The Next Phase of Biological Evolution is being Engineered…by People

A look into the future of laboratory work.

Researchers stare into a dish filled with oozing amoeba, and look through a microscope filled with twitching paramecia. They watch as these newly born organisms swim through their petri containers. Later, they watch clusters of stem and heart cells from the xenopus laevis frog — an entirely new life form; a biological robot — work collectively to digest and move pieces of microplastic from a small aqueous solution, and self heal when they are damaged.

As exciting as all of these microorganisms are, the scientists aren’t done. They go back to their drawing boards, iterating their algorithms, and remodeling the organisms’ morphologies. Months later, they discover an astonishing revelation on the tissue samples of a foreign organism with fire-resistant skin: it is expressed in Herring sperm DNA. They are able to identify a viable locus for retrieval and insertion, so they re-engineer the gene for compatibility in rodents, and voilá, there are fireproof rats.

After years of research and millions of genes later, geneticists are able to create an entirely functional genome that codes for general phenotypic and genotypic expressions, except promoting stable aneuploidy, so that the organism has abnormal chromosomal content, and is therefore completely gender neutral, as well as the loss of the mu receptor, as well as the functional variants of five emotionally-linked genes.