modern cell biologist or neurogeneti-
cist, like transfection or the polymer-
ase chain reaction. TReND also foot
a large sum of the bill themselves to
make the classes as inclusive as pos-
sible. Classes aren’t just for students
either with TReND offering training for
graduates and teaching staff so that
they may pass on what they’ve learnt
and so improve the qu ality of higher
education in Africa, as a step toward
helping African universities catch up
to the European standard. Because
right now Africa lacks self-sufficiency,
and the development that paves the
way to self-sufficiency is expensive.
As a result vital infrastructure gets
supplied by foreign investment often
in exchange for natural resources or
labour. Meaning, somebody builds a
network of roads, or housing, or in-
vests in a university, but the complica-
tion remains that there are few native
African engineers to build the road
themselves and the cost of equipping
a neuroscience lab, at least to Euro-
pean standards, basically slams the
door on many African hopefuls. This
is why the continent of Africa has only
620 accredited universities, while wid-
er Europe alone has 4000 universities.
Europe is tiny compared to Africa, and
so this creates an environment where
those that can afford education or
have been educated to a level where
they can make a difference are drawn
to higher education or industry in the
West.
To end this cycle of the brightest Af-
rican students choosing more estab-
lished European universities TReND
aims to encourage elite universities
in Africa. Technology itself can be
the solution to the prohibitive price
of modern science and so TReNDs
founder, Tom Baden, proposes that
advances in 3D printing technologies
can be used to print lab equipment on
location, wherever it may be. This is
a fairly novel idea, given the complex-
ity and sophistication of even low end
lab equipment, especially when you
consider that even these advanced
machines are calibrated against higher
standards, how could you validate the
precision of a 3D printed pipette, when
it’s the only pipette you have? Fortu-
nately we can be fairly sure that this
is only a short term problem as a huge
number of ready to be printed 3D soft-
ware models from Frisbees to phone
cases are available for free online, for
anyone with a 3D printer to download
and get printing. This is the open-
hardware movement, a named coined
from the open-source movement that
drives innovation in software design,
and what it means is that anyone can
download, tinker with and upload a
design to fix and develop it. Think of
it like crowd innovation where users
are directly invested in the final prod-
uct. This has massive advantages for
TReND because in the future it would
circumvent the need for shipping lab
equipment and obliterate the previous
costs. And, by providing 3D printers
and classes in coding and computer
science, allow students to print what
they need for themselves, without re-
lying on pre-fabricated models.
This approach worked well during the
rise of some of the most widely used
software in the world –FireFox and
Linux and Android, to name a few—as
software developers were the first to
harness the potential of open-source.
Their idea was to spread understand-
ing of coding, with the added ben-
efit of users being able to customise
a product exactly to their needs. Why
not apply this to science as well? With
the lowering cost of 3D printers and
the incredible convenience of the sys-
tem, some people suspect we may be
entering a new industrial era, it is just
waiting for more precise 3D printers
and printable materials beyond the
standard plastics. If this is achieved
it could bypass the lack of industry in
Africa by enabling them to print-man-
ufacture for themselves. Open-source
lab equipment is already here, and
Tom Baden among others is work-
ing towards a 3D printed laboratory
toolkit that so far includes a pipette
accurate to 1ml and a fluorescent
microscope capable of supporting si-
multaneous optogenetic stimulation,
that was made for less than $100. For
some perspective a new upright light
microscope with no extras from Zeiss
will set you back the princely sum of
€17,177.65, which means you could
lose of break your printable micro-
scope one hundred and seventy times,
and by its 170th iteration, who knows
what else it could do?
The open-hardware initiative there-
fore offers an opportunity to address
problems with science in both Africa
and in Europe, by opening science to
the public and giving people a better
understanding of the groundworks
of the scientific process as well as a
deeper familiarity with the equipment
that makes it happen. While TReNDs
goal of empowering aspiring and ex-
isting scientists to innovate for them-
selves could act as a starting point
for a profound shift in the distribution
of scientific activity. Even those who
could not code for themselves could
attain multiples fluorescent micro-
scopes for the classroom, and finally
do away with the far-to-literal field
trips we’ve all be subjected to. What’s
more coding languages are now be-
ing taught in many primary schools as
well, so hopefully the next generation
of scientists will thank us for giving
open-hardware a fair shot.
Joe Sheppard graduated from
the Cellular and Molecular Neu-
roscience master's program in
2016.
Baden, T. et al.. (2015). Open labware: 3-D
printing your own lab equipment. PLoS Bi-
ology, 13(3), 1–12
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