Genetic Engineering For All: The Last Great Frontier of Human Freedom

Genetic Engineering For All: The Last Great Frontier of Human Freedom

Josiah Zayner in his home lab.

(Courtesy Zayner)


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Josiah Zayner
Dr. Josiah Zayner is a biohacker and CEO who is constantly pushing the boundaries of science outside traditional environments including human genetic engineering. After his Ph.D., he worked at NASA's Synthetic Biology program, genetically engineering bacteria to help terraform Mars. He left NASA to found The ODIN, a company that makes genetic engineering available to consumers at home. His work has been featured in Time, Scientific American, Le Monde, Businessweek, The Guardian and NPR, among many others. He enjoys whiskey and Red Bull, sometimes together.
A new oral vaccine could prevent urinary tract infections for years

Urinary tract infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year.

Getty Images

Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.

But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history

A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital prepares a pig organ for transplant.

Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.

The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.