeks"!  Maybe this is a result of the lacking scientific education that we receive here in the United States.  We often hear how far behind we are in Math and Science in the world and now, since we are not equipped with the progressing pool of knowledge that is within the scientific community, we are repulsed by the technicality of science fiction that was actually meant to make this type of knowledge more accessible to all.  I think both of these hypotheses are accurate to some degree, but not completely one way or the other.  We are a consumer culture and we do seek to indulge our minds the best we can, especially when the road gets tough, but there had to be some reason writers turned to fantasy in the first place.  Building off of an age-old hoaxish following, and the fact that science was becoming far too complicated than most of us can generally stand, fantasy taps into our desires and explores the world of facts that never came to be.