Community labs on the college campus
Community labs are reshaping the way we engage in biological research and innovation, funneling startup culture, democratic idealism, and academic science into a single space.
In the broadest sense, community labs are like makerspaces for biologists. They offer shared space, equipment, funding, and mentorship, and host a variety of public events and workshops. Through these resources, community labs remove many of the barriers a scientist faces when starting a project, making it easier for anyone — kids, adults, amateur scientists, and professional scientists alike — to ask questions, tinker, and innovate.
Dozens of community labs exist around the globe, varying in size, scope, and mission. Genspace, the first recognized community lab, lives in a clean urban building in New York. Their projects and events emphasize the intersection of biology with tech and culture. You can find activities like growing leather out of kombucha or bio-remediating sculptures out of mushrooms in their events calendar. Opentrons, a successful lab automation start-up, originates from Genspace as well (from true “amateur scientists”, for that matter).
On the other side of the country, Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs (CCL) is more reminiscent of California’s garage-tech culture. You can take a virtual tour of their space on their website, and catch a glimpse of the murals and retired office chairs that decorate the room. CCL encapsulates a core value of many community labs — encouraging open, do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio). CCL is a main collaborator in the Open Insulin Project, which aims to create an open-source protocol for local insulin production, and Real Vegan Cheese, which applies brewing science to animal-free cheese production.
Our aim is to bring the spirit and value of community labs to the college campus.
Already, community labs or “BioMakerspaces” are moving into the college environment. Stanford’s BIOME has been around for several years, hosting annual hackathons to engage students in project-based biology. The MIT BioMakers, once a group housed inside the biological engineering department teaching labs, is now getting its own designated space featuring community projects inspired from MIT engineers (undergrads, grads, and postdocs alike) including honey microneedles, cell swarms, and biobots. My own lab, Agara Bio, has been around for two years at Johns Hopkins, and we’re finally funding student ventures and getting involved in projects like the Open Insulin Project.
This past month, a group of students and graduates from various universities formed the BioMaker Network (you can join our slack here!), connecting our teams together for the first time. We are learning a lot about the challenges we have faced in our respective labs, and discussing opportunities for how we can collaborate in the future.
Our goal, through a series of articles, is to curate our shared advice and experiences into a “Biomaker Guide”, both to help others start labs at their own schools and to generate discourse on how community labs should fit into the university environment.
Context and resources
- Central hub for most non-university, community labs — https://diybio.org/
- Comprehensive Medium article on DIYbio and community labs — https://medium.com/@ThatMrE/a-guide-to-diybio-updated-2019-abd0956cdf74
- Non-university community labs: Genspace, Counter Culture Labs, Baltimore Underground Science Space, Biocurious, Biofoundry, Sound Bio
- University community labs: Agara Bio (Johns Hopkins), BIOME (Stanford), Polymerspace (Harvey Mudd College), BIG (UC Davis), BioMakers (MIT)
- Rogue Experimenters — Community Labs (The New Yorker)
Upcoming articles
- First Steps (finding temporary space, money, and support)
- Recruiting and retaining club members
- Infrastructure and lab management
- Creating a community in a community lab
- Running workshops and events
- Dealing with COVID and getting creative
Lab Photos
MIT BioMakers BioMakerGuide photos
Written by Justin Greene, edited by Alec Lourenco
