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One morning in 2005, Shelley Beverley woke up to find that she had gone deaf. She was 21, and living in Johannesburg with her older brother Neil. I was very scared, she says. It was just so sudden. She struggled through the rest of the day, hoping that her hearing would come back, but it didnt. In one sense, her hearing loss wasnt entirely a surprise: Beverleys grandmother had been deaf, Neil had lost his hearing when he was 13, and her mum, Mary, had lost hers when she was 32. We knew it ran in the family, she says, but I thought Id been lucky and not inherited it.

Beverley, 35, lives in Margate, a semi-rural district south of Hobart, with her husband James. The couple migrated to Australia from South Africa in 2010, looking for space, buying 2 hectares of lush green grass at the foot of a forested ridge near the mouth of the Derwent River. We love the wildlife here, says James, looking out the living room window. Weve seen pademelons, echidnas, quolls, blue-tongue lizards, even a Tassie devil. At dusk, hundreds of kangaroos emerge from the forest to gorge on the grass. Its very peaceful, says James. Its really helped us after everything thats happened.

Apart from their deafness, Beverleys family had largely enjoyed good health. Then, in September 2015, her mother, Mary, then 62, started experiencing fatigue and stomach pain. Doctors in Durban ordered a colonoscopy, but the procedure made her worse. Her feet became swollen and purple. Because of their hearing problems, Shelley and Mary had communicated mainly in text messages. But soon I began noticing that her wording got a bit funny, says Beverley. It didnt always make sense.

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Beverley flew to Durban in February 2016, but by that time her mother could no longer talk or walk. She was so weak that she couldnt move her hands or lift her neck. Two days after Beverley arrived in Durban, her mother caught a virus that caused fluid to build up on her lungs. The doctors tried unsuccessfully to drain it. Shortly afterwards, she died. She weighed just 36 kilograms. It was so fast, Beverley says. And we were still in the dark about what she had.

Shortly before Marys death, Neil had also fallen ill. He developed a number of mysterious symptoms, including facial twitches and seizures. He kept falling over and tripping, and experienced vomiting and headaches so severe he lost his vision for weeks at a time. His behaviour became strange showering with his clothes on, and hallucinating.

One day, Dad was driving him around and Neil started talking to all these little people he thought were around his feet, says Beverley. Doctors in Durban had trouble diagnosing him, so they sent a biopsy to London, where he was found to have a type of mitochondrial cytopathy one of a large family of chronic and progressive diseases that affect the muscles, brain and nervous system. As the family soon learnt, the condition has no cure and no effective therapies. One of the common early symptoms is hearing loss.

Neil died in June 2017, aged 34, by which time Beverley had discovered she also had the condition. It was fear, so much fear, she says. She began experiencing symptoms, including migraines and vision loss. She has since developed diabetes, hypertension, gastro-paresis (when your stomach muscles dont work), and pharyngeal dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). Every time I get sick now, the flu or something, I think, When am I going to need a wheelchair or a feeding tube? When will my legs stop working?

Mito has taken everything from me, she says. If I die, at least James will still have a part of me.

Beverley has bright blue eyes and long, straight, ash-brown hair. Shes got a lazy left eye and uncommonly pale skin, which she attributes to her condition. Oh, and I had bunions out in 2010, she says, laughing wryly.

She doesnt know how long shes got left, but she is determined to make it count. She has joined mito awareness groups, and is an active member of the Mito Foundation, which supports sufferers, and funds research. She has exhaustively researched the condition and takes every opportunity to educate doctors. Youd be surprised by how little they know about it, she says.

But her overriding focus has been on a cutting-edge, and currently illegal, procedure called mitochondrial donation, a form of IVF which would allow those with the condition to have children, safe in the knowledge they would not be passing it on. Mito has taken everything from me, she says. If I die, at least James will still have a part of me. I would like him to look at our child, and say, You have your mums smile or your mums eyes.

An IVF treatment known as mitochondrial donation could potentially save up to 60 Australian children a year from being born with the condition. Credit:

Mitochondrial donation has been labelled immoral and unethical, a slippery slope to designer babies, not to mention potentially unsafe. The only country in the world to have legalised it is the UK. A report by medical experts into the technologys potential application in Australia is due to be delivered to Health Minister Greg Hunt this month.

This fight is really personal to me, Beverley says. Short of a cure, people with mito should at least have the option of having healthy children.

Mitochondria are microscopic structures in human cells that provide the body with energy. For this reason, they are often described as the cells powerhouse. They are crucially important: if your mitochondria fail or mutate, your body will be starved of energy, causing multiple organ failure and premature death.

A stylised representation of a mitochondrion, which provides the body with energy. Malfunction can lead to organ failure and death.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Mito, which is maternally inherited, usually affects the muscles and major organs such as the brain, heart, liver, inner ears, and eyes. But it can cause any symptom in any organ, at any age. Indeed, the term mito includes more than 200 disorders, the symptoms of which are maddeningly varied and seemingly unrelated, leading to delayed diagnoses or incorrect diagnoses or, indeed, no diagnosis.

Many of these people have been fobbed off by doctors or laughed off by people who think they are hypochondriacs, says Dr David Thorburn, a mitochondrial researcher at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, in Melbourne, who has diagnosed some 700 cases over the past 28 years. Most people are relieved to finally know what it is, because that is the end of that part of their journey.

Its sometimes said babies produced as a result of mitochondrial donation would have three parents the mother, the father, and the donor.

Up to two million people worldwide have some form of mito. - Others, like Beverley, who have a less severe type of the disease, will get adult onset, and can expect to become ill in their 30s, 40s or 50s.

According to Thorburn, One of the things that most dismays families with mito is the lack of control they have over passing the condition down to future generations of their family.

Remaining childless is one way to stop the condition from being passed down, as is adopting, but as Thorburn acknowledges, There is an innate desire in many individuals to have their own children. For these people, mito donation offers the very real prospect that the condition is eliminated from future generations.

Mitochondrial replacement is a highly specialised procedure, requiring a level of manual dexterity sufficient to manipulate a womans egg, which is roughly the width of a human hair. Within that egg is a nucleus, where a persons genes are located, and the cytoplasm, the jelly-like substance that surrounds it. Mitochondria are found in the cytoplasm.

Mitochondrial replacement involves taking a donor females healthy egg, removing its nucleus and replacing it with the nucleus of the woman affected by mitochondrial disease, but whose nucleus is healthy. The egg is then fertilised using her partners sperm. (Another option is to fertilise the egg first, and then swap the nucleus.) The resulting embryo is then implanted into the mother.

Researcher David Thorburn: "Mito donation offers the very real prospect that the condition is eliminated from future generations."Credit:Josh Robenstone

Since more than 99.9 per cent of our genes are found in the eggs nucleus, which remains unaffected, the procedure will have no impact on the childs height, hair colour or mannerisms. Despite that, its sometimes said that babies produced as a result of mitochondrial donation would have three parents the mother, the father, and the donor.

The technology has been tested in mice for more than 30 years, but only since 2009 has research been done on human embryos, mainly in the UK. Almost from the start, the research was subject to sensational headlines about scientists playing God, and the possibility of genetic engineering, with much of the hysteria being fuelled by anti-abortion groups. The Catholic Church described it as a further step in commodification of the human embryo and a failure to respect new individual human lives.

In 2012, the Human Genetics Alert, an independent watchdog group in London, wrote a paper comparing any baby produced with mitochondrial replacement to Frankensteins creation, since they would be produced by sticking together bits from many different bodies. According to the Conservative British MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, the procedure was not a cure for disease, it is the creating of a different person.

Regulators subjected the technology to four separate scientific reviews, together with rounds of ethical debate and community consultation. In 2015, the UK Parliament voted to legalise the technology for use in humans, on the proviso that it only be available to those women at high risk of passing on the disease. Since then, 13 couples in the UK have received the go-ahead to undergo the procedure.

Its unclear how many children, if any, have been born: the parents have asked that details not be published. Meanwhile, scientists like Thorburn wait eagerly for news of any developments. I know the UK researchers well and have asked several of them, and they are keeping completely quiet about it in respecting the families wishes, he says.

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If there have been babies born in the UK using the procedure, they arent the first. In April 2016, a child was born using the technique in Mexico, to a Jordanian mother who carried a fatal mitochondrial condition known as Leigh syndrome. The doctor in charge, an American fertility specialist called Dr John Zhang, later admitted that he had gone to Mexico because the procedure is illegal in America. In Mexico, he admitted, There are no rules.

Even those who want mitochondrial donation legalised in Australia concede that much remains unknown about the procedure. Its long-term risks can only be understood through lifelong health check-ups, but this is impossible until any children conceived via this procedure become adults. Implications for subsequent generations also remain unclear.

No medical procedure is 100 per cent safe, says Sean Murray, CEO of the Mito Foundation. But we think we are at the stage now where the benefits of the technology are greater than the risks.

One of the issues around safety concerns the compatibility of the donors mitochondria with the recipients nuclear genes. A 2016 study in mice suggested that mismatched mitochondria affected their metabolism and shortened their lives. Another concern is known as carryover, whereby a tiny amount of mutant mitochondria is inevitably transferred from the affected mothers egg into the donor egg during the procedure.

Instead of it being wiped out, the mutation might then reappear in the descendants of any girls born as a result. For this reason, some people have proposed that the procedure be restricted to male embryos only, but this raises all kinds of ethical issues around selective breeding and sex selection.

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Indeed, it often seems as if the term ethical minefield was coined especially with mitochondrial donation in mind.

My primary ethical concern has to do with the sanctity of human life, says Father Kevin McGovern, a Catholic priest and member of the National Health and Medical Research Councils Mitochondrial Donation Expert Working Committee.

If mitochondrial donation is permitted here, the technique most likely to be used is pronuclear transfer, which requires that both the donors egg and the affected mothers egg be fertilised. [This is to ensure that both eggs are at the same developmental stage.] But once the nucleus is removed from the donors fertilised egg, it is discarded. For people who believe that life begins at conception, this is akin to murder. You are creating two lives and destroying one for spare parts.

The Catholic Church has consistently opposed mitochondrial donation. In a Senate inquiry into the technology in 2018, Dr Bernadette Tobin, director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at the Australian Catholic University, suggested the process was intrinsically evil.

The inquiry also heard from Father Anthony Fisher, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, who raised concerns about the moral right of the child to know how he or she was conceived the problem of what he called genealogical bewilderment and the donors right to remain anonymous. He also worried that women might effectively become egg vending machines: The availability of human ova is often assumed when people talk about reproductive technology as if they were somehow there in a cupboard to be used. In fact, it means women have to be used to obtain these eggs. They are extracted by invasive procedures that do carry some risk.

A report by medical experts into mitochondrial donation and its potential application in Australia is due to be delivered to Health Minister Greg Hunt this month. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Equally troubling for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the peak national body for the churchs bishops, was the fact that mitochondrial donation involved conceiving babies not by marital intercourse [but by] a technical procedure.

Most of these concerns are redundant, argues the Mito Foundations Sean Murray. We already have a well defined regulatory framework for dealing with all this, he says. As far as the donors right to remain anonymous, we would defer to the appropriate federal or state and territory regulations that apply for sperm or egg donations. In regard to a kids right to know they had a mitochondrial donor, societally there seems to be a preference to inform kids. Its important for them to understand their genetic lineage.

Then theres the matter of consent. The parents can wrestle with the ethical issues and weigh up all the risks, but the only person who cant consent to the procedure is the unborn child. Well, says Murray, they cant consent to being born with mito, either.

The Mito Foundations Sean Murray: "In regard to a kids right to know they had a mitochondrial donor, societally there seems to be a preference to inform kids."Credit:Joshua Morris

Murray, 47, is one of the founding directors of the Mito Foundation, which was established in Sydney in 2009. Mito runs in my family, he says. My older brother, Peter, died of it in 2009 at 45, and my mum passed away in 2011, at 70. What people often dont understand is that even in families that have mito, each member can have different mutational loads basically, different amounts of bad mitochondria. Peter got a high load, but I didnt. Thats why Im still here.

A computer scientist by training, Murray now works full-time on the foundation. Much of his job involves travelling around the country, explaining mito to politicians, journalists and philanthropists, raising funds for research and, most crucially, advocating for a change to the laws.

Mitochondrial donation falls foul of two pieces of legislation: the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002, and the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction Act 2002. The laws prohibit the implantation of a human embryo that contains more than two peoples genetic material. The laws were subject to a mandatory review in 2010, but the then Labor government recommended they remain the same.

In 2013, the Mito Foundation urged the government to revisit its decision. Two years later, it began lobbying in earnest. What we tried to get across was that the science around mito donation has come a long way since 2010, says Murray. Also, the process that the UK went through to legalise it really reassured us that the procedure is safe and effective.

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In the past five years, Murray and his colleagues have consulted with more than 100 MPs and senators. Only one of them, according to Murray, said I dont like this. They have also talked to dozens of industry experts, including academics and medical and research bodies, about the benefits of mitochondrial donation. Most of them get it straight away, he says. We are talking about a technique that will prevent the chance of having a morbidly ill child.

Now, a breakthrough appears imminent. In February 2019, Health Minister Greg Hunt asked the National Health and Medical Research Council to look into the matter, review the science and conduct public consultation. The NHMRC is due to hand its report to Hunt this month. The expectation among the mito community is that he will recommend the laws be changed. Any proposals would then need to be debated in Parliament, where issues around reproductive medicine have, in the past, been hotly contested.

Murray expects some opposition from more conservative MPs, but nothing like the rancour seen in the NSW Parliament during last years debate over legalising abortion. Shadow health minister Chris Bowen has, for his part, said that Labor will support changing the laws.

Mitochondrial sufferer Shelley Beverley at home in Tasmania. This fight is really personal to me. Credit:Peter Mathew

Whether this will help people like Shelley Beverley is unclear. If Hunt gives it the green light, it will take two years at least for mitochondrial donation to become available to prospective parents, given the time involved in drafting and passing legislation, establishing a regulatory regime and getting doctors up to speed with the technology.

This will probably be too late for Beverley. I really only have about a year left to give it a go, she tells me. After that, my symptoms may progress and biologically things get worse after 35. She says she would consider going to the UK for the treatment, but that at present they are not accepting international patients.

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In the meantime, she watches TV, and reads a little, but not too much. (It puts me to sleep.) She gardens: she has a bed of huge white and pink roses out the back of her house, as a memorial to her mother and brother. And she eats. James cooks for me. He lets me choose the best meat and potatoes! Ive put on weight since I met him. She describes James as something close to an angel. He will listen to every problem I have or feeling I experience. He will always put me first.

Beverley started going out with James when she was 21, right around the time she first went deaf. I was so scared that he wouldnt like me as much. I remember calling him and saying I was scared he would leave me. But James is still here. Im very lucky to have him, she says. If I go, I want him to have a part of me.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

Tim Elliott is a senior writer with Good Weekend.

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How far should genetic engineering go to allow this couple to have a healthy baby? - Brisbane Times

Josiah Zayner and I are drinking fluorescent green beer at the ODIN, his Oakland lab. The tables are scattered with pipettes and disposable blue gloves, cases of Red Bull and Slim Jims are near at hand, and Drake is pulsing on the sound system. Its not St. Patricks Day, and the beer isnt really all that green. Its the ghostly luminescence of jellyfish pulsing through the depths. Thats because its chock full of glowing jellyfish protein.

But no jellyfish were harmed in the making of this beer. Zayner is the worlds most notorious biohackera new breed of garage tinkerer experimenting with DNA and biological systems outside the confines of traditional research. In this case, he genetically engineered a common brewers yeast by adding a jellyfishs green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene that he ordered online. As long as you know the DNA sequence of the gene you wantthe As, Cs, Gs, and Ts of the genetic codeyou no longer need the actual critter the gene came from. You just run off the code on a special DNA printer containing cartridges filled with liquid As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. Then you insert the new DNA into whichever organism you want to modify. The process is shockingly easy.

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I raise my glass and pause. Zayners yeast suffuses the beer with a gauzy haze. I have no idea which species of jellyfish the GFP gene came from, but my hunch is that it has never been a regular part of the human diet. Zayner assures me its safe. Genetic engineers love GFP because its such an easy visual. They include it with whichever other gene theyre trying to insert, and if their organism glows, they know the experiment worked without having to send off a sample for DNA sequencing. Scientists have engineered glowing cats and mice using GFP, he points out, and the creatures lived just fine.

I eye Zayner. He has drunk a fair amount of GFP beer himself, and while I wouldnt say he looks normalhe sports dozens of piercings, plugs in both earlobes, and a spike of bleached hair that is sometimes blue and sometimes whitehe seems healthy enough.

Dude, he assures me, we did all the normal FDA tests. Its nontoxic, nonallergenic. As further proof, he shows me his left forearm. Right next to the tattoo that says CREATE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL is a row of four tiny wounds. I modified myself with it. Its fine.

Agar plates and vials of microbes at the ODIN lab. (Justin Kaneps)

Zayner claims he was the first to genetically modify himself with another speciess DNA. For what he would call a science experiment and I would call conceptual art, he removed dead skin cells from his forearm (just rub the same spot with a toothbrush 200 times) and used a tattoo needle to punch jellyfish DNA into his skin. The DNA was attached to a common virus that specializes in infiltrating human cells and parking itself there. Those skin cells then began manufacturing the GFP along with all their regular proteinsthough, to Zayners disappointment, not enough to see the glow with the naked eye. He also performed a DIY fecal transplant on himself, which was chronicled in the recent documentary Gut Hack, curing himself of years of irritable bowel syndrome.

Im not sure what I think about any of this, starting with my beer. I tend to favor pilsner over jellybrew, but Im trying to maintain my chill biohacker persona, so I chug. Weve spiked it with enough blood orange juice to cover any weirdness, and frankly it goes down pretty easy. Just like that, this crunchy Vermonter who always shunned GMOs filled his belly with them, and starts looking forward to the week ahead.

Id always thought of genetic engineering as something done in million-dollar labs by corporate powerhouses like Monsanto. Extracting the DNA from life forms and inserting it into other life forms seemed like the kind of thing that required high-tech machines and years of trial and error. And it used to. But that was before Crispr, Science magazines 2015 Breakthrough of the Year, an engineered protein that can snip out sequences of DNA wherever you want. Its like a search and replace function for genes. It works on bacterial cells, it works on mouse cells, and it works on human cells. Its been used to engineer immune cells that kill cancer, viruses that kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria, female mosquitoes that cant reproduce (to crash the population), and a yeast infused with genetic code from poppies and rats that makes opioids out of sugar in a tank. But the crazy thing about Crispr is that its so easy to use and cheap to make that it also allows any budding hacker with some basic biology and a mischievous mind to play God in their garage.

The only thing missing is someone to share this knowledge with the multitudes, and thats where Zayner comes in. He started out traditionally enough: wunderkind Ph. D. candidate at the University of Chicago and then research fellow at NASA, where he adapted organisms for life on Mars. But then, in 2015, he veered off to become the pierced Prometheus of genetic engineering, bringing it down to us mortals from the labs of academia. In this field, there are a bunch of people with a lot of knowledge and a bunch of people with a lot of crazy, he says with a smile, but there are very few with a lot of knowledge and a lot of crazy.

Not for the first time, I smile back at Zayner and try to gauge the crazy. For now Im coming down on the side of like a fox. Hes made a huge success of the ODINshort for Open Discovery Institute and inspired by the Norse godthe combination lab and mail-order business he founded in 2013 to make DIY bio accessible to everyone. The ODIN sells pre-engineered GFP yeast ($80) online, along with DIY Crispr kits ($150), fluorescent-yeast-engineering kits ($160), something called the Amino DNA Playground ($349), and a complete Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit ($999) stocked with pipettes, tubes, scales, antibiotics, agar, light-activated bacteria, bioluminescent bacteria, Crispr, and a PCR machine, which makes copies of DNA through polymerase chain reaction. The ODINs clients include community colleges, high school kids, and mysterious individuals.

Jars of Crispr. (Justin Kaneps)

All ODIN kits are designed to engineer bacteria or yeast, the cheapest and simplest critters to work with, and they focus on obvious visuals like GFP. They are the Easy-Bake Ovens of genetic engineering. They offer quick success to rank amateurs like me and a tantalizing taste of the endless possibilities. Where we take it from there is up to us.

Zayner and his fellow biohackers are big on genetic freedom. Everything your body makes or does is encoded by a gene. And the more we learn about the genetic basis of human processesfrom disease and life expectancy to athletic and mental performancethe closer we get to being able to reprogram our bodies. I think we could do substantial changes to ourselves right now, Zayner says. You could go a little more crazy than scientists have been willing to let on.

For years there have been rumors that people already are. Gene doping, as its called, could theoretically give anybody the ability to burn oxygen like a Tibetan mountaineer, to build muscle like LeBron James, and to never get heart disease. Its all in the genes. Its in the hard work and good habits, too, but without certain tools you can only go so far. And in either the shady present or the not so distant future, well all have access to those tools, which Zayner finds pretty exciting. This is the first time in human history that were no longer stuck with the genes we had at birth. It fucking blows your mind.

He sees no reason to let corporations and ivory-tower institutions have all the fun. Hence the Easy-Bake Ovens. Give a man a cookie and he eats for a day. Teach a man to cook and youve stolen fire from the gods.

Josiah Zayner. The name screams Marvel Comics. The backstory, too: Country childhood on an Indiana farm. Pentecostal parents. (His brothers are Micah, Zachariah, and Jedediah; the dog was named Jeremiah.) Missionary in Peru. Teenage member of the late-nineties hacker collective Legions of the Underground. Biophysics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Synthetic-biology fellowship at NASAs Ames Research Center. Then something goes horribly wrong.

In Zayners case, there was no lab explosion. No rampaging through the streets of Mountain View, paralyzing Google employees with jellyfish tentacles sprouting from his back. No, what went wrong is that Zayner discovered that NASA was deadly dull. Empty offices. Stultifying bureaucracy. A supervisor who actually told him to spend less time in the lab. Not the place for someone who wanted to change the universe. So he did what any budding superhero would do: he went rogue.

Crispr and pipettes. (Justin Kaneps)

As his two-year NASA fellowship neared its end in 2015, Zayner launched an Indiegogo campaign offering contributors their own DIY gene-editing kit. Hed learned just enough while getting his Ph.D. to realize that genetic engineering was way more accessible than most people knew, and he couldnt wait to liberate it from the elite labs he loathed and bring it to the people, because, as he told me, I was always that poor-as-dirt kid dreaming that he could do some great experiment. The pitch video featured shots of Zayner swigging from a flask at the lab bench (his kitchen counter) while the voiceover asked, If you had access to cutting-edge syntheticbiology tools, what would you create? The campaign raised more than $70,000.

It also freaked out critics. Zayners campaign is worrisome because it does not seem to comply with the DIYbio.org code of conduct, Todd Kuiken, a scholar in the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, wrote in Nature in 2016. He was referring to the nonprofit founded in 2008 to foster safe practices in DIY biology. For example, he noted, The video that accompanies his campaign zooms in on petri dishes containing samples that are stored next to food in a refrigerator. Kuiken also believes there needs to be a robust public dialogue about the responsible use of Crispr.

The refrigerator comment still annoys Zayner. So are you saying that being able to do science is a class thing? Only people who can afford second fridges should do science? But he got his act together and bought another fridge, in part because he was already under scrutiny from the FDA, which had threatened to seize his equipment because of his Internet sales. Zayner has also been warned of possible prosecution by officials in Germany, where biohacking is banned. But the practice is perfectly legal throughout the United States, mostly because it has never occurred to legislators to outlaw such a thing, and the ODIN is doing well. Zayner sells thousands of gene-editing kits globally every year, and he expects to gross at least $400,000 in 2017. The world wants this.

The workday at the ODIN starts late-morning. One employee is multi-tasking, packing kits for the days orders while he propagates new batches of microbes. Zayners brother Micah is scarfing Chinese takeout on the couch. The air is redolent with the funk of E. coli bacteria and young male. Zayner solders new wiring onto used PCR machines (There are few things Im one of the worlds leading experts on, but finding functional lab equipment on eBay is one of them, he says) while guiding me through an attempt to engineer antibiotic resistance into E. coli using Crispr. Despite the punk trappings, Zayner is gentle, kind, and a very good teacher.

We rehydrate some dried E. coli in a test tube, pour it into a petri plate containing nutrients, and set it aside overnight. In the morning, we have a flourishing colony of fuzzy white bacteria. We scrape it up, divide it into two plastic tubes of liquid, and to one tube add a few drops of Crispr programmed to change a single A to a C, which will flip the electrical charge of a protein in the bacteria from positive to negative at the point where streptomycin normally attacks it, repelling the antibiotic molecules. Then we pour the two batches onto fresh agar plates laced with streptomycin and incubate everything at 99 degrees for 24 hours.

Genetically modified beer. (Justin Kaneps)

The next day, I pull our agar plates out of the incubator and examine them. Eureka! The normal bacteria is stone-cold dead. But the plate with the modified bacteria is studded with survivor colonies. Weve created GMOs in a day. They and their trillions of descendants will be immune to streptomycin.

Or they would have been if we hadnt killed the whole colony with bleach and thrown it in the trash. As crazy as our creation sounds, it turns out that it was pretty innocuous. This particular version of antibiotic resistance is so simplejust a single changed letter of DNAthat bacteria come up with it on their own all the time. We werent introducing anything the world hadnt seen before, and anyway our weak lab strain was about as dangerous as a cocker spaniel. Yet I cant help but wonder about all the biohackers out there who arent bleaching their experiments. What could the wrong person do with this knowledge?

Thats what I asked Ed You, the biological-countermeasures specialist at the FBIs Weapons of Mass Destruction directorate. You is the governments point person on bioweapons; its his job to worry about this stuff, but he had bigger things on his mind than the ODIN. The most dangerous bioterrorist out there is Mother Nature, he told me over the phone. Were getting hit with emerging and reemerging infectious diseases all the time. Bird flu, MERS, SARS, Zika, West Nile. If you think about a clear and present danger, its that. So we absolutely need the innovation that comes from the life sciences, from DIY bio, to make sure we develop the right counters.

Wait a minute, I said. You actually want them out there tinkering? Yes, he replied. Biology is proliferating quickly, but how do we address security in a way that doesnt handicap forward progress? If you shut down DIY bio, then you run a completely different national-security problem. If you stifle innovation, then youre going to be missing out on opportunities to come up with new vaccines, new biodefense, new countermeasures, new businesses. And if that happens, then youve developed a whole different kind of vulnerability.

You pointed out that the field was moving so fast that agents could never keep up with the pace of the advances. Instead, hes cultivated a neighborhood-watch mentality among the countrys scientists and biohackers. Theyre best positioned to see where the advances are coming from, he said. If someone like Josiah gets a suspicious order of some kind, he knows that hes got a local coordinator in the San Francisco field office he can contact.

Agar plates. (Justin Kaneps)

It all sounded strangely progressive for a bunch of G-men, but every expert I consulted told me that they had no concerns about Zayner. Forget the garagistas, they told me; worry about the academics. Many labs now have the technology and know-how to make some fearsome beasties. Last year, a scientist in Canada shocked the world when he managed to bring to life horsepox, a smallpox cousin that went extinct in the 1980s, by synthesizing its DNA from a sequence stored in a computer database. Are we entering a new era of bioterror?

Probably not, Zayner told me. Lets imagine youre the worst person in the world and you want to hurt people with biologicals. First you have to have the knowledge. Then you have to have the facility. Then you have to think about how its going to spread. It would be an astounding feat. Could you kill one or two people? Sure. But you can do that with a fucking kitchen knife.

That night, Zayner and I celebrate our successful biohack over pig-ear fries and sake at a Korean joint before heading over to Counter Culture Labs, a communal biohacker space where he occasionally teaches. Amid the lab benches and anarchist posters are shelves of strange plants under grow lights and a pig heart in a vat. One woman is attempting to create vegan cheese by inserting cow milk-producing genes into yeast, while another man is quietly sequencing the DNA of the mushrooms he collects in Mexico each summer. A small team are hard at work designing an organism that can produce human insulin. In keeping with the hacker ethos, they will gift it to the world open-source.

There are dozens of biohacker enclaves like this around the globe, such as Genspace in Brooklyn, New York, where hipsters can take Crispr classes and attend Biohacker Boot Camp. The U.S. has been the hub, but now Europe is coming on strong. DIYbio.org has nearly 5,000 members in its Google Group and boasts 99 local chapters, from Madison to Mumbai. Most biohackers never get beyond simple experiments with microbes, but a few have taken it further. David Ishee, a dog breeder in Mississippi, is editing heritable diseases out of his dalmatians. Sebastian Cocioba, a plant hacker in New York, engineered a pioneering blue rose gene, using a DNA sequence from a tropical clam that produces an intensely blue protein, as well as a beefsteak tomato that produces cow protein in its flesh. Cocioba, who operates out of his 12th-floor apartment in Long Island City, is so skilled that he has been asked by MIT to spearhead a top-secret flower project, the details of which cant be shared except to say that in a few years it will capture the worlds attention.

And what about people? I ask. How long before cyclists start giving themselves the EPO gene to produce more red blood cells, or lifters start playing around with the gene for human growth factor?

Zayner laughs. Dude, either people are already doing that shit, or its going to start immediately. Id be very surprised if there isnt somebody out there doing it already. Its so hard to test for. What are you going to do, look for DNA? If a professional athlete came to me right now and said, Ill give you $100,000 to make me a piece of DNA, Id be like, Hell yeah.

Zayner believes we should all have access to DIY bio. (Justin Kaneps)

Surprisingly, this is perfectly legal, though its long been banned by sporting organizations. Athletes and life-extension buffs have been sniffing around gene-therapy clinics for years, ever since pioneering physiologist Lee Sweeney, from the University of Pennsylvania, showed that mice injected with the gene IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor, significantly increased their muscle mass. Sweeney has also shown that mice injected with endurance genes were able to run 70 percent farther on the wheel than their unmodified peers, and that couch-potato mice ran 44 percent farther.

Just this June, a team of U.S. and Israeli scientists announced the discovery of a rare genetic mutation linked to ten years of extra longevity in men. And in 2015, Liz Parrish, the CEO of the startup BioViva, announced that she was the first person to attempt to reverse her own aging with gene therapy. I am patient zero, she wrote on Reddit. I will be 45 in January. I have aging as a disease. Parrish traveled to a clinic in Colombia (the therapy isnt approved in the U.S.) and received injections of one gene to extend the lifespan of her individual cells and another to block myostatin, the hormone that regulates muscle deterioration.

Myostatin is the holy grail of potential dopers who believe they can both arrest the natural deterioration of muscle and build more in their youth. Muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain, so myostatins job is to stop new muscle from being made once youve got enough and to atrophy muscle you arent using. You can find images online of dogs, cows, and people with a rare mutation that shuts down the myostatin gene and turns them into Incredible Hulks. Scientists in China recently used Crispr to turn off the myostatin gene in two beagles. The dogs look healthy, happyand ripped.

But Im less interested in what athletes are doing than in something Zayner said to me on my first day in the lab: This is the first time in history that were no longer stuck with the genes we had at birth. If Zayner has his way, well all be sculpting our own evolution.

Lets be clear: dont try this at home! Although hundreds of gene-therapy trials are under way, and many experts believe they will eventually transform almost every aspect of human health, few have been proven safe. When you start scrambling your DNA, very bad things can happen. You can get cancer. Your immune system can attack the unfamiliar DNA, as happened when an 18-year-old with a rare metabolic disorder died during a University of Pennsylvania gene-therapy trial in 1999.

But sick people wont wait for years of trials, Zayner says. He hears regularly from people willing to roll the dice. Hes been consulting pro bono for a man using Crispr to treat his own Huntingtons disease and another who is treating his 32-year-old wifes advanced lung carcinoma with genetically engineered DNA vaccines. A lot of people contact me with stuff like thatIm suffering. Can you help?

Zayner sticks to the free advice, helping people figure out the sequence of the DNA they need without supplying anything himself, but he knows where this is headed. The only thing holding people back is morality. I have no doubt there are places in Singapore or Thailand or the Philippines doing it. They could totally create individualized cancer treatments right now. Clinics will pop up. Youll go to shops in the back alleys of Bangkok and hand $10,000 to a synthetic biologist and hell take a blood sample and make you up a vaccine in a couple of days.

Im flashing back to Blade Runners replicant shopsI just do eyeswhen Zayner gets a funny smile and cocks his head. Want to try something kind of creepy Ive been thinking about?

For our final piece of conceptual art, Zayner and I swab the crevices of our skin and inside our mouths with Q-tips and swirl the gunk into tubes of distilled water. We spread the contents over agar plates and incubate them overnight.

The next morning, Josiahthing is nearly barren, but Rowanthing is crawling with cells. Look at those big fat yeasties! Zayner mutters with envy. All I can think is, if this works, it will give new meaning to the term homebrew.

We scrape up some Josiahthing and Rowanthing and put each in its own microcentrifuge tube with some chemicals that soften up cell walls so new DNA can get inside. We pipette ten microliters of the jellyfish DNA into each tube, shake them up, let them sit for a few hours, then pour them across new agar plates and cross our fingers. If this actually works, I might make it a kit, Zayner muses.

By then I have to catch a flight home, so I tape up my petri plate and pack it, along with yellow-tint glasses and a blue LED, which makes the fluorescence easier to see. TSA doesnt bat an eye.

The next day I get an e-mail from Zayner: Any growth on that plate?

Yep! Four or five nice, puffy little white colonies.

Put on the glasses and shine blue light on them. Do they glow?

I don the glasses and hit the plate with the blue LED. There are a dozen tiny colonies that stay dull under the light, but there are also five large conical colonies fluorescing like the Green Goblin. Totally! I write back, and send a photo.

Amazing! So cool! So jealous. Mine didnt work.

I feel as proud as Victor Frankenstein. Ive created life from my own spit. In the following weeks, Rowanthing develops an apex so green you dont even need the glasses to see it. Whatever it is, its new to this planet, and its burbling away in my basement, waiting to meet the world.

Contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen (@rowanjacobsen) is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Justin Kaneps(@Justkaneps) is anOutsidecontributing photographer.

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Hacking Your Genes Has Never Been Easier - Outside Magazine