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Biohack Chat Education

Biohack Chat #11

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Biohack Chat Education

Biohack Chat #10

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Biohack Chat Education

Biohack Chat #9

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Biohack Chat Education News

Biohack Chats With The Thought Emporium

SciHouse Inc. has been collaborating with The Thought Emporium on a series of informal chats about various topics in applied biological science and engineering.

Check out the playlist below to see them all.

Subscribe to our blog and the YouTube channels below to stay up to date.

Scihouse YouTube Chanel

The Thought Emporium

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Blog News

Scihouse Inc. @ Ted X Naperville

Gabriel Licina will be representing Scihouse Inc. at the Ted X Naperville Salon and dinning event this coming Wednesday the 18th at Blvd. Kitchen, in, Aurora, IL, with Sara Ware, founder, and director of BioBlaze Community Bio Lab. Gabriel will be speaking at the event and leading a DNA extraction workshop.

The event will include a 4-course farm-to-table dinner, included with the ticket price.

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Blog News

Scihouse goes to BioHack The Planet 2019

“I brought presents”

This week at Biohack The Planet 2019, Gabriel Licina, a biologist with Scihouse Inc., delivered a presentation about our latest progress in gene therapy development, as well as a hard-hitting message to the “biohacker” community in general, breaking with the fringe notion of embracing amateurish geewiz closet projects, and pie in the sky “entrepreneurial” fever dreams.

“Glybera was the first gene therapy approved in the EU back in 2013, and they put on the market for 1 million dollars, one person got it. … It works and it’s a million dollars.”

With the help of Scihouse Inc. the international team Gabriel Licina, Andreas Stürmer, and David Ishee reverse engineered Glybera (a million-dollar viral gene therapy approved in the EU for treatment of hereditary Lipoprotein lipase deficiency) and reapplied its technology to a non-viral gene therapy delivery mechanism called minicircles. This method allows for a dramatically lower production cost but must be administered over several doses rather than just one injection. Development of this treatment cost ~$7000, production will cost pennies. Lives will be saved, where once they would have been sacrificed. This happened for no other reason than greed, with prices set by corporate middlemen who played no part in its development.

“I need more data, I can’t even responsibly say if it works with just my data points, which is why I’m giving it to you guys to test, we are so far away, not in a 13 years of clinical trials type of way but I’m just one person, with a set of data points, it’s totally irresponsible for me to be like, well I got some good data I guess the next thing were going to do is, “heat man are you desperate, I got a needle” thats not how it should work. I think thats part of the problem, that were so frantic to get away from the regulatory system that already exists, that were running hard in the opposite direction, into mad max “in three to five years I’m going to be stabing all sorts of people” and that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know I need more data”

We have had very positive results, and we are waiting for peer-review by the independent genetic engineering community, before moving forward with FDA approval and human trials. If you would like to participate in the peer review please feel free to contact us.

“I would like to propose that we grow up a little bit”

“This is our cathedral moment, this is our victory gardens in the war for the world, this is the time when we might actually watch our families and our loved ones die in front of us, … anyone who has looked at the data knows that that’s the case. This is the time for us to stop playing around with our petty self centered little projects and actually do something that matters.”

A pertinent message to the biohacking community that really doesn’t need commentary. We all know what’s at stake, and we all know why.

“This is sao paulo in the middle of the afternoon because the world is on fire”

“Life extension is pretty useless if most the people are going to die from drought, fire, food shortage, extreme weather, in the next thirty years, the same goes for medicine, having really dope medicine is really useless if you’re just going to starve to death. So my friends made this, we can crank a new one out on the regular but who gives a crap if we’re all dead, … right?”

Contribute to Scihouse Inc. today, in any way you can, and together we will build the tools we need to beat back rising atmospheric carbon, one tree at a time.

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Blog

Why Conservation is Broken. The Species as a Front End

Note: This is a re-edit of an old article that I wrote on the Science for the Masses blog, updated now that it’s been a few years.

I spent a summer doing fundraising for a Pacific Northwest environmental group, WashPIRG. Door to door, grassroots, still one of the most effective methods of really getting people involved. Turns out actually talking face to face with people works better than asking people to like your Facebook group. Please subscribe below.

I ended up talking with this couple out on Bainbridge Island. For the last two decades, they had been restoring their 5 acre valley to its “natural state.” This meant removing invasive species by hand. You can’t bulldoze out blackberries. You remove them by hand, you plant native species to throw shade and take those resources. Scouring the earth just gets you scoured earth. It takes time and dedication to fight against the tides of evolution and prolific spread of those tiny seeds. They fought, and won, against the development of an industrial park upstream from their property. They had the highest density of salmon running in 15 miles.

This is in an area of the country where the white settlers said that you could walk across a river without touching the water when the salmon were running. They told me that every three days they had to come out and feed the fish, bulk salmon chow. There just wasn’t enough food. I was blown away. How was this possible? The place was a paradise. The air was fresh, heady with flowers, the sound of bees, the rich scent of soil and leaves.

Turns out none of that mattered. They talked to me about shoes.

Every once in a while your shoes wear down and you throw them away. Where did the soles of your shoes go? They didn’t just evaporate, melt into nothing. They become aerosolized. Right now you’re breathing the shoes of everyone within 50 miles, maybe more. The 600 thousand pairs of feet in Seattle are kicking up tiny poofs of vulcanized rubber, which float across the Puget Sound, and rain down into that damn stream. The fish don’t really care, the way that you don’t care about breathing it in. But the microbiota do. Some amoeba can’t handle it. Then the things that eat them have less food, and suddenly there are just less insects. Not enough that we would think to notice. Update, we’re noticing now. Compared to a city street, that valley is humming with activity. But there’s just not enough food now. You could convince people to drive less, but you’re not going to get people to stop wearing shoes.

Conservation is screwed. Our model of how the world fits together is fundamentally flawed.

You can’t save the salmon. Species are just a front end for the environment. It’s the part we pay attention to, the sticker on your bumper. Say you save the salmon. Where are you going to put them? Seriously, where will you put the things you save? They aren’t individual chunks that just look good on a plate. Salmon are a region, a temperature range, part of a trophic level. You can just as easily walk on moon without a space suit as you can save a salmon. The world is changed. There is no where to put them.

Obviously, this hit home. This was the point when I decided that the world was broken and that we needed to work on fixing it. We are great at burning things. Fire is still our finest technology. It’s the fastest, most effective tool that we have. We used it to knock out the bricks in the wall of the world. Knock out enough, and things start to sag, start to fall. This is biochemical reality. It’s physics. You can’t beat the laws of thermodynamics.

Now we have new technologies and we need to love them like fire.

We only pay attention to the frontend. You can’t convince people to stop walking in shoes. We can’t even convince them to stop sucking down soda. So, now I’m working with these new technologies. Building ponds that suck methane and carbon dioxide out of the air, trap all those aerosols and turn them into living things. Garbage in, fresh air out. Plants that may one day grow as fast as we can burn them. Maybe make a place for things to go when this is all over with. It’s hard to take responsibility.

In order to make this change, there needs to be real action. We need to stop talking about things and do something. We started a forum called Crisis Biology. Please take a moment to check it out and look over the ideas that people are submitting. Maybe you have an idea of your own. This could be developing trees that grow at twice the rate so they can suck carbon out of the air, building fuel cells that run on dirt and water, and making boxes of modified bacteria that will be sucking pollution out of the air. If you actually got this far in the article, you probably don’t feel too great. Would you like to fix that? Come say hi. There’s room for you at the lab bench, building bricks to fill the holes we made in the world.

As for Scihouse, we’re now more focused than ever on making sure that something can be done. Contact us about workshops, or if you want help starting your own lab.

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Education News Uncategorized

Fermentation Workshop

We are very excited for our upcoming fermentation workshop! We will be doing hands on work to create various ferments while providing an explanation for how fermentation works, and the various fungal and bacterial processes involved. It is our hope that participants can take this knowledge home with them (along with the ferments made during the workshop) and introduce the Jacksonville community to the magical world of fermentation! All details are included on the flyer posted above.

Categories
Public Reporting

2018 Annual Report

We’ve been doing our end of the year accounting and we’d like to share it with you. At Scihouse, we are committed to open access, and that means we want you, the community that helps us, know where your donations go.

You’ll notice that a lot of our income relies on donations from individuals or groups that are supporting specific projects. We work to make sure that if a party earmarks a donation for a purpose, those funds are spent on that project.

That’s it. You’ll note that the numbers aren’t exactly perfect; we’re not perfect, and we lost a receipt at some point.

We wanted to be more exact about how the cash moved around, but some things are hard to quantify. When you buy a case of gloves, it goes to everything. 

Please feel free to contact us if you want more information.  We’re looking forward to another year of doing cool projects, visiting schools, and making great science with all of you. 

Thank you

The Scihouse Team

Categories
Education News

Lending Library is Here!

After many donations from personal collections and libraries in town, the Scihouse Lending Library is now available.

If you’re a student looking for some resources, or just someone who wants to sit down and learn, we have a large collection of science and social science books for you to borrow.

If you work at a location that is thinking of getting rid of some of your books, consider donating to Scihouse. Don’t forget, we’re a 501c3 non profit so your donations help not just the community, but you.

Click the tab above to see our collection. More books come in every week.  If you have a request, we will do our best to hunt it down.

We’re always open Monday through Friday From 10 to 4 for walk ins.

See you soon