You may have seen a recent story in the Dailymail about how criminals can elude crimes by changing their DNA with a cheap crispr kit. I was recently kidnapped by a criminal to get me to help him to change his dna. Here’s the tale.
He was a retired criminal and his dna was already a several scenes. He wanted to change his dna to elude capture.
First I told him that he can’t change his dna in one site in the genome. The forensic tests look at multiple spots in the genome to get a “fingerprint”.
So we started doing this, but I told him that the sites in the genome used for forensic tests are repetitive, so they’ll be difficult to crispr. But I didn’t want to suggest trials because guess who the guinea pig would be...
He was already pissed that he had to buy multiple crispr kits, instead of the single $300 kit...
So, I had to bypass all the warnings in the crispr design. Did I really want to order this repetitive oligo? No. But I really didn’t want to be held by a crispr-DIY criminal either.
He injected the crispr mix because that’s what that news article suggested. I’m not sure when Dailymail became a medical journal... And against my better judgement, I told him we’d better check to see if it worked.
I told him we’d need to buy a forensic kit, a pcr machine, and a few other things. An old fashioned sequencer. I could have suggested a MiSeqFX, but his garage didn’t meet site requirements for installation. He was livid at $tag. I told him to take it up with Bio-Rad & Thermo.
And then I told him we’d need to check different tissues.
So, tens of thousands of dollars later, all the results came in mostly negative. No change had occurred, which is what you’d expect if you just inject crispr into yourself without targeting stem cells and no mechanism for the complex to enter cells.
At that point, the guy had run through all his savings and had to resort to a life in crime to get his money back.
So kids, don’t DIY crispr to escape a life of crime, despite what the Dailymail may say.
