Original Syn

Freedom from Friction! We developed the OpenMTA to support the redistribution of biological materials. For both charitable and commercial purposes. The OpenMTA is a legal instrument designed for how biology actually moves between people. Linda Kahl was the lead developer. The genius and sweat was hers. Linda drove the drafting, the negotiation, and the consensus-building across institutions that made the agreement real. The drafting effort ran via the BioBricks Foundation and Stanford, in partnership with OpenPlant at Cambridge and the John Innes Centre, with input from many others. The original team published the agreement in 2018. Infrastructure for Sharing! The OpenMTA matters because most material transfer agreements don't allow sharing.  The UBMTA, the dominant MTA, restricts redistribution and commercial use. That restriction is a tax on sharing. A tax that slows distribution and innovation. A tax that blocks downstream reuse. A tax that makes open collections like Addgene, F...

We are the well dwellers wallowing in our well bottoms.        Our most-familiar well manifests via the gravitational force keeping us physically on Earth – a gravity well that we can escape by rocketing up, up, and away.   Escape velocity.   There is a second well, largely unseen, that manifests via the life preceding us, defining us, and burdening us in the now as corporeal forms and functions – a life well that we might eventually escape by transcending terrestrial lineage.   Life liberation.     While we have both dreamt and done rocketing beyond our gravity well we have barely conceptualized any small circle of light implying life beyond the burbling basin of attraction comprising what we are as humans and the life around us.   A life well?!   What lies beyond our life well’s lip?   An empty vacuum of extinction?   An Eden?   Stated differently, a life well is a conceptual model of the life forms existing and pr...