TopLab. Drawing: Alice Morey

TOP Lab reframes the laboratory as a shared space – informal and inviting rather than sterile and exclusive. Through audience participation, the intention is to demystify biology and radically lower the barrier to participation in modern bioscience, allowing anyone to innovate and explore. Using borrowed, recycled and home-built equipment, we recreate a typical do-it- yourself biology (DIY bio) lab and bring biology to the public. This environment also encourages a thoughtful examination and discussion of the implications and ethical questions surrounding cutting-edge bio-based technologies.

We launched a crowdfunding campaign on the 4th of November 2017 with the goal of providing our lab with equipment used in a biology laboratory. Now with this equipment, our community can develop their own ideas. People can complete their projects using our resources or develop their experimental research. The success of this campaign was important for the ambition of TOP Lab: to become an open space that shares resources and overcomes barriers created by the lack of readily accessible professional facilities, equipment, and knowledge. The scientific community of the future depends on such spaces and communities to initiate a new era of science; to provide fresh opportunities and new solutions for the problems facing our planet.

TOP Lab started to host mushroom cultivation and mycofabrication courses from Spring  2019 within “Mind the Fungi”, a Citizen Science project of Art Laboratory Berlin and the TU Berlin Institute for Biotechnology. The Mind the Fungi project is focused on studying the characteristics of mushrooms of the Berlin area. For details of the project and lab protocols, check out our Mind the Fungi page.

TOP lab
Schätzelbergstr 1-3, 12099 Berlin

Email: lab [at] top-ev.de

TOP Lab. Photo: Brigita Kasperaite