The incentives here have been changing in favor of progress and the breaking down of the life science academic priesthood for years, but this piece omits a very

The incentives here have been changing in favor of progress and the breaking down of the life science academic priesthood for years, but this piece omits a very important part of the landscape, which is regulation and the present state of law. People in the diybio community are justifiably very cautious about what they say and do, as there is there very real threat of getting thrown in jail for no real reason other than they have a lab. The war on drugs on one hand and hysteria about terrorism on the other have done a great deal to make it risky to do home life science work. Beyond that regulation makes it hard to impossible to do near anything useful with animal tissues on a garage hacking basis, and if you're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point, really? Might as well build a cat webapp if your horizon is limited to glowing plants. So there is a lot of tension here between what is possible and what is permitted. That has been an issue in early stage research for decades now, and has cost uncounted lives and years of progress. This is just the stage in which that becomes more apparent as more people could, in theory, participate.