Tito Jankowski is one of the organizers of the DIY Bio community and he’s trying to make the field of biotechnology accessible to amateurs as well. He thinks anyone should be able to look at their DNA. You can start by swabbing saliva from inside your mouth and then look at it in a small, home-based lab. His small San Francisco-based company, Pearl Biotech, is starting to develop some of the equipment you’d need. The Pearl Gel Box, a gel electrophoresis system, is based on an open-source hardware design, like many of these projects, which means that the specifications are open and shared publicly. Anyone could use these specifications to build their own version of this equipment and customize it for a specific application. Or you can buy the Pearl Gel box in versions from $189 to $500, depending on how much assembly you’re willing to do yourself. Commercial versions cost more than $1,000 but most importantly, their producers don’t expect anyone but scientists or technicians to be using them.
Read on: http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-12-20/news/17353578_1_dna-garages-citizen-scientists
