Josiah Zayner and Iare 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. It’s not St. Patrick’s Day, and the beer isn’t really all that green. It’s the ghostly luminescence of jellyfish pulsing through the depths. That’s because it’s chock full of glowing jellyfish protein.
But no jellyfish were harmed in the making of this beer. Zayner is the world’s most notorious biohacker—a new breed of garage tinkerer experimenting with DNA and bio logical systems outside the confines of traditional research. In this case, he genet ically engineered a common brewer’s yeast by adding a jellyfish’s green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene…
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Outside (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2017