K2

They just don’t make em anymore. We used to have oligo pool synthesizers you could just buy (~2008). In the 90s and early 2000s you could have a personal oligo synthesizer. Those days are gone. Nowadays everyone just buys oligos from one of the massive service providers. It’s more efficient and easier, comes next day! Economies of scale! No real used market anymore, since demand dropped so much. I can’t even own an oligo pool synthesizer even if I tried. And I think we lost something there. We had accessible technology, and then we lost it. Hell, the price of DNA has gone up over the past ~10 years! Technology doesn’t just improve. Some technology is robust; it can always be revived. But much of biotech’s machines have such complicated supply lines that if they’re gone, they’re just…. Gone. Poof. Gone are the days of the affordable Opentrons! Gone are the days of oligo pool synthesizers! Gone are the days rapidly improving gene synthesis price! It’s a sense of loss I can’t ignore. Fuck it man, they just don’t make em anymore.