32 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
THECONTROLOFNATURE
LIFE HACKS
New gene-editing techniques could be used to revive species. Or do them in.
BY ELIZABETHKOLBERT
O
din, in Norse mythology, is an
extremely powerful god who’s
also a trickster. He has only
one eye, having sacrificed the other for
wisdom. Among his many talents, he
can wake the dead, calm storms, cure
the sick, and blind his enemies. Not in-
frequently, he transforms himself into
an animal; as a snake, he acquires the
gift of poetry, which he transfers to peo-
ple, inadvertently.
The Odin, in Oakland, California, is
a company that sells genetic-engineer-
ing kits. The company’s founder, Josiah
Zayner, sports a side-swept undercut,
multiple piercings, and a tattoo that urges:
“Create Something Beautiful.” He holds
a Ph.D. in biophysics and is a well-known
provocateur. Among his many stunts, he
has coaxed his skin to produce a fluores-
cent protein, ingested a friend’s poop in
a D.I.Y. fecal-matter transplant, and at-
tempted to deactivate one of his genes
so that he could grow bigger muscles.
(This last effort, he acknowledges, failed.)
Zayner calls himself a genetic designer
and has said that his goal is to give peo-
ple access to the resources they need to
modify life in their spare time.
The Odin’s offerings range from a
“Biohack the Planet” shot glass, which
costs three bucks, to a “genetic engi-
neering home lab kit,” which runs al-
most two thousand dollars and includes
a centrifuge, a polymerase-chain-reac-
tion machine, and an electrophoresis gel
box. I opted for something in between:
the “bacterial CRISPR and fluorescent
yeast combo kit,” which set me back
two hundred and nine dollars. It came
in a cardboard box decorated with the
company’s logo, a twisting tree circled
by a double helix. The tree, I believe, is
supposed to represent Yggdrasil, whose
trunk, in Norse mythology, rises through
the center of the cosmos.
Inside the box, I found an assort-
ment of lab tools—pipette tips, petri
dishes, disposable gloves—as well as
several vials containing E. coli and all
I’d need to rearrange its genome. The
E. coli went into the fridge, next to the
butter. The other vials went into a bin
in the freezer, with the ice cream.
Genetic engineering is, by now, mid-
dle-aged. The first genetically engineered
bacterium was produced in 1973. This
was soon followed by a genetically en-
gineered mouse, in 1974, and a geneti-
cally engineered tobacco plant, in 1983.
The first genetically engineered food
approved for human consumption, the
Flavr Savr tomato, was introduced in
1994; it proved such a disappointment
that it went out of production a few years
later. Genetically engineered varieties of
corn and soy were developed around the
same time; these, by contrast, have be-
come more or less ubiquitous.
In the past decade or so, genetic en-
gineering has undergone its own trans-
formation, thanks to CRISPR—short-
hand for a suite of techniques, mostly
borrowed from bacteria, that make it
vastly easier for biohackers and research-
ers to manipulate DNA. (The acronym
stands for “clustered regularly interspaced
short palindromic repeats.”) CRISPR al-
lows its users to snip a stretch of DNA
and then either disable the affected se-
quence or replace it with a new one.
The possibilities that follow are pretty
much endless. Jennifer Doudna, a pro-
fessor at the University of California,
Berkeley, and one of the developers of
CRISPR, has put it like this: we now have
“a way to rewrite the very molecules of
life any way we wish.” With CRISPR, bi-
ologists have already created—among
many, many other living things—ants
that can’t smell, beagles that put on su-
perhero-like brawn, pigs that resist swine
fever, macaques that suffer from sleep
disorders, coffee beans that contain no
caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice
that don’t get fat, and bacteria whose
genes contain, in code, Eadweard Muy-
bridge’s famous series of photographs
showing a horse in motion. Two years
ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, an-
nounced that he had produced the world’s
first CRISPR-edited humans, twin baby
girls. According to He, the girls’ genes
had been tweaked to confer resistance
to H.I.V., though whether this is actu-
ally the case remains unclear. Following
his announcement, He was fired from
his academic post, in Shenzhen, and sen-
tenced to three years in prison.
I have almost no experience in genet-
ics and have not done hands-on lab work
since high school. Still, by following the
instructions that came in the box from
the Odin, in the course of a weekend I
was able to create a novel organism. First
I grew a colony of E. coli in one of the
petri dishes. Then I doused it with the
various proteins and bits of designer
DNA I’d stored in the freezer. The pro-
cess swapped out one “letter” of the bac-
teria’s genome, replacing an “A” (adenine)
with a “C” (cytosine). Thanks to this
emendation, my new and improved
E. coli could, in effect, thumb its nose at
streptomycin, a powerful antibiotic. Al-
though it felt a little creepy engineering
a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my
kitchen, there was also a definite sense
of achievement, so much so that I de-
cided to move on to the second project
in the kit: inserting a jellyfish gene into
yeast in order to make it glow.
T
he Australian Centre for Disease
Preparedness, in the city of Gee-
long, is one of the most advanced high-
containment laboratories in the world.
It sits behind two sets of gates, the sec-
ond of which is intended to foil truck
bombers, and its poured-concrete walls
are thick enough, I was told, to with-
stand a plane crash. There are five hun-
dred and twenty air-lock doors at the
facility and four levels of security. “It’s
where you’d want to be in the zombie
apocalypse,” a staff member told me.
Until recently, the center was known as
