The unabating technological march has made it possible to do various interesting things to the bodies but injecting harmful DNA just to see what happens is something that you should never do. This however did not deter a French teenager, 16 year old, from transcribing parts of Arabic language Quran and Hebrew book of Genesis into DNA and injecting in the body- one text in each thigh.
Adrien Locatelli published a paper [1] in which he claimed that not only were the DNA proteins injected in the body without knowledge if he would be harmed by them but he built DNA sequences by translating religious texts in the building blocks of DNA.
Proteins and DNA are macromolecules with a primary structure that can be written with letters. Studies suggest that it is possible to convert any information to DNA for storage purpose. Locatelli says that since digital information can be converted to DNA so it made him question if he could convert a religious text in DNA and put it in a living being. The answer to this question is a firm yes. And this biohacker used his own body for testing. He first downloaded digital copies of the religious material and converted the character in a specific nucleotide which make up strands of DNA. After this he converted the information in a protein using a tool that spat out the sequence of protein which was created using amino acids.
Then he injected both the texts in his body in each of his thighs [2]. He just experienced some soreness apart from which there was nothing considering injecting home cooked proteins in the body is a risky task. For his experiment, Locatelli did not need any special equipments. He only had to buy syringe and saline solution since he got liquid from Vector Builder and powder from ProteoGenix.
VectorBuilder creates viruses which can sneak DNA strands in cells for the purpose of gene editing. ProteoGenix synthesizes custom strands of DNA. Both the companies serve scientists but the products can be purchased by normal people as well. The texts that Locatelli injected in the body did not seem like much. DNA is a long molecule that helps store information. Generally it stores the information living things require for their business. But it can store any information which can be written down.
The method of Locatelli for translating the texts to DNA was quite straightforward. Information is encoded by the DNA using repeated strings of four nucleotides abbreviated as A, C, G,T. This kid matched each letter of the religious text with a nucleotide so that each nucleotide was representative of more than one letter. So each vav, aleph, tsade,nun,tav would become a G. Each dalet, resh ,ayin, khet would make a T. And so on.
This is an amalgamation of science and religion. Locatelli added that it would be great to inject religious text for a religious person. This researcher did not experience any health issues after the procedure but there was some little inflammation where the injection was given on the left thigh for some days.
Sriram Kosuri said that the injected texts could cause allergic reactions. He says he cannot comment on how the actual virus was made given how he injected it. There is not much known about the vector used and how it was done.