Its building may be nondescript and smell of chocolate, but the Boston Open Science Laboratory is back in Somerville, providing people a place to learn about and engage in science.
BOSLab had been in Cambridge since 2019, after having started in a garage in Somerville’s Davis Square in 2009 as the Boston Open Source Science Lab. It was “maybe 100 square feet, tops,” said Wendy Pouliot, BOSLab’s president. It now has 1,300 square feet in The Hive at Boynton Yards, an arts and creative enterprise space that also houses Taza Chocolate (hence the chocolate smell).
BOSLab is the oldest community biology lab in the United States (though New York’s Genspace disputes this claim). There are now several dozen. BOSLab’s space features benches along the walls to set up and run experiments, as well as a full complement of refrigerators and freezers, incubators to grow bacteria and yeast, equipment to amplify and analyze genetic material, imaging equipment, sterilization equipment and safety equipment. It has cabinets and shelves stocked with chemicals and other reagents. A large table in the center of its space is used as an office. A separate room stores the abundance of donated equipment.
It costs $60 a month to become a member. It’s run entirely by volunteers, including Pouliot, who got involved in 2017. “I’ve had access to labs to explore science in different ways and to be able to participate in science. But a lot of individuals never get that opportunity,” said Pouliot, who has a doctorate in neurobiology. “What’s really unique about [community lab] spaces is that it really, truly does give everyone in the community access.”
BOSLab offers classes, an artist-in-residence program, a scientist-in-training program, a workforce development program and an entrepreneur program.
One of its 51 members is Shanveer Gupta, a senior at Thayer Academy in Braintree. Gupta has been doing work at the lab since he was in the seventh grade, and participates in BOSLab’s scientist-in-training program. “I simply saw it as a place to gain lab skills and begin my journey into science,” Gupta said.
Gupta is also part of a team at the lab that competes in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine Foundation’s synthetic biology competition. Teams get BioBrick kits – DNA components – that they use to create useful organisms. Gupta’s team is working on a project that will detect and predict toxic cyanobacteria blooms in water.
Gupta does wish BOSLab had a higher biosafety rating. It is a biosafety level 1 laboratory, the lowest rating out of four designated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People working in a BSL-1 lab could not work with cells from animals or humans.
The lab space has worked well for Chris Kenyon, who started using it three years ago to run projects that help him advance his startup, Earthbarrier Atmospheric Sciences Corporation. Earthbarrier works on ecological engineering projects including terraforming, or creating Earthlike conditions on other planets. “BOSLab is incredibly unique, affordable, well-equipped, compliant and, most importantly, doesn’t take [intellectual property],” he said. “We’ve been incredibly successful building new forms of bacterial life and validating our designs.”
Many community biology labs struggle to cover their costs, even though most charge more than BOSLab’s $60-a-month memberships, Pouliot said.
“We benefit from being the Boston area,” Pouliot said. “We really can only be that affordable because of the kindness of in-kind donations from local companies.” She said many labs are trying different models to help sustain themselves. Genspace was the first community lab to get a grant from the National Science Foundation. That allowed it to create paid positions. The grant made sense because community labs “are points of communication between the public and science,” she said. BOSLab had applied for an NSF grant that disappeared with the change in administration, but Pouliot believes that eventually, federal funding for community labs will be common.
BOSLab does get occasional project-specific grants, such as one for $2,500 from the Mass Cultural Council. She hopes someday that BOSLab will be able to build out a BSL-2 laboratory, though she said “when you start doing BSL-2 mammalian cell culture, it’s shockingly expensive.” It also would probably require paying people to manage the infrastructure. Directors of community science labs have met to discuss forming a national organization so they could go after larger funds. A national organization would also be better able to advocate for community labs, she said.
Some community labs have incubator space for entrepreneurs and use the rents to pay for their community science laboratory. BOSLab has done a market analysis and is exploring a laboratory bench rental model that would be cheaper than full-service lab spaces such as LabCentral. “We already provide space for that super-early entrepreneur who’s paying out of pocket,” Pouliot said. But “anybody that comes into the incubator in our group would have to give back to the community, whether that’s through taking high school interns or giving talks or training.”
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