I suspect most everyone was afraid of policy and PR implications of selling SARS-CoV-2 PCR kits to the public. That @miniPCR is now OK doing this signals to me a real opening up of legitimate citizen science. Next up: all respiratory viruses?
Srsly, what are we afraid of? 🙂 2/2

To be fair, companies like @biomeme and @chaibio were already ahead of the game at the start of the pandemic. But selling devices and kits targetted at (and priced for) the highschool classroom is a step function increase in scale and acceptance.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. Digging deeper into the instructions I see this isn’t a real virus test kit (no RNA extraction, no reverse-transcriptase). It comes with DNA samples, presumably synthetic. That’s a shame 😢.

We’re already experimenting with COVID transmission in pretty much every single classroom in North America and Europe. Would it really be any more risk to at least get some science education out of it? 😁