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Biohacker Injects Himself With Religious Texts Converted to DNA

posted by mrpg on Friday December 21 2018, @11:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the florida-man,-zat-you? dept.

takyon writes:

High School Student Injects The Book Of Genesis Into His Body

A student has injected himself with the Book of Genesis and the surah Ar-Ra'd (part of the Qur'an) because he "wondered whether it would be possible".

Adrien Locatelli, a high school student in Grenoble, France, decided to inject himself with several religious texts.

"Recent studies have reported that it is possible to convert any type of information into DNA for the purpose of storage," he wrote, publishing his initial results on the Open Science Framework.

"Since it is possible to convert digital information into DNA, I wondered whether it would be possible to convert a religious text into DNA and to inject it in a living being."

Seems like a good origin story for a religious superhero.

Related: Man Who Attempted DIY Gene Therapy Found Dead
Biohacker With Implanted Card Escapes Conviction

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Friday December 21 2018, @01:17PM (2 children)

    by MrGuy (1007) on Friday December 21 2018, @01:17PM (#777178)

    Forget about what you think of his plan for a moment.

    We’re so good at synthesizing DNA now that the ability to synthesize an arbitrary strand of DNA tens of thousands of base pairs long? And this technology is sufficiently available that it’s available to high school students?

    Let’s ballpark the length of the sequence. I’m using English as my reference language, because that’s easiest for me, but should be roughly on par with other languages. The book of Genesis is about 37,000 words long according to this site. [soylentnews.org] Let’s guess the average word is just over 4 characters long, which typical in English, and means about 150,000 characters. According to this XKCD [soylentnews.org], English contains about 1 bit of information per letter, so we have 150,000 bits of information. DNA has 4 possible bases per location, so 2 bits. This means the DNA strand is 75,000 bases long. Not long in an absolute sense for DNA, but I remain surprised that it’s it’s something that’s no big deal to create from scratch. And that’s just for Genesis - he also has the Quran book in there.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 21 2018, @01:36PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 21 2018, @01:36PM (#777185) Journal
    Don't forget that it's easier to say you did something, than to actually do it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21 2018, @03:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21 2018, @03:05PM (#777212)

    he also has the Quran book in there

    He was trying to change his alignment to evil?