Comment from UTT:

Can the devil tinker with life? Has Satan tinkered with life before? According to the Bible (Genesis chapter 6) he has before the flood and "after that" as well. He is doing it again, isn't he, and humans are taking the credit, are they not?

May 20 - How DIY bio-hackers are changing the conversation around genetic engineering

Article: Cloning And Genetic Engineering

CRISPR is a controversial new technology for genetically engineering cells and making those changes heritable. It and other new gene-editing technologies have both raised hopes of speedier biomedical breakthroughs and concerns that they could eventually enable the modification of healthy humans. But what is not generally known is that the use of CRISPR as a research tool has already become so widespread that even community labs have access to it � and this isn�t necessarily a bad thing.

For those not familiar with the term, community labs (also known as bio-hackerspace) are a relatively new phenomenon: grassroots, nonprofit organizations that maintain laboratory facilities open to the general public, with a mission to make the practice of biotechnology available to all. Anyone can come in and work on a self-funded project for a very low membership fee as long as it falls within generally accepted guidelines for biosafety. Within these spaces, citizen scientists have access to many of the same technologies used in university and corporate labs, including CRISPR. The movement has grown rapidly � in 2013 there were six groups, while today there are nearly 30. In 2014, the Wilson Center released a report saying that half of practitioners had joined the citizen science movement in the last 6 months before their survey.