I really enjoy hearing about groups of people who take the pursuit of knowledge into their own hands and build or create crazy projects.  That’s why I was excited to hear about people with home-built biology labs in their homes, in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126881.400-rise-of-the-garage-genome-hackers.html?page=2 The article links to this site, which talks about some current projects and has resources for getting together with a local group: http://diybio.org/