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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
It has been an eventful few months and we just wanted to let you know the state of things. We had put together a fantastic bio lab and were gearing up to start monthly classes and were doing some cool research. Due to a series of circumstances that created a strong conflict of interest, we had to cut ties with the sponsor that was helping to pay for some of the lab costs.
As such, we currently do not have a lab space. Luckily, as a mobile makerspace this isn’t a big problem. We still have most of our equipment and so we are moving forward.
Starting March 14th we’ll be hosting monthly get togethers where makers and scientists alike can gather some place fun, have a drink, and chat about projects ideas and more. The first will take place at Intuition and start at 6:00pm. Come and hang out and let’s talk shop about the projects you want to make. You can also find us on Meetup here.
We’re also excited to announce that on April 17th we’ll be taking part in Mini Maker Faire, hosted by the MOSH. We’ll have lasers, glowing microbes, our gene gun, bioplastics, and more so be sure to stop by – we’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!
Finally, while we’re still committed to bringing you the tools and information you need to be a maker in Jacksonville, we also want to rebuild and open a new lab. With it we’ll be able to continue our research and share the methods and materials of biotechnology with all of you. We will be able to resume the biology classes and start new ones on other topics. Access to biology tools is normally restricted to high level university students and we want to make them available to all of you. If you’d like to help make that a reality, Donate Here.
As a 501c3 non profit, your donations are tax deductible.
That’s all for now, and thank you for your continued support!
-The Scihouse Team
In microbiology, one of the first skills you learn is streaking. While the name sounds funny, it actually refers to a method of slowly diluting a bacterial culture until only single cells remain. To learn how to streak a plate, check out our new video!
A gene gun is by far one of the most useful tools for getting DNA into an organism. But they are prohibitively expensive to buy ($35,000 new from biorad). Since we needed one for our projects we thought we’d try and build one! We managed to put ours together for less than $100 and it works great! Thanks so much to those who came to makercon this past weekend and saw us demonstrating it. To find out how to build your own gene gun, check out our new video!
We are happy to announce that our diyBio care package from The Odin has arrived! Exciting new toys for the biology lab are now here. Pictured below are the great materials that have been donated. You can see that we now have a PCR machine, gel box, new pipettes and tips to add to our collection, various reagents, and even a CRISPR kit! Not shown are the bacteria strains, dyes, and other materials for recombination.
If you are interested in learning how to get started as a biohacker, let us know. We’re currently testing the waters to see how many people are interested in a diy biology and biohacking class.
This brings us to the other announcement.
Due to a variety of environmental and infrastructural issues, we have chosen to move the makerspace out of the warehouse. But don’t worry! We are setting up to run classes at various locations around the city, including a drone factory and the Jax Library Makerspace. All the tools still exist and if you want to learn or do, we can pop up and make it happen. We’re still here, we’re just more mobile. Flexibility is good.
Thank you again to The Odin for their awesome donation of supplies, and let us know if you are ready to start biohacking.
This past Friday, we hosted Pop Art Block Party and it was an absolute blast! In the short span of a week we transformed the space from a mostly bare warehouse, into a beautiful exhibition filled with science and art. With several hundred people in attendance we stayed busy the whole night. We met a lot of amazing people and look forward to seeing new faces at the meetups.
The new mural at the front of the building looks amazing!
One of our founders, Alex Borrelli doing some live torchwork. He made this cool pair of DNA goblets!
Our Electronics and Bio/Chem spaces got a makeover and some new art. Now they’re ready to host some exciting classes and workshops!
Our new pallet bar looked super cool when it was all lit up.
Even the greenspace was transformed!
Thanks again to everyone who made it out to the event, and we hope you had as great of a time as we did. We’re already starting to get ready for our next event. While this event was a lot of fun, it was also mostly aimed at adults. Our next event will be for all ages and will lean more towards the science aspects of the space, so be sure to keep an eye out for that in the near future!
For anyone who’s come to one of the Meetups, you’ve seen us receive images from passing weather satellites. If you ever wanted to know how that works, we’ve already made 2 videos going through the process, but for those who prefer written instructions, we now have an Instructable to go with it! https://www.instructables.com/id/Receiving-Images-From-Passing-Weather-Satellites-N/
This instructable only covers NOAA satellites but we’re working on part 2 which will cover the details of METEOR M2 reception as well.
Yesterday, Wednesday June 14th we taught our first class at the Jax Public Library’s Makerspace. First off, we just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone who attended. It was a great experience and one we look forward to doing again.
The class was on the topics of plants and plant biology and we talked about the plant at all scales, from leaves and roots to stomata and chloroplasts. We manage to cover an impressive amount of content in the short span of the class and everyone got lots of hands on with everything we covered. Best of all, everyone went home with their own mini greenhouse kit and seeds that they picked and planted themselves.
It was a lot of fun and hope everyone enjoyed as much as we did!