How DIY technologies are democratizing science
Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 2:35 pm
I thought some here might be interested in this piece from Nature on how scientists in poorer countries are building their own instruments, in particular using open-source plans and 3D printers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03193-5 (free to read)
The gulf between rich and poor is pretty massive here. At the beginning of my masters, at an entirely middling university in France, we were doing a lab tour and got shown the room with the next-gen sequencers and told that we'd be using them next week for a practical, and obviously could plan to use them for our research projects too.
A student from Ethiopia piped up with "Wow! There's only one of those in my country."
It's very sad how little capacity-building the scientific community has managed to achieve in the 50+ years since CP Snow's famous Two Cultures lecture, to give but one example. Seems like new technologies might finally allow the global south to pull itself up by its bootstraps, alongside efforts like Sci Hub to allow people to read the literature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03193-5 (free to read)
The gulf between rich and poor is pretty massive here. At the beginning of my masters, at an entirely middling university in France, we were doing a lab tour and got shown the room with the next-gen sequencers and told that we'd be using them next week for a practical, and obviously could plan to use them for our research projects too.
A student from Ethiopia piped up with "Wow! There's only one of those in my country."
It's very sad how little capacity-building the scientific community has managed to achieve in the 50+ years since CP Snow's famous Two Cultures lecture, to give but one example. Seems like new technologies might finally allow the global south to pull itself up by its bootstraps, alongside efforts like Sci Hub to allow people to read the literature.