

Transcriptic - outsourcing basic biology research work - recardona
http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/13/transcriptics-wild-seed-round-the-internet-was-just-trying-to-throw-money-at-us/

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polyfractal
At my last wet-bench lab, I was responsible for dissecting and culturing
cortical neurons. Sounds cool, right?

The dissection day protocol took 5 hours, start to finish. The largest gap was
about 15 minutes as samples trypsonized in a water bath. I could sneak out to
the bathroom or grab a snack during this period. The rest of the time was
spent stacking, unstacking, pipetting, sloshing, scraping, mixing various
liquids inside of sterile bio-safety cabinet.

Every wednesday I would perform this identical protocol and effectively space
out for 5 hours at a time, listening to podcasts. Sometimes I would just dream
about a robot doing my job. Much of my other duties during the week revolved
around these little culture dishes. Neurons require a pretty obnoxious feeding
schedule.

I was effectively being paid 30k a year to be a robot. A single purchase of
30k would have saved my lab a lot of money, since it would have replaced me as
a tech.

I considered starting a business trying to sell robots to do just this, but
decided I didnt have enough robotics knowledge to do it, or capital to start.

Best wishes to these guys!

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benmathes
frisco: “This is not a local, social, mobile photosharing app. It’s really
frustrating to see someone get a PhD in chemistry and decide what the world
really needs is a better way to share photos in real time to music.”

Clearly a lot of investors thought the same.

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jacoblyles
Companies like transcriptic remind us of why many of us got into tech in the
first place. These guys are definitely on the flying cars side of the flying
cars vs. 140 characters spectrum.

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dxbydt
I interviewed at transcriptic but ended up at twitter...so the next time my
boss walks by & asks why I'm cranky, I'll say I was supposed to be flying cars
instead of manning this giant 140 character machine :))

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frisco
ps we're _very_ actively hiring! If you're interested, send me an email at
max@transcriptic.com! More info here:
<https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs>

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jostmey
This is exciting. Finally, the Tech world seems to be growing beyond social
media (ect...) and moving toward developing actually useful businesses!

It looks like all that Transcriptic does right now is simply put plasmids
together. Hopefully, that will change in the future, and they will offer
additional services :-)

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natosaichek
Absolutely! We're excited about opening the whole platform up so that the only
limitations on what can be done are the physical capabilities of the robots.
Cloning is a small piece of the gigantic array of possibilities.

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aantix
@frisco Besides the manual robotic tasks, I could envision workflows that
require the worker to do some basic identification in order to proceed. Sounds
like something a trained Mechanical Turk or a oDesk worker could do. I have
extensive experience with complex crowdsourcing workflows; shoot me an email
at my website ( www.aantix.com ) if you ever want bounce ideas off of me..

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jamesjporter
I remember also hearing about a company that was trying to outsource molecular
cloning, but with people, not robots. Basically you sent them your DNA and
told them what you wanted done and they would bust their ass to do it and send
it back to you. Does anyone have a link for this? I can't for the life of me
remember the name of the company.

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jcarden
Way to go guys!

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frisco
thanks!

