In the beginning...

Welcome, welcome.  Please step forward and don’t be shy.  I’m sure you are all thinking to yourself What in the world is Dwyer doing in the lab now??  But I assure you, you are completely safe.  The purpose of The Dark Lab is not to have you make zombie rats or some other exotic creature, although you may encounter the stranger, darker side of science.  I like efforts that do not stick close to the shore of the NIH/NSF grant funding lake  but, rather, research that swims out to the deeper, darker parts.  Research that takes risks.  People don’t get beheaded for this stuff anymore (ahhh, the days…) but it is still rare to see work that really pushes the limits, chokes the Dogma, or shifts paradigms out of their comfortable little beds.  Why should anyone else care about this stuff?  Because there has never been a better time to be involved.  A new Golden Era of science has come where one doesn’t need a PhD and a fancy lab to make major contributions.  Hackerspaces have popped up across the country, giving interested people access to basic DNA technologies.  High school students are working on the protein folding problem, discovering galaxies, and mining data from the human genome project for new ways to attack cancer and other deadly diseases.  Access to information on the internet has never been easier, computational power has never been stronger, and there is a growing interest from scientists to use volunteers from the lay community to help them with their work.  The opportunities are limitless!    I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years and I know first-hand that a good idea can come from anywhere!  So, if something you read about here seems pretty cool… get involved!  Just watch the floor as you leave the lab… one of my zombie rats has chewed through the steel cage again.