imran*

Category: Friends

  • DIYBio UK Summit

    DIYbio SummitThis weekend sees the UK's first DIYbio summit take place at Manchester's Madlab, founded my good friends – Hwa Young and Asa Calow.

    The DIYbio movement intends to democratise biology and enable "citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety" and the summit is part of Manchester's Science festival and includes speakers from Genspace, Hackteria and Transit Lab.

    I've been following the work of synthetic biologists like Drew Endy and the Open Wetware Lab for many years, but it was back in Spring 2009, when Asa and I attended the Real Hackers Program RNA workshop at ETech in San Diego, that I saw that Asa had the bio bug too. Over the course of a couple of hours, we were taught how to hack E.Coli into various bio applications, by Ginkgo BioWorks' Reshma Shetty.

    Through Hwa's been running various DIYbio meetups recently – includng an octopus dissection workshop! – it's great to see high impact work like the summit being concieved and delivered by the Madlab crew. Indeed, as Monica starts to formulate the 2012 edition of LSxJunior, Asa and I are keen to run a workshop on 'genetics and DNA sequencing for kids'.

    Find out more about the DIYbio Summit at the Madlab site.

    —

    I wonder if any of the outputs from the DIYbio summit will find their way across town to ian Forrester's Last Weekend Dining Club…

  • The Dreamers

    My good friend Matt Maude has been shortlisted for the Virgin Media Shorts 2011 prize, with his piece The Dreamers…

    A woman rises from her bed in the middle of the night. As she crosses the city, we see other sleepwalkers congregating to one place.

    Matt tells a great story, with few words and some lovely expressive actors – but his talents aren't limited to the screen; check out the story of how he cleared the rights for the use of Sigur Rós in The Dreamers.