Meeting the Waag society - Infinite Possibilities
We were really surprised to find the Waag society within an old building in the middle of Amsterdam that looked like a small castle. Every Tuesday evening, the Waag Society offers a regular open Wetlab. There, we met Lucas Evers, who is leading the open Wetlab and many other interesting people. Some were regular guests, others visited the Waag society for the first time.
After a short greeting, Michelle, a biotechnology student from Italy and current intern at the Waag Society, presented the amazing DIY hardware they assembled and told us about his ambitious project "BioStrike". He aims to design and distribute a toolkit to empower citizens to develop new antimicrobials. Because of the substantial overlap with the last year's Aachen iGEM project, we had an intense discussion about the increasing danger of the speading microbial resistances to antibiotics.
Afterwards Lucas gave all of the guests an interesting tour, telling us about the fascinating history of the building and the amazing events they organized during the last few months. After his tour, he got the chance to outline our iGEM project, which started an controversial discussion about the future of synthetic biology.
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Back in the main room Michele told us, that Pieter planned to participate in the iGEM competition next year. That was a great coincidence, because we had hoped to convince Pieter to participate in the iGEM during our visit. We reached our first goal, without even meeting him.
Drinking tea and eating Aachen’s famous gingerbread, everyone gathered around a big table. One of the most mind blowing discussions about biohacking and bioart we ever attended was about to start. It turned out, that most of the regular guests were actually artists, who collaborate with the Waag society. The presented bioart projects ranged from simply painting with different-colored microbes to experimentally expressing the behavior of a biological network as a theater play with actors as nodes of an computational algorithm.
We learned a lot about bioart and how the Waag society triggers open discussions about synthetic biology and biotechnology using bioart as a starting point. They invited us to visit their exhibition Matter of Live in November 2015, which we gladly accepted
Another big project of the Waag society’s WetLab is the BioHack Academy. This academy teaches everybody interested how to set up a laboratory based on DIY hardware. Not only private persons, but also new found community labs use this academy. Via internet conferences, the biohack academy goes global, even people from Iran asked them to join the biohack academy.
Concerning the Waag Society's educational strategy, they were also interested in the teaching lessons in synthetic biology we shared with the "Technik Garage". Following the teach the teacher principle, we believe they will soon spread synthetic biology even to people far away from Europe.
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