BioCoder #3

Interview with Ian Marcus of SynBio4All

An Open, Online Platform for Collaboration on Synthetic Biology Projects

Noah Most

“We all have ideas,” Ian Marcus, the project leader of SynBio4All, told me as we sat down at the Citizen Cyberscience Conference 2014, “but why is it that the only people that can come up with ideas are people that have been very myopic in their research?”

While many citizen science programs channel that spirit, top-down initiatives dominate the largely academic-led citizen science landscape. Typically, laypeople are limited to either collecting data (eBird) or recognizing patterns (WhaleFM). Many initiatives define citizen science as merely a way for citizens to help scientists. Although these top-down initiatives have yielded many exciting results, including more than 50 publications out of the Zooniverse citizen science portal, there has been comparatively little support by academics to affirm citizens’ capabilities as scientists—able to develop interesting ideas, design valid protocols, and interpret results.

SynBio4All, developed at the Paris Descartes University, aims to help change that. “SynBio4All is an open, online, collaborative platform by which citizen scientists, DIYbiologists, and academics could take a project from start to finish,” Marcus explained. “They come up with the idea, they design the project, they help with the lab work if they want, and they disseminate the results to the public. And all of it is open, online, and for everybody to see.” ...