Is Kickstarter Hostile To Science?
A Weed That Glows Glowing Plant By discouraging a promising science project, Kickstarter could be encouraging corporate monopolies, enabling sloppy legislation, and keeping cool glow-in-the-dark plants out of our houses. On July 31, Kickstarter updated its guidelines to include this sentence: "Projects cannot offer genetically modified organisms as a reward." That seems like a small and specific ban, but there's a lot more going on here than that suggests: this is about the future of science funding, the future of agriculture, of bedroom experimentation and synthetic biology and the impact of all of that on nature. And it's about whether Kickstarter has a problem with science. Here's how this all started. On April 23rd, a three-person (with some help) team from Singularity University, a research facility within NASA's Silicon Valley campus, posted a Kickstarter for the Glowing Plant project, asking for $65,000 in the period ending June 7th. The project aims to,...