Meet the human guinea pig who hacked his own DNA
Self experimentation has a long history. Scientists have consumed, breathed in, and injected themselves with all manner of substances in the pursuit of scientific understanding. Some have even received Nobel prizes for putting themselves under the microscope. But with the advances in genetic engineering, none have altered their own DNA, in the name of science, until now.
Dr. Josiah Zayner is a biohacker and the founder and CEO of a genetic engineering company, called The Odin which sells biotechnology tools to other biohackers, like himself. "What we try to do is get genetic engineering in the hands of consumers to let them do basically whatever they want with it."
On Oct. 4 at a biotechnology conference in San Francisco, Zayner says he injected himself with CRISPR, the powerful gene editing technology, to biohack the muscle cells in his forearm. "Well it's not necessarily that I want bigger muscles," he says. "The thing is, that this is the first time in history that we are no longer are slaves to our genetics. We no longer have to live with the genetics we had when we were born. Technologies like CRISPR and other genetic modification technologies allow adult humans to modify the cells in their body."
