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Note: I wasn’t sure where to put this piece. I sat down intending to write a continuation of my E coli story. But instead, this came out instead. I will keep this piece at the end of my E coli story, and may even try to integrate it. But, I'm not sure. My brain does weird things sometimes. 

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Lately, I’ve been feeling exceptionally alone and afraid. I’ve come to the expected-but-still-very-scary realization that, as intelligent and knowledgeable as the “adultier adults” in my life are, I know a lot of things that they don’t. I chose to study biotechnology at university, which is a field that was entirely science fiction until the 1970s. 

Even then, it didn’t get much attention until 2012, when scientists such as Dr. Jennifer Doudna, Dr. Feng Zhang, and Dr. George Church figured out the mechanism behind how bacterial and prokaryotic cells protect themselves from viruses and antibiotics, known colloquially as CRISPR, which uses an enzyme called Cas9 to chop up DNA for alterations. Up until 2012, we knew a lot about genes and genetics, but almost nothing about how to fix fucked-up genes and genetics. But the discoveries made in 2012 suddenly made gene-editing a reality. 

A little over ten years later, I’ve become one of the very few people in the world to successfully harness CRISPR/Cas9 to make simple E. coli cells glow green under blacklight using a gene originally found in jellyfish. 

Trying to explain that to literally anyone outside of my Biotech classes is damn near impossible, it seems. I almost feel like I’m doing some Manhattan Project shit in the 1950s, even though I can freely discuss what I’m doing. People just don’t understand it, including my own friends and family. 

Over the weekend my dad, smartly, challenged me to explain what I was doing in my microbiology lab course in a way that even his scientifically-illiterate ass could understand. After some thinking, I managed to liken a cell to a company, with DNA being the boss, RNA being the secretary (or the human printer), and everything else being the product makers and managers. 

Luckily, once I put cell biology in those terms a construction manager like my dad could understand, he understood the gravity of what I was doing pretty much right away. 

“So, just so I understand, you basically genetically engineered a jar of E. coli to glow green, so you could see what it was doing, and how long its DNA was, in real time.”

“Yup!” I answered him, “And this is just the beginning of my cell biology projects. In about a month, I’ll be CRISPR-ing a mammalian cell.”

“So you really are on the cutting edge of this shit, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

“Doesn’t that freak ya out a bit?” my dad asked. 

“Oh abso-fuckin’-lutely! But if I don’t do it, who else will?”

But if I don’t do it, who else will?

To be continued…