Amateurs Are Trying Genetic Engineering At Home

the_kanzure points out this AP story on amateur genetic engineering, excerpting: "The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories." Reader resistant has a few ideas about how to use this sort of lab: "Personally, I'd like to whip up a reasonably long-lasting and durable paint made with dye based on squid genes that glows brightly enough to allow 'guide lines' to be daubed along hallway baseboards, powered by a very low trickle of electricity. Plus, a harmless glowing yogurt would make for a cool prank."

Comments

Re:thoughts from someone in the community

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

That's precisely the point. Low doses of UV are not going create lots of mutations. But if you hit a bacterium with lots of uv, you get so many mutations that when you select for some particular trait, you don't know what else you're getting with it.

And that's precisely an example of what I'm talking about. How do you know that the mutations caused by UV light are the same as mutations cause by some other way? And if they were different, how could you tell if they had a different effect on other things?

On the other hand, when you use the techniques of genetic engineering to insert or remove particular sequences of DNA, you know exactly which bits you're putting in.

But that ignores the context of where this thing will be. Simply because you know what you have created, that doesn't mean you will automatically know what effect it will have on other things, at least in something like biology at the moment, where there are still vast systems that we don't understand.