The phylogeny of Prozac yogurt.
Christina Agapakisis a synthetic biologist and
postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA
who blogs about about biology, engineering, biological engineering, and biologically inspired engineering at
A few weeks ago, I saw a retweet that claimed “biohacking is easier than you think” with a link to a post on a blog
accompanying a book called Massively Networked. The post included video of Tuur van Balen’s
presentation at the NextNature
power show a few months earlier. Van Balen is a designer whose work I’ve followed
for a couple years now, and his most recent project imagines how synthetic biology might produce and deliver medicines in the future. He demonstrates---using homemade tools, equipment purchased on eBay, and online resources for finding
and synthesizing
DNA sequences---how someone could engineer a strain of bacteria to produce Prozac-laced yogurt. While he’s not actually making Prozac, his demonstration does show pretty accurately ...
