Every aspect of wet-lab biology is very expensive. Beyond the equipment and reagents, if you want to do in vivo aging research, you need a pathogen-free environ

Every aspect of wet-lab biology is very expensive. Beyond the equipment and reagents, if you want to do in vivo aging research, you need a pathogen-free environment to house rats/mice for months or years and food to feed them. Hackerspaces are promising in that they are finding ways to do certain techniques inexpensively. But to do the kind of wet-lab research that results in a published paper requires a wide array of equipment that I don't see available to the layman anytime soon (unless they're independently wealthy). On the other hand, there is nothing specifically preventing interested amateurs from doing bioinformatics or aging informatics themselves. Only a few things (e.g., sequence analysis) require big clusters; you can do quite a lot on your home PC. If you need data, tons of it is freely available: http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ is a good place to start. http://rosalind.info/ http://rosalind.info/ provides good tutorials. I wish we would see more open-source developers creating well-designed bioinformatics platforms under the auspices of e.g., Apache or GNU. In general the programming experience of bioinformaticians is quite low, and we are under tremendous pressure to publish often, so there is little incentive to maintain projects over the long-term.