Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering - NYTimes.com

There are several interesting things in this article, not least of which is the open source element. The information--the knowledge & to a degree skill (so important in bench science)--created and then archived is in accordance with open-source principles and, I surmise, license. This set up and logical arrangement allows supervised students to work with industry on projects that both teaches them the basics of the science (how to do x) and produces real knowledge for others. (Call it the end of adolescence: thankfully.)

When I set up the Education Project at OpenOffice.org lo these many years ago (2004 or so, inspired by a visit to Greece and Crete where late at night we discussed the problematic of finding and inspiring developers for Foss projects), my vision was more or less like the one underwriting the one above: engage students in CS by giving them work they find interesting and that is more than merely doing what a billion of their forebears have already done: Let them do new work, collaboratively, with others who are not students. My model was the grad class & lab in any number of fields, but especially science, and my interest lay not only in resolving the developer bottleneck but in moving away from the strictures put on knowledge by commodity culture.

(Commodity culture here parcels objects according to commodity value, and this means that learning, as well as doing, are affected, as to learn X in commodity culture necessarily implies an investment of money, unless X exists in the public domain or its equivalent, where the cost of its existence has already been paid or is seen as outside of any economic valuation. The result is necessarily a shabby education, unless one comes from a culture and society whose wealth, visible or invisible, obvious or taken for granted, overwhelms the associated costs. Such a place was once the United States, where disinterested liberal education was once possible; and it was also and to a degree still exists elsewhere in the developed world--indeed, it's almost a definition of development, to have this sort of free (paid-for) knowledge. But it's disappearing there and has never really been present in the developing--aka postcolonial--world, where for many students knowledge of, even the things we in the developed countries take for granted (free), is immensely costly and requires the outlay of risk far beyond what most would consider reasonable.)

Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering - NYTimes.com