In case you needed more life imitating fiction, a startup known as The Los Angeles Project is using gene editing to experiment with doing some “crazy” things to animals—including making glow-in-the-dark rabbits, cats that are hypo-allergenic and maybe, one day, actual unicorns. As founder and biohacker Josie Zayner says, “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals.” The actual motto of the company from their website and social media is “We Build Life.”
Clearly there are Jurassic Park inspired concerns here about the unintended side effects of this experimentation. Particularly because the animals are engineered “without the ability to reproduce” which is quite literally the thing that didn’t work in Jurassic Park.
On the plus side, their work will inspire new questions and debates about what the limits and regulations around this sort of genetic research and experimentation should be. When asked about this, Zayner did have the most John Hammond-esque response: “The crazy thing is, this technology is so advanced, and nobody’s doing shit with it. That’s kind of our motto: Let’s do stuff with it.”
Hopefully that “stuff” doesn’t involve frog DNA which can switch genders so we end up with a world overrun with fluorescent bunnies and experimental unicorns. Then again, maybe the unicorns wouldn’t be so bad.
