Josiah Zayner is a biohacker, artist, and scientist best known for his self-experimentation and his work making hands-on genetic engineering accessible to a lay audience, including CRISPR.
He spent two years as a researcher at the Mountain View, California's NASAAmes Space Synthetic Biology Research Center, where he worked on Martian colony habitat design. While at the agency, Zayner also analyzed speech patterns in online chat, Twitter, and books, and found that language on Twitter and online chat is closer to how people talk than to how they write. Zayner found NASA's scientific work less innovative than he expected, and upon leaving in January 2016, he launched a crowdfunding campaign to provide CRISPR kits to let the general public experiment with editing bacterial DNA. He also continued his grad school business, The ODIN, which sells kits to let the general public experiment at home. The company's main adviser is George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of PersonalGenomes.org. As of May 2016, The ODIN had four employees and operated out of Zayner's garage. He refers to himself as a biohacker and believes in the importance of letting the general public participate in scientific experimentation, rather than leaving it segregated to labs. Zayner found the academic biohacking community to be exclusive and hierarchical, particularly with respect to the types of people who decide what is "safe". He hopes that his projects can let even more people experiment in their homes. Other scientists have responded that biohacking is inherently exclusive for its dependence on leisure time and money, and that deviance from general safety rules could lead to even harsher regulations for all. Zayner's public CRISPR kit campaign coincided with wider public scrutiny over genetic modification. Zayner maintained that these fears were based on misunderstandings of the product, as genetic experiments on yeast and bacteria cannot produce a viral epidemic. In April 2015, Zayner ran a hoax on Craigslist to raise awareness about the future potential of forgery in forensic genetic testing. Zayner later used CRISPR to attempt to edit his own genes and is the first known person to do so. His CRISPR kit was displayed at the Cooper Hewitt's 2019 Nature Design Triennial. In February 2016, Zayner attempted a full body microbiome transplant on himself, including a fecal transplant, to experiment with microbiome engineering and to see if he could treat his gastrointestinal and other health issues. The microbiome from the donor's feces successfully transplanted in Zayner's gut according to DNA sequencing done on samples. This experiment was documented by filmmakers Kate McLean and Mario Furloni and turned into the short documentary film Gut Hack. In December 2016, Zayner created a fluorescent beer by engineering yeast to contain the green fluorescent protein from jellyfish. Zayner's company, The ODIN, released kits to allow people to create their own engineered fluorescent yeast, which was met with some controversy as the FDA declared that the green fluorescent protein can be seen as a color additive. Zayner views the kit as a way that an individual can use genetic engineering to create new things in their everyday life. In 2019, Zayner launched a curriculum featuring a series of educational videos directed at those studying biotechnology for the first time.
Art
In the arts, Zayner's work has been featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art and others. While at the University of Chicago Zayner created a musical instrument, the Chromochord, which stimulates light-, oxygen-, and voltage-sensing proteins and translates their reactions into music. Together with composer Francisco Castillo Trigueros he received a grant from the university to compose music and create audio visual art installations using the work. Zayner, gave a musical performance using the Chromochord at NY MoMA PS1. Zayner was a resident artist at Stochastic Labs in Berkeley, California where he worked with the new media artistLynn Hershman Leeson to create an art installation about genetic engineering, which included a booth designed by Zayner that attempted to reverse engineer a person's DNA from their picture. The installation was shown at ZKM and Deichtorhallen.
