You’re at home and you want to know what is really in your food; is it GMO or not? Or perhaps after watching Jurassic Park, you suddenly have a peculiar urge to extract DNA from ancient fossils. Maybe you even want to go a step further and tinker with CRISPR, or you’ll just stick with the less controversial ancient science of cheese-making. And while you’re enjoying your homemade cheese after testing whether you are lactose intolerant or not, why not do a paternity test – because little Junior’s pointy elf ears look nothing like your Dumbo the Elephant ears.

In addition to lab space, and more than basic biology know-how, you’re gonna need incubators, spectrometers, thermocyclers, gel electropheresis and centrifuges to do all that. But before you start scrolling through e-Bay and scavenging laboratories only to come to the grim realization of just how difficult and expensive it is acquiring all that hardware needed for experiments that are technically easy, what if I told you that you can have all those hard-to-access and expensive tools…in a box. Not packed inside a box as separate hardware, but as a single, compact unit that functions as a fridge, an incubator, a spectrometer, a blue-LED gel dock, a thermocycler and a centrifuge.

This all-in-one portable box is the Feles One; an easy to use, desktop biolab that comes with a user-friendly touchscreen interface that not only controls all of the Feles’ modules, but also has simple instructions and detailed experiment protocols.

The creators of the Feles One compare its ease-of-use to assembling IKEA furniture, and describe it as the most complete desktop biolab, a “lab-in-box toolkit designed to enable the general public to explore the biology all around them using routine procedures done in professional labs around the world.”

The Feles One spawned from an idea by Yixiao Jiang after she moved to Boston and enrolled in a Synthetic Biology class by George Church, where she met John Min – a PhD student with George Church at the Harvard Medical school. It was after Jiang approached Min with the idea of an Internet-of-Things system for lab hardware that would make lab tools easy enough for anyone to use, that the two began creating and developing what would become the Feles One.

The word ‘feles’ is latin for cat, and Min says it is meant to represent not just the curiosity of a cat, but also a cat’s precise and elegant movements, and its amicability. The Feles One’s sleek, minimalist aesthetics certainly fit this representation as it is suitable for any space. Say you want to use it for molecular gastronomy, it would not look out of place in your kitchen. And at 24x16x11 inches in dimensions and weighing only 20 pounds, it can compliment the décor of your home, workspace or office.

The Feles has so far lived up to how it has present itself. As of May 22nd , the Feles team has $73,908 pledged on their Kickstarter campaign, having rapidly surpassed their goal of $50,000. This is really not a surprise because the Feles One represents bioliteracy and access. The possibilities it opens up, place it at the right moment in history when the general public needs to be bioliterate enough to make informed decisions in a world where CRISPR babies exist, at a time when laws and ethics need to catch up to biotechnology.

What the Feles team has done will steer biotechnology towards the public by significantly reducing the barriers of entry into biology. The Feles One is not just a lab in a box, it is empowerment and it is certainly way more to biology than what Apple and the iPhone were to mobile computing and cell phones, because it is a leap towards the coming genetic revolution.

More on the Feles One Kickstarter campaign