Tito Jankowski | Co-Founder | BioCurious
BioCurious is the World’s First Hackerspace for Bio, Built in the Heart of Silicon Valley.
They are a community of scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and amateurs who believe that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone.
Located in Sunnyvale, CA, their co-working laboratory space and shared equipment is ideal for entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, hobbyists, and students.
Tito Jankowski hacks biotechnology. He is a proponent of open source hardware, biotech hackerspaces, and synthetic biology. He thinks about society’s effect on science, product design, and public speaking. His work has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, Nature, and GQ France, and in the books Biopunk: Kitchen-Counter Scientists Hack the Software of Life, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, and “Maker Pro” by Maker Media. He is co-founder of Pearl Biotech, empowering scientists with a torrent of new research tools and practices. Tito was previously the Product Manager at Scanadu, a Silicon Valley startup bringing medical tools for the people to the people, and Co-Founder of OpenPCR, a company developing open source DNA copy machines to make biotechnology accessible on your desktop.
How did you find the space and funding?
The Kickstarter page that started it all: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openscience/biocurious-a-hackerspace-for-biotech-the-community
Was building the Biocurious community hard? Who is/was part of the community & What types of equipment did you find you needed and what were the challenges you encountered?
Here’s a quora post I wrote on this: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-best-practices-developing-for-hackerspaces
What types of projects have you and the Biocurious team worked on?
They can be seen here: http://biocurious.org/projects/
What do you see as the future for biohacking in California and globally?
I consider this my best thinking the true secret of “BioCurious” and why biohacking is so enticing. I’ve given this talk all over the world and this version was filmed at Stanford in June: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Gca2LeYnY
Originally published at www.bio.science.
