[BBF Standards] BioHackathon

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 08 February 2008, "Jason Kelly" <jasonk at mit.edu> wrote:
> I think the idea of a "hackathon" (e.g. get a lot of people in one
> place at one time and write code until you pass out) would be a great
> thing for wet lab biology some day.  However, the slow timescale of
> laboratory work currently makes this pretty unreasonable, so maybe
> something in between would be a design-a-thon.  A bunch of people in
> a room designing biological systems, sharing ideas, debugging, etc...
> just need a bunch of computers and whiteboards....

Ah, yes, I am all for a design-a-thon -- that's just as good. Don't have 
to concern ourselves waiting for results. 

> or maybe there's some biology that could be done on that timescale,
> would be interested to hear suggestions.

Maybe real-time work can be done when we have results on the order of 
minutes and seconds with labs-on-a-chip, but otherwise I would have to 
agree with your assessment of the situation. What sort of biology 
*couldn't* be done without enough resources laying around, a wonderland 
of supplies stockpiled and horded together for one major event each 
year? All participants would have to be told to come with a few ideas, 
and I am sure that when they start setting up, naturally people will 
gravitate to those experiments which seem to be the most interesting ;)

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/