Geneticists Develop Hybrid Creature From Whatever Scraps Of DNA Lying Around Lab

DURHAM, NC—Throwing together a bunch of unused polynucleotides that would otherwise have gone to waste, a team of geneticists and biomedical engineers at Duke University told reporters Thursday they had developed a new hybrid creature from various scraps of DNA they had lying around their lab. “Over the course of our CRISPR studies, we’ve accumulated a lot of surplus gene fragments, so we figured, why not just mix everything up and see what happens?” said lab chief Andrew Brown as he used a scalpel to scrape some stray fruit fly DNA from a beaker, explaining that genetic material for the new organism had been salvaged from used test tubes, old refrigeration units, and at least a dozen biohazard containers. “In a way, it’s the ultimate test of your genetic engineering skills—taking whatever nucleic acids you happen to have on hand and seeing what you can whip up. It’s also fun. We had all this extra mouse, sheep, moth, hermit crab, carpenter ant, and chimpanzee DNA, all of which was still perfectly good and wasn’t being used for anything else. So we grabbed a pipette, took a base pair here, a base pair there, threw everything in the thermocycler, and voilà!” After discovering they had only managed to create a small, unremarkable organism that “basically just looked like another kind of beetle,” the geneticists reportedly squashed it with a tissue, threw it in the trash, and headed home for the night.