Team:USP UNIFESP-Brazil/HP/Silver
AlgAranha Team USP_UNIFESP-Brazil
In order to fulfill the requirements for the human practices silver medal, our team explored a huge issue : hardware accessibility in the developing world!
All the restrictions that we and other motivated research groups face such as:
- Restrictions due to outdated bureaucracy and hierarchy
- Economic/funding limitations
- Dealing with closed equipment
- Being free, with autonomy, to create and improve hardware
Brazil is known as a beautiful country that has a great nature, happy people and excels at soccer.
Have you ever wondered that maybe Brazil is not what it should be? Our country faces many problems as an emerging country like its scientific-technological dependence from other countries. This dependency seems that has affected Brazilian academic settings which probably smashed opportunities that otherwise could have broaden windows to innovation and problem solving.
Lab equipments are very expensive and several brazilian laboratories are not able to afford them. Moreover, when an acquired equipment breaks, it can not be quickly or easily repaired without the company's assistance. Why can not we just fix it? Lack of autonomy often yield a sense of inferiority that strongly feed and make us whirl around a vicious loop of dependence. Rather than be a mutual relationship between academy and companies, these last ones not only charge high prices for equipment repairment, but they also delay delivering support. Therefore, those are important caveats to swing that could put brazilian science development on a crag’s edge.
Since knowledge stands as global resource, everybody has already gained the right to access to devices and equipments in order to make their ideas and projects possible. The problem? In many places, it’s a veiled right. On this regard, hardware accessibility has raised aware of how publicly shared information can empower us to construct and disassembly such fancy and forbidden-to-touch equipments.
As we let others recognize that “openness” can help to restore our autonomy, we unconsciously liberate others to come up with audacious solutions to their own problems and to put their work into daily practice!
These issues let us talk about open and closed hardwares/softwares, two opposite ways to develop a hardware or software. Closed hardwares/softwares has been adopted in many laboratories due to their reliability. But open hardwares/softwares mirror collaborative development, sharing what people have desired, designed and made, so that anybody can access it and collaborate with. And it is so amazing, is not it?! We greatly appreciate this approach because it embraces people without access to high technology or expensive settings and allows a fast and robust development process.
In this way, we developed a do-it-yourself centrifuge in our project using the open hardware approach in order to share it with the community and help other people that face limitations to put their ideas into action. Other equipments are being developed like a transilluminator and an electrophoresis system. We also created the device to count cells in a stream using a webcam adapted to function as a microscope.
It is important to say that we live surrounded by "magic boxes" in a laboratory. We only press a button and something happens, many times without having knowledge of their operation. So open hardware stimulates the comprehension of an equipment and enables us to customize it. The closed devices purchased from companies come to us sealed and “untouchable”, leaving the user limited to the interface. Hacking these devices was empowering, since we became familiar to them to the point of even redesigning and building them up from scratch!
The iGEM project helped us to solve problems that we were not able. Today, we are much more confident, and we know we can contribute to brazilian science!
You can click here to give a look at the centrifuge instructions!
