19-Year-Old Biotech Enthusiast Will Trade Coffee Beans for Lab Equipment
Unroasted coffee beans Dan Bollinger via Wikimedia Commons Avery Ashley wants to make a deal: his home-roasted coffee beans for lab equipment that'll let him grow his first batch of glowing bugs, so he can one day bioengineer yeast cells into inexpensive food. In a house in rural North Carolina, a rectangular fold-out table is scattered with decades-old lab equipment including a centrifuge, a PCR machine (used to copy DNA), and a gel electrophoresis box that's used for measuring DNA. Animal Collective plays on the computer speakers. In his computer chair, 19-year-old Avery Ashley rolls from his desk to his makeshift lab bench. He's making agar plates to cultivate Escherichia coli-gut bacteria. Ashley hopes to grow his first batch of glowing bugs, so he can one day bioengineer yeast cells into inexpensive, nutritional and tasty foods. But between the cost of lab equipment and reagents, doing biotechnology experiments isn't cheap. To gain...