Remote Control Biology

Here at Lux we are approached on a weekly basis by PhDs looking to leave academia and enter industry. The first question I ask them is “How much time do you have left before graduating?” What I’m really asking is “How much time do you have left to network the hell out of industry?” There’s a lot of downtime in science, and that downtime is invaluable if your mind is made up that professorship is not for you. Growing bacterial clones? Inoculate the liquid media, place flask in a shaker at 37 degrees, and wait 3-6 hours. Trying to get an understanding of gene expression? Add DNA to master mix, distribute at infinitesimally low volumes in 384-well plates, place in PCR machine, input settings and wait 2-3 hours. Want to visualize protein expression? Grow cells (at least 1 day), fix cells to dish (hours), add antibody to cells and wait overnight. Running gels, growing bacteria, transfecting cells, enzymatic reactions, sequencing, PCR, breeding mice, sectioning, staining and imaging tissue it all takes time. And there’s a lot of waiting. Now for the PhDs that aren’t long for academia, that time can be spent researching their next career move. But there’s another movement that is specifically looking at that downtime, and further to the entire process of biological experimentation and thinking that science research can get a whole lot more efficient – at Lux we call them the biological hackers.