BiologiGaragen
Copenhagen, Denmark

It was founded in late 2010 by me and Malthe. We are situated in Copenhagen. I will do a brief mention of the projects. This will not be a long presentation. We have set a space up in a basement in Copenhagen, joined with labitat.dk a hackerspace in Copenhagen. We have a bunch of equipment. Getting equipment or space has not been a problem. We were offered a DNA sequencer last week.

This is one of Malthe's projects. It's where you take a photo and you can count the colonies by tapping on your iphone. I think this is a huge help and there's competing traditional lab equipment. There are some issues with getting it on different smartphones and platforms. You can read more on the website called colonycount.org.

We are collaborating with some architects to submit an architectural proposal for this.. that tries to do sustainable energy on top of land where we can store biologiccal information with improving the biomass in a local. Also, we are collaborating with architects for fungi cultivation. It's more of an art perspective about perceiving architectures.

In the future, we are running out of the basement and it's a bit difficult doing molecular biology work when your space is flooded. So we are looking for a newer and bigger space, we are trying to develop an umbrella organization on top of the biospace and hackerspace and on top of the bioart space, and reaching out to the .. it's a rich environment in Copenhagen. And we have been in touch with them and we can help each other in NGO associations, that's where we are heading towards now.

Also we have not only the local, we also have another funny twist is that we have been approached by big companies that want innovation developers asking us how we can or how they can learn from us creating a creative environment for their scientists. We would like that to be for the umbrella of citizen scientists to cross disciplinary companies in a more official science space.

Last, quickly upon concerns and issues. We have not had any bad people really show up and try to make ricin or anything, we had a few differences between the general discussions we've had so far. There are only 5 million citizens, so I have spoken with the chief of the departments in Denmark, so there's much easier to get in reach with people and the governments and departments. That's a big difference, and it removes a lot of the other hard issues we've been discussing.

GMO is not allowed unelss you have a certified lab. The chief of the fire department institute, it's called CDDBTK (what?), but we have a positive dialog about when to file they will give us permission apparently to do GMO work. Also, the rules are phrased a bit different than Germany and Netherland.. there are rules that you have to apply, but you make your own rules, showing how you want to apply up to them, and they kind of .. meeting the requiremensts so you don't have to follow the exact standard rules that are maybe nonsense to your situation.