Forget Odin, the controversial kit that was being sold online by controversial “biohacker” Josiah Zayner (getting people to play around with developing antibiotic-resistant bacteria is certainly not a good idea). At Stanford University they have developed a CRISPRkit for cell-free in vitro experiments that is easy and safe because the target is a harmless pigment. And the great thing is that it costs less than an American coffee (two dollars).

The paper explaining how it works came out in Nature Communications last month, and recently the news was picked up by Phys.org. It certainly does not enable research in the true sense of the word, and it sidesteps the difficulties of genomic editing on cells (to watch a leading science journalist try his hand at a real editing task and fail here is Jon Cohen of Science; as simple a technology as CRISPR is, one cannot improvise as a gene-editor).

The purpose of the new kit (and others in development) of course is educational: students do experiments in school to learn about biology and genetics, and the challenge is to give them a taste of CRISPR’s potential. So democratize access to the hottest technology for genomic editing and, hopefully, spark the next generation of scientists.