Anarchy in the Laboratory

Real science is happening outside the hallowed halls of high-priced research facilities.  Take a look in garages, schools, and hackerspaces and you will see things like remote controlled cockroaches, crowdsourced radioactivity monitoring programs, lab equipment mad from kitchen appliances, biotech research, homebrew scanning electron microscopes, and other full-fledged scientific endeavors.

In the same way that punk rock broke down barriers that previously kept musicians from selling records and playing shows, punk science provides amateur enthusiasts with the skills and tools to make useful contributions to the body of scientific knowledge without having a Ph.D. and millions of dollars in funding. So what are you waiting for — as Johnny Rotten said in 1976, “We don’t need permission for anything!”