As living technologies proliferate, how do we ensure that communities—diverse socioeconomically, culturally, and creatively—are able to not only experience its benefits, but are also active participants and agents of change? What are some of the key elements that are enabling the expansion of biotechnology’s reach beyond ‘traditional’ academic, government, and corporate laboratories?
In this talk Professor David Kong will explore the growth of biotechnology in non-traditional spaces and the creative ecosystem that supports them, including open tools, virtual infrastructure for sharing, and new programs for learning and education. In addition he will share advances in open hardware, including the application of advanced digital fabrication technology to the production of bio-hardware. From ‘Metafluidics,’ to ‘How to Grow (Almost) Anything,’ a distributed biotechnology course that is helping to augment the existing network of over one thousand Fab Labs worldwide with community biology labs, to organizing the first ‘Global Community Biology Summit,’