Same pathway as the author! In high school, biology class meant memorizing modules of the human heart and pricking my finger to find out what my blood type was

Same pathway as the author! In high school, biology class meant memorizing modules of the human heart and pricking my finger to find out what my blood type was (I stayed home sick that day). "Loving biology" meant carrying around AP Bio books thicker than an unabridged Webster dictionary. No thanks. Then later in college, my friend said it would be fun if we both took the genetics class he needed to take for his pre-med reqs. I agreed, and then bombed the class exam after exam. One day right before Thanksgiving, when all the students are checked out, the profs got up and demoed their research. They got up and showed us BLAST, the 3 GB human genome, and software tools to search the genome. Most importantly, these 2 professors, masters of the genetics universe as they were, made lots of mistakes while demoing the software. They "oops"ed their way through this and that and said it was ok because the human genome had just recently been sequenced and it was all still new. "It's a UNIX system! I know this" popped into my head, and I promptly declared myself a biotech entrepreneur. After class I went up to the teachers and told them I would build them better software tools for genetics. Then I wrote every department in school I could find who used digital genomes to build them better tools. Tools for understanding the most important language the universe had ever written. 14 years later, in the wake of that realization is the first hackerspace for biotech BioCurious [1], an open source DNA copy machine OpenPCR [2], and lots of great work with the iGEM [3] and DIYbio [4] communities. These days the fun continues as I'm engineering the biggest living system out there [5], planet Earth. [1] BioCurious http://biocurious.org http://biocurious.org [2] OpenPCR http://openpcr.org http://openpcr.org [3] iGEM http://igem.org http://igem.org [4] Do-it-yourself Biology http://diybio.org http://diybio.org [5] Mining carbon from the air, AirMiners http://airminers.org http://airminers.org & Negative http://gonegative.co http://gonegative.co