Cottage-Core Biotech
On amateur biology, curiosity, and open-science with Sebastian Cocioba
Sebastian Cocioba has spent the past fifteen years turning his home into a functional BSL-1 laboratory as he walks an unfamiliar path to becoming a flower designer. On X (Twitter), his moderately large following receives a play-by-play of his experiments, which range from engineering sugar-selectable bacteria to hacking together low-cost lab gear. For those inspired to replicate his work themselves, Cocioba also maintains an open lab notebook, Flowers for Everyone, where he records his methodology, results, and failures in meticulous detail. What also comes through alongside the notes and figures is a sense of infectious curiosity accompanied by an apt self-description: “I’m [still] 100 percent an amateur biologist.”
The insistence on ‘amateur’ was previously noted in an Asimov Press profile on Cocioba, which highlighted that the word comes from the French amour or Latin amare – to love. This relationship with biology makes sense given his interest in reviving the “gentleman sciences” of the nineteenth century1, demonstrating that valuable findings can come from the public domain. His guiding question to that end is simple: Can you be curious about the natural world and do publishable research as a hobby? Everything in his DIY lab is an attempt to prove that the answer can be yes.2
Cocioba started off like most hobbyists, running experiments for “the love of the game,” and then began sharing them on the internet openly, abundantly, and conscientiously. Soon, he was receiving inbound messages from academics and fellow enthusiasts alike: “Hey, I saw that you are doing something that aligns with my research. Could you help me with this thing and I will pay you?” Outside the ivory tower but suddenly privy to its inner workings, he describes these projects as “therapy” for the researchers, a chance for them to answer questions they have always had without being bound by a grant. Over-time, it became his primary job – running a “one-man contract research organization (CRO).”
However, unlike traditional CROs Cocioba maintains a crucial clause in his contracts: if he builds a “fundamental tool, such as a really convenient vector that has nothing to do with [their] IP, then it should be open.”3 These methodological advances then become public knowledge, with due credit to the company that funded them. It is a model that benefits everyone – clients get their specific work done while gaining some goodwill and the broader community gains access to new techniques.
Cocioba is equally forthcoming with his own projects, which he documents publicly on Flowers for Everyone, a lab-notebook that he has previously described as an “open-source diary meets Julia Child cookbook.” Entries include experiments with Petunias engineered to turn deep red as a visual marker for successful genetic modifications, and progress-updates on modular plate-readers. Beyond the site, he is also working on a modernized twist to a floral dip transformation protocol for Arabidopsis that makes transgenic seeds glow while still inside their seed pods (siliques). This work, inspired by a 2003 paper, is part of his broader effort to mine expired patents for low-cost tools that can democratize biology. Taken together, his work represents “one example of how somebody wades through science day by day” and has become a reliable resource for a growing community of amateur scientists.4
He doesn’t just make public his successes, though, quoting Edison when probed about how he chooses what to document: “I didn’t make a light bulb. I learned a thousand and one ways how not to make a light bulb.”5 For Cocioba, failures are an important part of the scientific process – “That tacit knowledge is what industry has because they know how they failed. But in academia, we don’t actually know how everyone has failed. We only get the final result.” To circumvent this problem he publishes his shortfalls as open-questions on X: “Instead of failing in a vacuum, be like, ‘This failed, but I wonder why?’ And get the nerds who are on their lunch break going, ‘Oh, I actually know.’”
This philosophy of radical transparency also drives one of his proposals: bounties for biology. He imagines a Department of Defense-style system where researchers could earn money for validating published promoters or curating the thousands of unverified parts in the iGEM registry. The key difference from traditional funding? “If multiple people chase that bounty and converge onto it from different angles, each one of them should be paid the bounty in full.” Moreover, “it would be great if we can compensate for negative results by giving academic credit.” This approach could potentially incentivize validation while creating learning opportunities for students.6 He calls it “janitorial science” because it is unglamorous but essential. “Sanitation is the reason why civilizations work, and biodata sanitation is honorable work... if we actually give people credit and say ‘you are a sanitation engineer of biology’, that’s actually an incredibly respectable thing.”
The question of who does science, and how they are compensated, remains central to Cocioba’s work. Referencing the current rate of funding cuts, he recounts how friends have watched awards disappear because a proposal contained the word “climate,” or lost money because their proposals “had the word ‘diversity’ in it when they were talking about microbial diversity.” But the true damage, he says, will reveal itself later when research programs are abandoned and promising students leave science because the price-reward trade-offs no longer makes sense: “Cutting costs for basic research is like cutting off your leg to lose weight.”
The one potential upside he sees though, is more scrutiny of research budgets from scientists who begin taking a “hard look at the expense sheet.” Preferred-vendor purchasing, he argues, “turns into a mafia really quick” because no one knows the baseline. One example he shares is of a five-liter ‘reaction vessel’ which is listed at $300 in a lab catalog but when flipped over, reveals the same maker’s mark as a $23 IKEA bucket. He has made a sport of such investigations, which allow him to make custom lab-hardware for labs at a fraction of the cost: “cottage-core biotech” he calls it.
These methods have become increasingly necessary. Prototype PCBs that once landed for five bucks plus shipping now cost almost ten-times that because of fluctuating tariffs, and Cocioba is forced to run even leaner – “Before, I would do seven designs and pick the one that works; now I have to do one and it better work.” To economize, he mills his own electrophoresis combs on a 3-D printer, swaps platinum electrodes for paper clips if the steel will do (“because thousands of boxes of paper clips are still going to be cheaper than one gel box”), and uses an Instant Pot as a foolproof autoclave.
Being able to DIY hardware is also useful because, “finding used laboratory tools can be hit-or-miss and it really depends on where you live. Now, because of tariffs, it’s even harder to get OEM7 stuff from China…and sometimes you just need something that holds a tube at a particular angle.” This prompted Cocioba to publish a paper where he cataloged some of these work arounds – a repository of 3D-printable lab tools that allow others to access wet-lab tools quickly and at a fraction of the cost.8 With consumer-grade printers now cheap and ubiquitous, 3-D printing has quietly democratized bench science, making it easier for curious individuals to start experimenting.
Cocioba makes a compelling case for why that matters.“There are industrial-grade microbes on your shoe right now,” he says, organisms that will die underfoot because no one bothers to swab the tread. With overnight, zero-prep sequencing now cheap enough for amateurs, he argues the real hazard is not sampling the puddle, not plating the mystery colony – there is a real opportunity cost to not being curious about the world.
His open notebook, his bounty proposal, his insistence on documenting failures are all attempts to lower barriers to doing science. To show that the question has moved beyond whether amateurs can contribute to science to whether science can afford to ignore them.
All quotes and opinions from conversations dated 2nd and 27th May, 2025. Wording lightly edited at times for clarity.
With thanks to Alex Danylyszyn and Samarth Jajoo for feedback on drafts.
“Without the sexism and racism and exclusion etc.”
“People say DIY biology. I want DIT, do-it-together biology.”
Again, given that it is not IP protected.
Here, Cocioba is insistent that if an amateur's blog falls into disarray, so does the science. To avoid situations like these, he is working with collaborator Sung Won Lim (@naturepoker1 on twitter) to publish Willowlands, an archival project that intends to attach DOI numbers and physical Library of Congress deposits to lab-notebooks.
Although the source of the quote is not in question, there are many versions of it floating around the internet (all to the same effect). I am linking here the source most often used on the internet: “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
Especially so in a time moment where there is much discussion about a “reproducibility crisis.”
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