The Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom has successfully “hacked” fruit fly DNA. And we hate them for it. Not because of their interfering with the dominion of God and man. Because we’re going to have to explain to idiots on Facebook what this means.
Why did they even do this, beyond the fun of torturing fruit flies. The idea is that by manipulating fly DNA, we can use that to study how different proteins interact and even “program” the flies to create proteins on demand. We can now have the flies generate different proteins for disease mechanisms and other stuff that’s hard to generate in the lab.
For reasonable people, this is a truly amazing thing. This is a powerful new tool in science and medicine. The advances this will generate will be breathtaking, and Jason Chin and his entire team should be justly proud of what they have achieved.
We mention this because we give it approximately thirty seconds before the kind of smug jerk who talks about buying local produce and drops the world “Frankenfood” into your Facebook comments when you mention going to the grocery store is probably going to burn him in effigy.
Actually, working those people up is a bonus. Good job, guys!
image courtesy Muhammad Mahdi Karim under the GNU Free Documentation License