Transcriptic - outsourcing basic biology research work | Hacker News Reader

Transcriptic - outsourcing basic biology research work

pandodaily.com

33 pointsrecardona12 comments

At my last wet-bench lab, I was responsible for dissecting and culturing cortical neurons. Sounds cool, right?

The dissection day protocol took 5 hours, start to finish. The largest gap was about 15 minutes as samples trypsonized in a water bath. I could sneak out to the bathroom or grab a snack during this period. The rest of the time was spent stacking, unstacking, pipetting, sloshing, scraping, mixing various liquids inside of sterile bio-safety cabinet.

Every wednesday I would perform this identical protocol and effectively space out for 5 hours at a time, listening to podcasts. Sometimes I would just dream about a robot doing my job. Much of my other duties during the week revolved around these little culture dishes. Neurons require a pretty obnoxious feeding schedule.

I was effectively being paid 30k a year to be a robot. A single purchase of 30k would have saved my lab a lot of money, since it would have replaced me as a tech.

I considered starting a business trying to sell robots to do just this, but decided I didnt have enough robotics knowledge to do it, or capital to start.

Best wishes to these guys!

frisco: “This is not a local, social, mobile photosharing app. It’s really frustrating to see someone get a PhD in chemistry and decide what the world really needs is a better way to share photos in real time to music.”

Clearly a lot of investors thought the same.

Companies like transcriptic remind us of why many of us got into tech in the first place. These guys are definitely on the flying cars side of the flying cars vs. 140 characters spectrum.

I interviewed at transcriptic but ended up at twitter...so the next time my boss walks by & asks why I'm cranky, I'll say I was supposed to be flying cars instead of manning this giant 140 character machine :))

ps we're very actively hiring! If you're interested, send me an email at max@transcriptic.com! More info here: https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs

This is exciting. Finally, the Tech world seems to be growing beyond social media (ect...) and moving toward developing actually useful businesses!

It looks like all that Transcriptic does right now is simply put plasmids together. Hopefully, that will change in the future, and they will offer additional services :-)

Absolutely! We're excited about opening the whole platform up so that the only limitations on what can be done are the physical capabilities of the robots. Cloning is a small piece of the gigantic array of possibilities.

It's interesting how much of the funding infrastructure for this was originally created for relatively inconsequential, share-pictures-of-cats businesses.

@frisco Besides the manual robotic tasks, I could envision workflows that require the worker to do some basic identification in order to proceed. Sounds like something a trained Mechanical Turk or a oDesk worker could do. I have extensive experience with complex crowdsourcing workflows; shoot me an email at my website ( www.aantix.com ) if you ever want bounce ideas off of me..

I remember also hearing about a company that was trying to outsource molecular cloning, but with people, not robots. Basically you sent them your DNA and told them what you wanted done and they would bust their ass to do it and send it back to you. Does anyone have a link for this? I can't for the life of me remember the name of the company.

Way to go guys!

thanks!

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