Old Pyrex Carage Box

Genome at Home: Biohackers Build Their Own Labs

A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility. To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a corner. The room itself is about 120 square feet and has one big window with a view of an adjacent roof. There’s an 8-foot-wide gap in the middle; the rest of the room is for science. “I thought about moving the lab to the empty living room downstairs,” Perfetto says. “I really need more space. But that’s right by the front door. I don’t want to freak people out.”

He laughs a little awkwardly, and it’s easy to see why he’s worried. With its Pyrex containers on metal racks and other clinical-looking equipment, the bedroom looks perfect for cooking crystal meth. A mass of wires spills out of a wooden box; on top sits a metal plate punched full of holes. A table holds several laptops, test tubes, a box of purple surgical gloves, a rack with pipettes in various sizes, rubber tubes connected to vials, an orange plastic box with a blue light in the bottom, and a centrifuge that looks like an oversize rice cooker. The wooden box is actually a homemade device for doing polymerase chain reactions (PCR), a process that turns small samples of DNA into quantities large enough to analyze. And the orange plastic thing runs gel electrophoresis, a way to sort DNA strands by size. Perfetto, an engineer, built a few of the gadgets himself.

“I’ve been sleeping in here,” says Mackenzie Cowell, Perfetto’s business partner. “And who knows what kinds of chemicals have soaked into this rug!” He flew out to California from Boston a week earlier and has been working with Perfetto on a DIY genomics kit to sell through their new business, CoFactor. The problem is, right now extracting and amplifying DNA at home still takes too many steps. The guys are worried that people won’t enjoy the process if it’s too complicated.

A Coffee Brewer Four Me | ROASTe

Back in the late eighties drip coffee was hitting full stride with over fifty percent of the market but pour over and press still represented about fifteen percent of the market.  The final push for these customers began in earnest as smaller four cup drip coffee brewers began hitting store shelves.  A person making a couple 12 fl oz mugs with a filter cone or press might not want a ten or twelve cup coffee maker but would not be able to resist the convenience of these little appliances.  A major player in this market and coffee in general was Krups.

Their Brewmaster Junior was popular since it made up to twenty fluid ounces of very hot coffee using thermal technology to keep the water hot through out the brewing process.  The successor to this model, the Krups Model 105 Cafe Prima carried on this tradition with the same fully enclosed double wall brewing chamber which actually is a lidded filter cone that sits on top of the four cup Pyrex brand carafe.  Available according to the box in white or - like mine - in black.

The lighted power switch and stow away cord along with a magnified water level indicator gave this model a strong feature set when compared to other small coffee makers in this class.  The addition of a Teflon coated heating plate was icing on the cake making clean up a snap.  The unit relies on number two size cone filters which holds 40 grams of very fresh coffee without overflowing the brewing chamber from the bloom.  The heater is 650 watts but the thermostat is set sufficiently high to allow for shower head temperature readings consistently hitting between 190 and 200 degrees F. thoughout the brewing process and a toasty 180 degrees F in the carafe for the finished pot.

The coffee finishes brewing fast and tastes great. This is one of the nicer small four cup brewers I have found lately, and with luck you can find one too. Unfortunately these haven't been available from Krups for a while now.  I have a feeling these small brewers were nice, but still not enough to sway the die hard fifteen percent of pour over and press coffee drinkers to plug in to the convenience of auto drip since not many really nice ones are available from manufacturers.  The increase in single serve coffee might have been the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.

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