The Odin – DIY genetic engineering

I have to just say, as interesting as the videos are, The Thought Emporium has some... I guess questionable ethics. They've been repeatedly critiqued for overuse of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their experiments, and they dismiss it by saying antibiotic-resistant bacteria is already everywhere (yes it is, and the problem is going to get a lot worse if people promote using that as carte blanche to do whatever), and openly discuss how they skirt animal experimentation rules using technicalities like cooking the fish you harvested live brain matter from (you can argue whether the rules are too stringent, but treating ethics as some annoyance to hack around is blatantly missing the point). This doesn't detract from his shopping recommendations, but it does speak to the sort of concerns people have with the way the space operates generally. It's very "myopic engineer sees problem that needs fixing".

This has come up again and again on a TTE-adjacent discord, most recently someone was sent gel stain contaminated with DNA.

I'd imagine they'll stir up the pharmaceuticals market as much as meth cooks did. If someone makes an actual advancement with these kits, watch him get bought out tout de suite.

Big mood, I've been fantasizing about a building a wet lab at home for years. There are like 5 people actively doing research on my illness worldwide and the latest experimental treatment would be two grands a week at retail prices.

I'm sorry for your child, but I'm not delighted. The guy that you can see in one of the pictures drinking from a glass recipient was in a Netflix documentary (I can't remember the title from top of my mind) where he was advocating for everyone being able to use genetic engineering for self-improvement, even without any previous knowledge of genetics. And this is what I take issue with. Sure genetic engineering has a lot of potential and could be used even to treat your child, but as every powerful tool, it has to be used by capable hands. Putting it freely in the hands of people that don't fully understand it (and I'm myself into that group) has the potential of creating great damages.

Last time something genetics based was developed fast, and succesful, quite a few people went on the fences over it: Covid mRNA vaccines.

There are reasons why medical development takes time and money. And why rare diseases are underserved. And no amount of "disruption" is going to change the simple question of cost in that equation. So if VCs want to change that, they can simply use some of their "free" billions to fund proper development and research.

Are you sure it’s possible? There is a lot of hype around biotech and CRISPR, but we still can’t safely and reliably edit DNA in a living person, except in a few specific cases where the nature of the disease makes it especially easy.

> I'm delighted to see that biohackers are stirring things up. Let's hope this inspires the industry to rethink their approach to drug development.

I joined a biohacker Discord a while ago out of curiousity.

One of the channels was dedicated to getting a Chinese company to synthesize a pipeline pharmaceutical that was being researched in mice by some company. The people in the channel didn't want to wait for the human trials to experiment on themselves.

Long story short, they got a synthesis and paid thousands to confirm its purity. Several people took it and experienced some extremely concerning, potentially life threatening side effects. I noped out of the Discord because I didn't want to be associated with that group in any way after watching how they operated.

Genetic engineering is a whole new level of potential problems.

Yes. There will be autonomous weapon platforms everywhere regardless of our desires, both from nation-states and non-state actors. To defend from them, you might want to understand how they work, and how they are built.

That seems like a bad idea. Just waiting for the escape and autobrewery syndrome

There have been efforts in the last decade to engineer yeast to produce lysergic acid (https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/jun/21/scienti...). Apparently, a group managed to introduce the complete pathway and published an article last year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28386-6

Where are you at? I am a hobby chemist and getting a sigma aldrich account is rly hard in europe as a private person

Now they're going be like "why is there suddenly a 10x increase in requests for individual accounts?" Haha

Same here. Been a happy customer of theirs for years & even attended one of their Biohack the Planet conferences back before Covid. Everyone that I met who worked there was great. The team really goes above & beyond to make their customers happy and to promote citizen science.

I'm curious about the yeast part. I heard it's difficult/expensive to grow yeast at home, as opposed to bacteria. Are there online tutorials that you used? I've seen plenty of bacterial modification tutorials, but not so much for yeast.

Do they even ship outside the USA?

Nevermind all the chemicals, just shipping the plant itself internationally for that kit might be impossible.

It's a shame, the EU is so technologically backward and anti-science.

Which parts or chemicals are restricted or watched?

I mean if you're worried about bioterrorism, I'm sure there are plenty of ways and means to do so outside of convenient packages like this for someone with enough motivation.

I mean with enough motivation anyone (assuming they pass a background check) can pursue a degree in biology / genetics, get a job with access to a lab, and do the thing.

We need some way to detect germs in realtime, without knowing in advance what they are, so people can evacuate buildings that have them.

There's gotta be some miniature electron microscope that can look at viruses in the air or something, right?

Only Fauci-funded Chinese laboratories have the right to manipulate pathogens!

This offering seems largely educational, this stuff being what people learn in bioengineering degrees anyway. And this stuff isn't really plug-and-play :) Most beginner attempts will simply fail (e.g. dead target organism, no change to desired traits, etc.). Any serious bioengineer (incl. ill-intentioned ones) would have more advanced equipment and knowledge anyway.

Why isn't outlawing it the solution? Seems like a pretty good solution

You're right. We should abolish anti-terrorism laws. Or rules outlawing murder for that matter.

> Have you forgotten that the world is full of bad actors who are literally trying to eat people?

Your premise here is false. If X thing is bad, a number of other people doing it doesn’t make it OK. If anything, it makes it worse, not better. If all your friends jumped off the edge of a cliff to suicide, would you do it?

> They spend all day long everyday trying to find a random path to something that can eat you

It's more subtle than that. They spend all day every day trying to perpetuate themselves, which incidentally may be helped by eating you, but probably isn't. Much better to let you fly around the world and let you help them spread onto more surfaces.

Humans alone? Maybe not today. Humans and those organisms joining forces? I don't see how that would make the danger lesser than the random walk of those organisms unaided.

Any more specifics or a link to your site? Couldn't find anything with a few quick Google searches

Careful, you're at risk of being chained to a rock in a cave, with poison dripped on your head for an age...

At THOR, we believe the future is going to be dominated by big, sturdy hammers and bashing of enemy heads in. Now please would you raise your head?

I believe it is extremely dependent on what compound you are talking about, and how complicated the biosynthesis of that compound is.

A simple protein? Very easy.

A complex alkaloid, the biosynthesis of which involves many steps? Super difficult.

Engineering arbitrary modifications is incredibly difficult, due to a myriad of factors, like working against evolutionary optimizations, lack of knowledge of the target organism, reaction pathways that don't go quite like we've sketched them, unspecific enzymes, etc. The success stories you read about are a very small fraction of all attempts. And like another user said, some things are easier than others.

That would be a very bad idea, as what you break is fundamental reality around you. A lot of people on this thread really underestimate the level of care that's currently taken with the sorts of labs that are used and how controlled they are to prevent exposure. It's bad enough we have environmental collapse from all other industrial activity. It's not like engineering, or even chemistry and physics, one person doing something a bit slap dash really could end the entire world in very unobvious ways. If anything we should be reversing legislatively what's already happening with big agri companies doing artificial evolution to produce new seed stock against an engineered target.

Engineering “bad stuff” with kits like this is virtually impossible. Synthetic biology is still difficult and expensive, and what can be done without a large budget for massive , robotically automated trial and error is still very limited.

That said, to help evolve antibiotic resistant bacteria all you have to do is not properly finish a course of antibiotics.

This kit does not facilitate that kind of work. First of all, the expertise needed for the actual genetic engineering is packed here as a pre-made plasmid that has absolutely no way to be repurposed. Second, bacteria culture is something of an art and also needs expertise and specialized equipment to perform appropriately. What they provide here is not professional-grade at all.

Now, the really scary part is that pretty much any Biology undergraduate would have access to sufficient equipment and understanding to start exploring those ideas. Access to nasty viruses and bacteria is somewhat controlled now, and in theory you have to be part of a lab to be able to properly source and manipulate everything you would need. However, I think it is a much bigger risk than the average person would assume, and also one that is much harder to control because it doesn't leave an easily traceable fingerprint, like nuclear enrichment for example.

It's very easy to give bacteria certain antibiotic resistances, the mechanism is pretty much identical to the one used to make them green fluorescent in these kits. You transform the bacteria with a plasmid, they take this up and produce proteins from the genes on it. Those plasmids in the kit almost certainly have some antibiotic resistance on them anyway, that's the way you filter out the succesfully transformed bacteria.

The good news is that the resistances you can give this way are typically present in nature already. Bacteria are already exchanging these kinds of plasmids. And the bacteria you get in these kits or generally use in the lab are also harmless to humans.

I don't think you could effectively design a bioweapon with the stuff you have in such a kit. That would require a lot more knowledge, effort and material. I think at best you'd be able to create a resistant bacterium similar to those that already occur sometimes in the wild.

I got several of their earlier kits - never got it to work even with most of the prep done by someone else, my bacteria either didn't accept the jellyfish genes or they just died :(.

It takes some skill to do even very simple stuff, but it's certainly plausible that, say, Covidlike events become a common weapon in interstate conflicts. My own hope is that a lot of individuals with access to this knowledge will have a much healthier arms race than a few big labs - most individuals are moral agents, so a few bad actors in a big group of people with mostly good intentions is less scary to me than a few big groups with no bad intentions but zero-sum game theory.

The question more generally how easy is it to engineer bad stuff, regardless of this kit. Easier than engineering good stuff!

This seems to be the case for most science: You poke around in the dark, illuminated by past discoveries, you might need to wait for new tools for observation to be developed, you come up with some theories that are partly correct but only the next generations will be able to prove/disprove them.

I've been enjoying listening to The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which details a lot how the discoveries of cellular biology only came when e.g. suitably high quality lenses, microscopes or microneedles could be manufactured. As such, many of the early cellular biologists were at least part craftsmen as well.

Similarly for genetics, there the speed of discovery has been limited by tools: For sequencing (esp. cheap enough and accurate enough to start from limited genetic material) as well as editing the genome.

iGEM, at least for students?

https://igem.org/Competition

Advances in biotech are happening at an extraordinary pace, and it has been going on for decades. iGEM is celebrating its 20th year of synthetic biology competitions. https://igem.org/

almost nobody claims that. everybody knows covid was caused by 5G :P

No it isn't. It's a harmless bog standard strain of E. Coli used in every biology lab everywhere. Just making the edits in the 8 week course with all of the right materials supplied is not guaranteed. To design a set of dangerous genes would be very difficult and getting someone to manufacture the plasmids would probably set off some alarm bells. The companies that make these things aren't just blindly producing and shipping anything you ask for, and making those plasmids requires a really sophisticated lab. These kits are totally harmless and inline with what you might do in an intro course in college.

I've no idea about biotech, but it's not as if this kit has some molecular factory that can build you arbitrary DNA strands. As far as I know, there is no magic cauldron where you can throw eye of newt for adenine, toe of frog for cytosine and so on, and it would spew out a flask of plasmids built to your spec.

And that E.Coli strain... I believe I may have more dangerous stuff in my lower intestine.

They are just adding plasmids with benign things, e.g. a florescent protein. These are a huge burden for the cell and are strongly selected against, they constantly spontaneously revert to the unengineered variant. It’s conceivable that you could add a plasmid to confer some dangerous capabilities to a bacteria, but it wouldn’t happen by accident, and it would not be easy. You would need to iterate a huge number of trials and designs to get a chance of one doing anything.

A malicious actor operating at scale with a lot of resources would be required, and simple educational kits like this would not be useful to them anyways. This is almost like saying educational kits for schools that contain tiny amounts of benign radioactive ore should be illegal because they could in principle contribute material for an atom bomb…