Dear BrmLab,
My name is Noga, I’m an undergraduate student interning in Synthetic Biology & Policy at Johns Hopkins University, under Professor Gigi Gronvall. I am currently writing a Feature about the role of community labs in innovation, with the goal of revealing an additional value to community labs that will be lost if the public continues to buy into the current narrative about the risk surrounding DIY biology.
With this focus in mind, my goal is to interview a few biotech startups that rose from community labs as well as those community labs. I’m in touch with Dan Grushkin of Genspace and a few other laboratories, but I’d be really interested in discussion your approach to innovation and how your lab’s location and the surrounding culture affects it. I was wondering if you would be willing to have someone sit down for a Skype interview and discuss some of this? I’ve added the questions I will ask below, but I’m sure there would be more that come up during the conversation:
1. How do you think your experience working on a project in a community lab contrasts with that of working on the same thing in the private sector? What are the advantages and disadvantages? 2. What opportunities do you think community laboratories give people? Can you use examples? 3. What aspects of community labs do you think are often dismissed by the media or laypeople? 4. How would you compare innovation in biotech to innovation in tech? does it get less or more attention, is it easier or harder to get startups off the ground, do the innovations themselves have different traits (do they have more environmental or global streak, are they more daring, are they more down-to-earth)? 5. What do you think there could be done to sustain community laboratories and ensure they can remain incubators for biotechnologies?
In addition, I’d love it if you could get me in touch with startups that sprung up from your lab. If you are busy, you’re welcome to answer these questions through email. My plan would be to use 1-2 quotes from you. Following the interview, I will email you twice more: once with the quotes I chose to get your approval, and a second time asking you to read over the section of the feature dedicated to you, to ensure it’s accurate. We’re aiming at a journal on the scale of somewhere between STAT News and Global Health Now. Let me know if you have any questions.
Warm regards,
Noga Aharony Summer Intern 443-573-3310 naharon1@jhu.edumailto:naharon1@jhu.edu [JHSPH-2]
