This Man Rewrites the Genetic Code of Animals
Scientists like Dan Carlson are in high demand, thanks to recently discovered tools that enable them to tweak the DNA of all kinds of organisms.
For nine nerve-racking months beginning in the summer of 2014, Dan Carlson waited for his lab experiments to be born. Carlson and his team at the biotechnology startup Recombinetics had made a small tweak in the genetic code of dairy cattle in an attempt to prevent the animals from growing horns. Now, that edited DNA was being copied over to the cells in fetuses growing in their surrogate mothers.
No one had tried this before, so it wasn’t clear it would work. And compared with the mere days it takes for the cutting-and-pasting of genes to complete in culture dishes, the months-long pregnancies were agonizingly slow. “You hope everything is going well,” Carlson says. “You’re expecting it to come out without any horns or horn buds, but you just don’t know.”