Modifying Your Own Genes Is Just An Injection Away–If You’re Feeling Lucky
By Adele Peters,
Fast Company
| 10. 10. 2017
“What we’ve got here is some DNA, and this is a syringe,” Josiah Zayner tells a room full of synthetic biologists and other researchers. He fills the needle and plunges it into his skin. “This will modify my muscle genes and give me bigger muscles.”
Zayner, a biohacker–basically meaning he experiments with biology in a DIY lab rather than a traditional one–was giving a talk called “A Step-by-Step Guide to Genetically Modifying Yourself With CRISPR” at the SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco, where other presentations featured academics in suits and the young CEOs of typical biotech startups. Unlike the others, he started his workshop by handing out shots of scotch and a booklet explaining the basics of DIY genome engineering.
If you want to genetically modify yourself, it turns out, it’s not necessarily complicated. As he offered samples in small baggies to the crowd, Zayner explained that it took him about five minutes to make the DNA that he brought to the presentation. The vial held Cas9, an enzyme that snips DNA at a particular location targeted by guide RNA...
Related Articles
President Trump scored a bunch of generally favorable mainstream headlines recently by announcing that he was ordering expanded access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). He had announced in October that he was “the father of IVF” although he also said he had only just learned what it was from Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who explained it to him over the phone. “And within about two minutes, I understood it.”
The executive order, as reporter Susan Rinkunas wryly noted at...
By Staff, The Economist | 02.21.2025
One of the greatest scandals in modern science began with a late-2010s advertisement for HIV-positive couples looking to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). The ad had been put out by a scientist named He Jiankui, a biologist then at...
By Oriol Güell, El País | 02.17.2025
A “small strand of blood in the poop.” This was the first sign, initially viewed as unimportant, that put Jesús Lunar and Cristina López on the trail that something was happening with their son’s health. Javier had been born on...
By Bertha Coombs, CNBC | 02.18.2025
Starting in his early teens, Deshawn “DJ” Chow wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to live a normal life. Crushing pain episodes brought on by his sickle cell disease were getting progressively worse.
“It’s just been hard skipping school...
