It was so much easier to commit crimes in the Seventies.
Why do you think it was a heyday for serial killers like the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne
Gacy, and David Berkowitz?
Incidentally, forensic DNA testing first successfully solved a criminal case in 1986.
Dr. Alec Jeffreys, a British geneticist, used genetic fingerprinting to solve a pair of
sexually-motivated murders in Leicester, UK.
After this breakthrough, other crime scene investigators across the globe started to
see similar success with these scientific methods.
For aspiring criminals, it was all downhill from there.
But that’s not gonna be you.
No, you’re a different class of ne’er-do-well.
People always told you that crime doesn’t pay.
Really?
Pablo Escobar was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands to keep the rest of his money
together.
And forensic DNA testing?
No biggie.
There are ways around that.
You’d heard stories of criminals filing off or altering their fingerprints to get
away with their dastardly deeds, but can you do the same with your DNA?
Think your DNA is as unchangeable as your eye colour?
We regret to inform you that you’re dead wrong on that one.
And if you’re really serious about taking on a criminal career, you better listen close
and consider your options.
Before we proceed, here’s a quick science lesson about what exactly DNA is.
If you’re a fan of Jurassic Park, the phrase “the building blocks of life” probably
jumped to mind, and you wouldn’t really be wrong.
The actual DNA acronym is short for Deoxyribonucleic acid – its structure is the famous double-helix,
formed of two chemical strands called nucleotides, and held together by four chemical bases:
adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G).
DNA essentially stores the information for the development of your body.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get back to changing your DNA for
fun and profit.
Particularly of the criminal variety.
First, you think, “Well, I better check and see how people have done this on purpose
in the past.”
So, you begin your research, and suddenly, you’re seeing the name Josiah Zayner everywhere.
Who is this guy, calling himself a “biohacker”?
And furthermore, what the heck is a biohacker?
That sounds like something straight out of Blade Runner.
Well, our morally dubious friend, biohacking is a practical branch of the transhumanism
movement.
Biohackers are people who practice self-experimentation with the aim of improving their biology through
science.
You may hear this and start picturing Resident Evil-style super-mutations, or elaborate cybernetic
enhancements like robotic limbs and AI-assisted brains.
While this kind of thing is on the mind of some biohackers, many methods of biohacking
are simpler, DIY systems of body and mind improvement.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, praises the curative powers of drinking “salt juice” and fasting.
Other biohackers heavily moderate their sleeping or exercise habits to achieve desired results.
Some dabble in simple cybernetic enhancements, like chips or even subcutaneous lights.
On the more extreme end of things, you’ve got Silicon Valley investors interested in
Young Blood Transfusions.
These are, as the name suggests, older individuals receiving regular blood transfusions from
young, healthy donors to preserve their youth and vitality.
So, I guess vampires are real after all?
Anyway, back to Mr. Josiah Zayner, a biohacker who claims to have successfully changed his
DNA.
You eagerly read into the story, hoping that with his simple method, you’ll be bankrolling
the Escobar dollars in no time.
Who is this man, and what exactly did he do to change his DNA?
Zayner is a life-long devotee of the biohacking movement.
The 38-year-old former-NASA employee believes science and technology are the best paths
to unlocking the true potential of the human body, and – as a testament to his beliefs
– he uses himself as a guinea pig.
While his more recent stunts include injecting his arm with modified CRISPR DNA in hopes
of stimulating muscle growth – you bookmark that for later – of real interest to you
is Zayner’s full-body microbiome transplant in 2016.
For the record, the microbiome is a term for the ecology of microbes in your body.
Josiah Zayner had been plagued by gastrointestinal issues his whole life, and so decided to treat
this with a fecal matter transplant.
What exactly is a fecal matter transplant, you wonder?
While fecal matter transplants are an accepted medical treatment, Josiah Zayner’s take
on the treatment involved using antibiotics to eliminate his gut bacteria (don’t try
this at home) and then ingesting samples of his friend’s feces to replace said bacteria
(don’t try that at home, either.)
However, at least according to Zayner’s self-reporting, the treatment did change his
life for the better.
His home-grown DNA sequencing confirmed that he had indeed changed his gut microbiome.
Between oddball treatments like fecal matter transplants and injecting CRISPR DNA, you
could become a whole new person.
In the words of Zayner himself, “This is the first time in human history that we're
no longer stuck with the genes we had at birth.”
That being said, Zayner kind of lost you at the “ingesting his friend’s feces” part.
I mean, you want to start collecting your ill-gotten gains, but not quite that badly.
There has to be non-gross ways of changing your DNA, right?
The search goes on.
While researching more methods of evading forensic DNA detection, you find you’re
seeing the words “gene therapy” an awful lot.
You also see the story of Brian Madeux, a 44-year-old man from Phoenix, Arizona, who
was treated for his enzyme-inhibiting genetic disease with gene-editing liquid.
The disease was costing Brian hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment costs every
single year, without even really providing him a better quality of life.
Thanks to gene-editing, his chances of recovery have never been better.
Sandy Macrae, the CEO of the company responsible for Brian’s therapy, explained the process
as follows: "We cut your DNA, open it up, insert a gene, stitch it back up.
Invisible mending.
It becomes part of your DNA and is there for the rest of your life."
Gene editing as a treatment for genetic disease has become increasingly mainstream over the
last several years, thanks to advances in science and technology in this area.
In late 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Luxterna, a drug capable of altering
the patient’s DNA.
Specifically, Luxterna treats a rare form of hereditary genetic blindness.
Much like Josiah Zayner’s CRISPR dosages, Luxtrerna is injected, so it isn’t the kind
of thing you can obtain without a serious prescription.
Scott Gottlieb, who was the FDA chairman at the time, said that he expected the benefits
of new gene therapy treatments to increase exponentially.
Much like the criminal enterprise you’re hoping to start once you figure out this whole
“DNA Thing” – the gene therapy industry has opened up new markets for entrepreneurs.
A huge number of medicine and software start-ups focused around supporting gene therapy have
sprung up in the last few years, such as Insilico Medicine in Latvia and Paradigm Diagnostics
in Phoenix.
Over time, it’s possible that gene therapy could be as common as chemo and radiotherapy
in treating genetic cancers.
Emerging gene-editing treatments include Strimvelis, which treats dangerous auto-immune diseases.
Kymriah treats leukemia in children by fighting cancer cells.
And the aforementioned CRISPR – which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats – hopes to simply edit disease out of human genomes.
Someday, when suffering from previously incurable genetic diseases, you’ll be spoiled for
choice with which gene therapy treatment to choose.
Sounds good for people suffering from genetic diseases, but not all that useful for avoiding
the police.
You probably need a diagnosis and much better health insurance to change your DNA through
gene therapy.
Next option!
So, you ask yourself: Are there any cheaper ways of doing this?
What are some of the other things that can alter your DNA?
After more meticulous research, you find some answers.
In 2017, food company Nestle convened a huge group of five-hundred-and-fifty scientists
to research the links between nutrition and epigenetics – or, the field of study concerning
the links between gene expression and external or biological factors.
They found evidence that modifying your diet can, in fact, impact the gene expression of
you and your children.
Adequate and balanced nutrition can help prevent the presentation of certain genetic diseases,
such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.
This can go both ways, as poor food and drink intake can actively encourage negative gene
expression.
For example, a study conducted by the scientific journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental
Research, found that chronic binge drinking can cause alcohol dependency on a genetic
level.
So, it’s best to be mindful of what you put into your body, because your genes certainly
will.
However, epigenetics is a lot more complicated than a simple one-to-one correlation between
diet and gene expression.
Countless factors can play into this: Among them are stress, exercise, and childhood experience.
Harvard researchers have found that mice observed under chronic stress experienced epigenetic
modifications towards stress disorders and mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia.
A similar phenomenon has been recorded in humans.
In 2016, a study in Mount Sinai hospital found that epigenetic stress can be inherited, as
the descendants of Holocaust survivors experienced higher rates of stress disorders than the
general population.
An epigenetic study from Northwestern University Professor Thom McDade found that one’s childhood
environment can modify genetic expression in adulthood, particularly in terms of developing
genetic diseases.
He discovered that certain childhood conditions in his sample group – such as being in a
low socioeconomic group, prolonged parental absence, and microbe exposure – could affect
the child’s future levels of inflammation.
This inflammation would, in turn, be the trigger for the development of other conditions, such
as some cancers.
This all shows that gene expression is a lot more malleable than you might imagine.
However…there’s a catch.
As always.
While epigenetic factors can affect gene expression, they don’t cause any permanent structural
changes to the DNA itself.
In other words: You can eat, drink, and subject yourself to as much stress as you like, your
DNA will still be identifiably yours under any forensic procedure.
So, it’s back to the drawing board.
Again.
You’re wracking your devious criminal mind here, wondering why it’s so darn hard to
change your DNA.
I mean, in your research, you even found that some people managed to fundamentally alter
their DNA by accident.
Some people get all the luck.
People like Chris Long.
Chris Long is an IT worker from Nevada who underwent a bone marrow transplant in hopes
of treating his nasty case of acute myeloid leukemia.
His donor was an unidentified man from Germany, whom Long would become extremely close with
in a truly unexpected way.
How, exactly?
It’s because the DNA present in Chris Long’s semen is not his own – It’s his donor’s.
While other samples of DNA taken from Chris, such as cheek swabs and blood samples, still
registered as his DNA, his semen only displayed the donor DNA.
Why?
At this stage, nobody is quite sure.
Though if someone like Chris committed a crime with a sexual element, forensic science would
not be able to trace the crime back to him – unless, of course, they were aware of
the condition in the first place.
It presents a terrifying precedent for the future of forensic science now that this is
a possibility.
However, seeing as you can’t volunteer for a bone marrow transplant without suffering
from blood or bone cancer, you’re not gonna have much luck here.
DNA is starting to feel like more trouble than it's worth.
Seeing as it’s so hard to change your DNA, wouldn’t it just be easier to get rid of
it entirely?
Would such a thing even be possible?
Well, yes, but it’s not something you’d like to experience.
One horrific example is the last eighty-three days of the life of Hisashi Ouchi, a 35-year-old
Japanese lab tech who worked in the Tokaimura Nuclear Power Plant.
During a mishap with a dangerous quantity of Uranium, Hisashi Ouchi and some other technicians
were exposed to lethal doses of gamma radiation.
Unfortunately for Hisashi, he survived the incident, even after taking 17 Sieverts of
radiation.
For context on the significance of this, 8 Sieverts is considered a lethal dose.
Hisashi experienced quite possibly the largest amount of radiation experienced by any living
human being.
In an infamous question of scientific ethics, he was kept alive for 83 days while scientists
tested the effects of the radiation on his rapidly and horrifically degrading body.
Thankfully, he was at least in a medically-induced coma until his eventual death.
The radiation poisoning Hisashi suffered from was said to be so severe that it completely
your DNA.
But nobody’s stopping you from changing your mind for the better.
Why not check out some of our other videos on genetics – like “These Gene Mutations
Gave Some People Superpowers” or “When Royal Inbreeding Went Horribly Wrong.”
You can trust us.
Making interesting videos is in our DNA.