"similar" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Surely nothing bad will happen as a result of private citizens now being able to do genetic engineering from the comfort of their basement.
1 is right. Let's wait until a pregnant woman CRISPRs* herself and then we can get excited.
* the verb for this activity is going to need some work.
1: You're telling me. If you click through to the blog, you can see pictures of the modified and unmodified beagles. It's creepy.
I'm minded of a background element in what I think was a serialized Cory Doctorow novel[la?] where early on they learn how edit tweak the metabolism so you can eat anything and never get fat, and twenty years later, most of the people who made liberal use of this tweak start dying of cancer.
5: It's our culture. Don't be so nosy.
OMG, when the raccoons get smart and start organizing against environmental degradation and stuff, it's gonna be so great! Best apocalypse evar!
It's probably more likely somebody creates smallpox 2.0 and we all die of otherwise preventable dehydration when everybody is incapable of moving for the same three days. Thinking we'll all be murdered by super-intelligent raccoons is pure daydreaming.
Still better than "killed by sentient dog foreskin."
That was all going to happen anyway though.
At night, the GMO ice weasels come.
Paywalled so it doesn't have details, but my first guess is he didn't actually do anything because he didn't deliver it correctly, with the viral packaging and dispersion necessary to affect something systemic like muscle regulation. Might affect a few localized cells that will die off relatively soon. Although it would be really funny if just one arm got very muscular and people could accuse him of excessive masturbation. Cry, cry, gene edit, cry.
Second option is he'll get cancer. It's way better than RNAi but still has off target effects.
Warning: triggering for some commenters.
"Zayner has a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Chicago."
Based on reports of this and comments from people who have a clue about CRISPR, he did it wrong. If nothing else, his dose was WAY too low to be meaningful, and it isn't even clear he injected something useful.
The biohacking equivalent of tweeting a few times on a topic, I guess.
My understanding is that CRISPR is simply not precise enough to do this sort of thing safely or with any reasonable level of reliability; it takes lots of tries to get a single edit right without unwanted additional edits, and that's not the sort of tool you'd want to apply to an already-existing human body.
Best to note that New Scientist is not a reliable source, that there's lots of unjustified buzz around CRISPR, and move on.
New Scientist is probably more reliable than the rest of that list of links. Fwiw.