BioMaker: Biologists as Tool-Builders


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“If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” – Maker motto. Alfréd Rényi famously joked that a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. We biologists, on the other hand, tend to need more equipment than a pencil and a coffee cup. Stand at your bench, and you can put your hands on almost a hundred different tools: everything from a benchtop sequencer all the way down to a molded-plastic cell scraper. While you have given countless hours of thought to the inner workings of your experimental organism, you probably haven’t considered the making and workings of these objects at all.