A bounty for cheaper biology experiments

Niko McCarty, founder of Asimov Press and now a fellow at Astera Institute, recently ran a bounty to surface new ideas to reduce the cost of lab experiments in biology. I found his reflections really interesting. He received far more interest than he expected (430 submissions in total), and though he expected to award prizes to only 4, he ended up awarding 20. Some ideas I found interesting were: “a protein printer fabricated using DNA origami” and a way to run protein synthesis reactions on a gel filtration column. He explains that the micro-grants (<$5000 each) aren’t likely to push the projects forward materially, but might still do so by providing a vote of confidence in them.