Not going to happen.
"Biohacking" is 100% hype. 0% science.
On insulin specifically: http://blog.indysci.org/insulin-is-hard-but-not-impossible/
1) wrote that blog post
and
2) gave the open insulin guys the design they're using. I am a little bit dismayed that credit for the design is somewhat buried in the public facing materials, but whatever.
and
3) agree that it's mostly hype - both this project and 'biohacking' in general. I run a nonprofit that is working on an patent-free cancer drug. Raised 60k and I'm doing ok, about to launch into production phase pre- animal model study. I would hesitate to call myself a biohacker - I have a PhD in chemistry and two postdocs in biochemistry and molecular biology, so I'm not coming from the CS/IT side - although I do currently code for a living.
but
4) think that whatever, the project could be interesting.
As it is, the way insulin is manufactured is pretty terrible, it could be way cheaper, and it's with that in mind that I designed the scheme the way that I designed it.
"A lot of biohackers (even PhD level biohackers ensconced in academia) are basically script kiddies – cut and paste these bits of DNA and cross your fingers and hope the result you expect pops out."
Same is true of Neuro phds: "scan brains in fmri/eeg that i have no idea how it works from a physics perspective", run this matlab script here, use this proprietary software there, calculate "connectivity|power|correlation" - "does this look good for my paper? yes, shiny grant coming right up! Will it move the field forward? Not anymore than the thousand other papers out there but the university pr office is on it!" (in no particular order).
I say this because if all this was more out in the open (methods, software, caveats on every level on a git repo) and more available to people in other fields/expertise to look at and source materials and parts, a lot could be moved forward in general from what I'm observing going on in academia now along the lines of:
"As I worked on insulin in grad school, I risked my job as a lowly postdoc, chiming in and pointedly telling him (in front of the program manager) why it wouldn’t work. Some of my coworkers speculated that I might not show up the next day, but I survived to tell the tale."
I see some well intentioned people fumbling around, being derided in private by academics (who play the same human status games in different ways) who are still willing to talk with such people (because $$$, and maybe because some other academic they "collaborate" with is talking with them), who are pretty smart in their field (who are finding alternative funding sources!) who I secretly hope burn a fire under the ass of what goes now, so I won't write it all off.
I could probably whip it up myself, but I'm already stretched thin doing two biology projects that aren't paying me anything - and in fact are costing me (my nonprofit and a startup) and I make barely enough on some part-time contract coding work that I am really lucky to have landed through roommate-nepotism.
As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for.
I've decided to quit impostor syndrome and accept that I am kind of a biochemistry badass (I redesigned an enzyme and made it 4x better on my first shot based on first principles), and that if anyone wants my expertise they have to pay $$ for it. The other week an ALS advocate showed me a drug candidate structure and I correctly identified the mechanism of action without knowing much about the target. I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that.
But good luck to them.
I think the work you do is pretty awesome (at least from reading your posts here and on your blog) and can understand that you are stretched, but I can see that you also want to move the field forward (and not in the "lets shit some papers out and maximize for 'impact factor'" way).
>"As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for."
I can see where you are coming from about the whole Postdocapalypse economics… I see it heating up as well with mindfulness being the current carrying agent in moving the neural tech forward (some neuro phd i was talking to on twitter said this to when I was mocking the "run matlab on cluster for months mentality" and saying it could be done way faster (hours) and cheaper: "Sounds a little bit more complicated than just reporting what you did in a paper.", so yeah, the investors who fund people like that are going to get exactly what they are paying for), but I'm going to help people milk it for what its worth just to help foster something that can compete with the abomination that academia has metastasized into that masquerades such games as science.
> "…I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that."
Yeah I can understand that, but I also think the way that resources are allocated as a society are in for a major shake up (esp with the whole crowdfunding bonanza across so many industries, and have people who worked for the UN and a gov agency in Turkey contact me about the software I wrote to track it on social media), which I think is why people aren't terribly excited on top of the personal stress all the uncertainty brings which I'm familiar with being a drop out who's in the neck of it up here in the boston area (and happen to be the only one it seems to have open-sourced a spacial beamformer in c++ for real time neural feedback for eeg that can be adapted for dual eeg/fmri). I do think though, because you aren't necessarily confining yourself to what things have to be (as defined by the status quo), you'll probably end up doing way more than you think you are capable of now.
And after spearheading several bio-hacking-type calls within DARPA, and seemingly being groomed to take Arati Prabhukar's position, she seems to have suddenly disappeared from her position at DARPA altogether in the past few months.
DARPA is doing the same pretty much with some stuff going on at MIT in neuroimaging… so i hear… :P
And there's a lab in Wisconsin that's sucking up 10's million of dollars from private foundations of which a co pi of that lab visited ours to tell us about their soon to be created public outreach arm… on top of the questionable custom eeg head cap for dual/eeg frmi thats close to a million who knows nothing about e&m, who I confronted directly about that while getting the backing from the senior research scientist (who is on a visa…) in my lab whose phd is in soft condensed matter physics who worked on SQUIDs at yale, who is now conveniently "volunteering" most of the time doing mobile apps for some company attached to our lab who wrote most of the code for the system people saw Anderson Cooper hooked up too on CNN not too long ago… but you'll never hear about him over others trying to capture 100% of what they think is the only opportunity now.
#WhatAFuckingJokeThingsAre and this is why things are due for a shake up lol
Trying to pretend otherwise is ignoring all the technologies becoming available on a ramen budget.
When your quality of life, or even the remaining duration of it, is largely in the hands of a few executives at a single company, it's generally a good move to do whatever is necessary to reduce your dependence on them, before they realize that they can bleed you dry--along with those like you--with a few keystrokes in their inventory system.
It is inevitable that people made desperate by medical circumstance will do dangerous things with biology on a shockingly low budget.
For instance, did you know that some people are doing at-home fecal transplants using thrift-store blenders and over-the-counter enema kits?
How long do you think it will be before someone tries converting cells in their intestinal lining into beta cells, or implanting an artificial pancreas made from their own cells? It is very likely that any successes will be unknown, while the first person to inadvertently kill himself while attempting to cure his own diseases with garage-scale biotech will be criticized and demonized worldwide. And that will be the spark falling on dry tinder, as people realize that the cost of biohacking is now low enough to be within reach of ordinary people.