Kevin Lustig, one of the founders of Bio, Tech and Beyond, a just christened non-profit incubator in Carlsbad, California aimed at providing laboratory space for a new breed of citizen scientists, says its motto captures the essence of his group’s effort: “Probably crazy, possibly brilliant.”

The facility, a former Farmer’s Insurance auto claims office the city of Carlsbad agreed to lease to the group for $1 a year for five years, is located about 35 miles north of San Diego. Carlsbad is home to scores of life sciences companies including Life Technologies.

Relying on donated equipment and volunteer labor, the group has managed to assemble in the 6,000 square-feet of space a modern cell biology laboratory in a matter of a few months that is capable of allowing both amateur and professional scientists to conduct experiments, culture cells, explore stem cell biology, or do synthetic biology. It not only has features typically found in a pharmaceutical or academic lab, but also offers three-dimensional printers and robotics for automation.

For the city of Carlsbad, the hope is that its deeply discounted rent will pay dividends in companies that spin-out of the incubator and decide to set up shop in nearby space. Carlsbad also envisions itself becoming a leader in the citizen science movement.

Lustig says the incubator aspires to uncover hidden geniuses that for one reason or another never had the chance to express their scientific talent either because they were never trained as scientists or because they worked at a company and had great ideas, but could never do anything about it.

“We’re trying to tap into that latent talent that we know is out there—and that we need if we’re going to solve all of these incredible problems that we face today,” he says. “Professional science alone is not enough. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’m a professional scientist. I love what we do, but we need to admit in many ways we are falling short.”

He rattles off statistics on cancer deaths, deaths from stroke and tropical disease, and notes that despite hundreds of billions of dollars in research, industry produces about 30 new drugs a year. Now that technology has gotten cheap enough and easy enough to replicate that you can build a facility that is state of the art, he expects to see life sciences undergo the type of garage revolution that gave birth to tech giants such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Microsoft.

“Life science has never been able to take that path because the technologies were so expensive,” says Lustig. “Well the costs have come down so dramatically that now you can feasibly have a community lab like this and do cutting edge, even bleeding edge experimentation.”

This is not Lustig’s first effort at disruptive conventional models for life sciences research. He is CEO of Assay Depot, an online marketplace for outsourced pharmaceutical research services that connects researchers to service providers to accelerate projects, cut costs, and ultimately deliver promising drugs to the clinic faster.

Bio, Tech, and Beyond features 14, ten-foot lab benches. Some of them will be shared by tinkerers and hobbyists, who will pay as little as $100 a month. Dedicated space is available for monthly rent that goes up to $600. So far, the greatest interest in space has come not from citizen scientists, but professionals who want to pursue projects outside of their day jobs.

The founders plans to eventually raise capital for a microfund to help finance researchers with promising projects and push them toward turning their ideas into products.

This is not the first community lab. Joseph Jackson, one of the co-founders of Bio, Tech and Beyond is the founder of BioCurious, a bio hacker space in Sunnyvale, California. But what’s striking in discussing the incubator with Lustig is not just that the incubator reflects a transformation of the sophisticated tools of biology that now allows the kid home from college to clone genes in his garage, but the vision he has for where all of this might lead.

“We need a community lab like BTNB in every city across the country,” he says. “That’s really what we’re trying to build here – a sustainable model.”

Probably crazy, possibly brilliant.