Christi Guerrini featured in New Yorker article

In a recent New Yorker story about community labs and emerging issues around biomedical citizen science by Margaret Talbot, Christi Guerrini described findings from this research project:

Christi Guerrini, a legal scholar and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who is conducting a research project about biohackers, told me that many community labs go well beyond “check-the-box compliance,” adding, “There was one individual I interviewed who really struck me in his thoughtfulness around to what extent organisms can experience pain—he was very conflicted about it. The organisms he was considering working with were jellyfish.”

Guerrini feels that D.I.Y. biologists often have a greater commitment than their professional counterparts do to making their work open to scrutiny—and available for free on the Internet. Their research might not be paradigm-shifting, but you or I could access it without having an institutional affiliation or an expensive journal subscription. (We’d have less confidence, of course, that the research was legit.) Among professionals, Guerrini said, “you have the phenomenon of scientists wanting to hold onto their data and sort of dribble it out, because they are responding to incentives around promotion and tenure and intellectual property.”