Unicorns, dragons, pixies, and the like are the stuff of kids' stories, or at least they should be. But now a new Texas startup, a bioengineering firm, The Embryo Corporation, is looking at the possibility of producing these creatures for real, and that new company is headed by a woman who doesn't shy away from experimenting on herself.
That's taking putting one's money where one's mouth is to a rather extreme extent.
Perched beneath a “Hippies use the back door” sign was Josie Zayner, sipping coffee in a crop top, jean shorts, and a patchwork of video game– and anime-themed tattoos. Zayner, a former NASA research fellow and world-famous biohacker turned gene-editing start-up CEO, relishes Bebo’s. She feels more at home here, laughing with the waitress about cheese sticks, than she ever did in the Bay Area.
“Nobody wants to be a San Franciscan except for the tech world,” said Zayner, 45, who’s called Austin, Texas, home since 2021. “These people show more warmth than you’d ever experience in San Francisco,” she continued, nodding at the dizzying decor. “This is the soul of America.”
Zayner gained infamy in the 2010s through a series of audacious gene-editing stunts and experiments conducted in California, during which she spliced jellyfish DNA into her own skin, injected herself onstage at a conference with a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) solution designed to knock out the gene that limits muscle growth, performed her own fecal transplant to cure her chronic gut problems, and even livestreamed herself on YouTube self-injecting a Covid DNA vaccine.
This is the kind of person we want messing around with genetic engineering? At least Colossal Bioscience claims to be "de-extinctioning." They aren't, of course; they are producing, to quote a famous movie scientist, genetically engineered theme park monsters. But Zayner has some more radical goals.
The Embryo Corporation’s goals veer into the magical: synthesizing entirely new life-forms, like dragons and unicorns, and pushing the limits of what we can create by playing with the genetic codes that underpin our biological reality.
It hasn't been all smooth sailing, which is probably for the best.
Warning: contains profanity
Zayner’s faced backlash from animal activists over plans to make glowing rabbits (she’s since switched to 100 percent hypoallergenic, fluorescent cats, which are more commercially viable, she says), and many in agriculture think she’s interfering with the natural order of the world. Zayner rejects the idea that it’s something to be avoided. “Being a god is just being 100 years in the future,” she said. “I think the whole playing God thing is bulls**t.”
Getting to a deity level will take decades of trial and error. Which is why Zayner, for now, has zeroed in on the moneymakers that will pay for her loftier goals. She’s currently sequencing elite racehorses, to breed and eventually engineer faster ones, and gene-editing cattle that grow larger on less feed and carry Wagyu-grade marbling.
Forget animal activists. It's biologists that should be concerned here.
Setting aside her comments on achieving godhood, which are frankly alarming in themselves, Josie Zayner looks to be playing awfully fast and loose with the very structures of life itself, something about which humans still don't understand very well. While it's a safe bet that most of her attempts will come to naught - even cloned embryos have a horrible rate of failure without any genetic tweaking - it's the successes we should be worried about.
These attempts smack of the kind of genetic twiddling that Robert Heinlein proposed in his novel "Friday," where genetically engineered artificial humans were common (their motto was "my mother was a test tube, my father, a knife"), and often gifted with speed and strength far beyond most people. But his work also postulated what he called "living artifacts," like a talking sheepdog, four-armed humanoids designed to fly high-speed aircraft, engineered humanoid kobold dwarfs for mining, and much more. But that was fiction, and a cautionary tale at that.
Josie Zayner seems determined to make some of this a reality.
Look, the same techniques that might produce a glowing rabbit or a cat-sized elephant could also be used to produce an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, or a robust virus that can live for months on a doorknob. But my main concern is this: We do not yet understand genetics well enough to start capriciously messing with it, and that sure seems to be what's going on here.
And wouldn't a gene-engineered racehorse be... cheating?
Editor's Note: This article was edited for clarity post-publication.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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