The Community Labs Built on Silicon Valley’s Junk
Trash from biotech startups are citizen scientists’ treasure
One Saturday in August 2018, Patrik D’haeseleer raced down to Silicon Valley with two other members of Counter Culture Labs, a community science lab and maker space in Oakland, California. D’haeseleer and other scientists around the Bay Area had heard that the controversial blood-testing company Theranos, once the unicorn biotech startup of the Valley, was liquidating its assets to pay off creditors. There was a rumor going around that local community laboratories and other nonprofits might be invited to help Theranos rid itself of its wares.
The rumor turned out to be true.
D’haeseleer and his companions pulled up to the sprawling Theranos campus in Palo Alto to grab whatever they could use in their community labs.
The company’s warehouse was mostly filled with single-use laboratory supplies, like pipette tips and test tubes. D’haeseleer and his crew took a load of them back to Counter Culture Labs, where citizen scientists trying to develop a cheaper form of insulin and make vegan cheese out of yeast would put them…
