I have been reading up on something called the Los Angeles Project that involves gene editing embryos to try to make new animals.
Biohacker Josie Zayner and Cathy Tie are the founders. They even have aspirations to make dragons and unicorns with CRISPR. That resonated with me for reasons I’ll talk about in a minute.
What’s this project all about and how far might they get? Could it end in disaster?
Who are The Los Angeles Project founders Josie Zayner and Cathy Tie?
I’m most familiar with Zayner for her work on CRISPR kits that can be used at home.
Zayner has also done other DIY science including self-experimentation including a DIY COVID vaccine.
Cathy Tie, co-founder of The Los Angeles Project, was not on my radar screen until a few months ago. A quick search found that she is a biotech entrepreneur who reportedly got a very early start in this arena. From the web:
“Cathy, for her part, published her first immunology paper at 16, co-founded genetic-testing startup Ranomics at 18, became the youngest founder to raise venture capital in biotech, and was selected for the Thiel Fellowship program. By 22, she was a partner at Cervin Ventures, subsequently launching Locke Bio (“Shopify for Health”), and has been invited to join the board of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Association starting in 2026.”
If I understood right on Twitter, Tie was also just recently married to He Jiankui. Yes, that’s the same guy who made the CRISPR babies. Will He Jiankui have any influence on The Los Angeles Project? It seems unavoidable, but we’ll see. Speaking of humans and CRISPR, note the recent tweet below from Zayner.
In that context, when I then saw the featured picture for a recent video interview with Tie and Zayner, it wasn’t great to see a quote superimposed about human gene editing in a garage.
What is The Los Angeles Project?
So what’s the plan exactly with this project?
They want to make new, beautiful animals via gene editing. Think glowing bunnies and, yes, unicorns and dragons too.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because my daughter Julie and I explored making dragons (and at one point unicorns) in our book, How to Build a Dragon or Die Trying. While our book is satirical in many ways, we do discuss in some detail how tech like CRISPR, stem cells, and cloning could be used toward the goal of making new animals, especially dragons. Since then a few people have reached out because they want to try to do this for real. Those who reached out have seemed mainly in the brainstorming phase.
I predicted that someone would actually try to make dragons, unicorns, and other fantastical creatures.
The Los Angeles Project may fit the bill.
How much is just hype?
Why found a biotech pursuing such goals? For fun and profit?
Presumably the idea would be to create these new animals and then sell them. I can see very rich people shelling out a million for a unicorn. Imagine what someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk might pay for a convincing dragon-like creature. A billion?
This means that there could be a hefty income stream for a biotech doing this kind of stuff.
Yet there’s also major hype here too. For example, see the tweet below from Tie.
How much innovation and relevance to medicine?
In my view statements like “Creating a lightbulb from scratch” and comparing yourselves to Edison are probably missteps. Talk about raising expectations.
I don’t see this project as being that innovative. Maybe they’ll wow us later. But for now, what’s new here?
Maybe less than it seems.
CRISPR exists. Delivery mechanisms have been researched. Embryo editing is already a thing across many species.
Keeping it real, the core ideas here are not new either. Julie and I published our book in 2019. The idea for that germinated maybe back in 2016. In addition, others had talked about such projects and new animals even before us. See this 2015 piece from the wonderful duo of Alto Charo and Hank Greely on CRISPR Critters.
Of course, having and communicating ideas is not the same as taking the plunge to actually do something like Tie and Zayner appear to be doing.
Will these efforts have any relevance to that last point mentioned by Tie in the tweet: genomic medicine in people? I don’t see a clear path there either. Maybe they’ll develop new technologies that could aid biomedical science?
Risks, realistic expectations
If you go to our How to Build a Dragon book, you’ll see that we also discussed major practical challenges to this kind of project. I don’t see an easy path to producing a new animal that is highly dragon-like.
Even just heading down this road is going to be highly risky too. A death of a scientist at the company from a fire-breathing prototype animal would not only be a tragedy but also likely be the end of the road. So could reports of baby animals dying from unintended effects of fantasy-related gene editing. You can’t go down this path without risking such bad outcomes. I hope the project leaders are not ignoring such possibilities.
If you still want to go for a fantastical animal, as we wrote in the book, making unicorns is the low-hanging fruit in this space. You can probably introduce horn-producing genes into horses and you might have some unicorn-like results. It’s probably not that simple, but it’ll be far easier than making a dragon.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they made loads of money and got huge investments from tech bros and others.
What we can expect from the Los Angeles Project
Glowing bunnies are easy so I bet something like that will be coming first. Maybe they’ve already been produced? Is this stuff useful?
The same kinds of questions came to mind for me for Colossal Biosciences, which recently wrongly claimed to have de-extincted dire wolves. Longer term, I suppose the Los Angeles Project might pull a Colossal Biosciences on the dragons. They could make some lizard with slightly dragon-like features and just call it a dragon even if that’s not accurate. The media would probably eat it up.
What might this pseudo-dragon be like? Maybe a Draco lizard that burps acid. Or a Komodo dragon with wings too small to loft its massive body into the air. We imagined such things in our book.
Overall, as much as I’m skeptical of the wisdom of some of this project, I’m also curious to see what Zayner and Tie will do. It could be fun or all go south quickly if they aren’t careful and thoughtful in advance.
Bioethics schmethics?
The main issue for me as I watch for news from the Los Angeles Project will be how they treat their modified animals (just as a commodity?) and deal with challenges along the way. Do they also avoid talking about heritable human gene editing?
We also talked in the book about the ethics of these kinds of projects. Will Tie and Zayner make ethics a high priority? Why is bioethics relevant here? Trying to produce something like a real dragon has many unavoidable risks and ethical challenges, including making a whole lot of messed up embryos, animals, and animal babies along the way. Maybe hundreds of them.
How will they handle that and similar unpleasant outcomes if they get that far?
I haven’t seen that deep level of discussion. Maybe it’s happening behind the scenes.
Nice piece, Paul, and thanks for the shout out to the 2015 paper Alta Charo and I wrote. I worry that ethics, which I think in this context is mainly, though not entirely, animal welfare, will not be a. high priority.
BTW, about 25 years ago, Eduardo Kac, a European artist, claimed to make a green fluorescent protein rabbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba_(rabbit) He even publicized a glowing green rabbit photo. (Picture/photo? here). Almost certainly fake. Seems the fur doesn’t take up the GFP so only the whites of the eyes and naked white pads on the nose and paws would glow.
I’m not opposed to playful experimentation with genetic modification of other organisms, as long as their welfare is protected. I want to buy glow in the dark petunias. (Not glo fish – not a tropical fish guy). But I’ve always remembered Robert Heinlein’s 1948 short story, Jerry Was a Man. Some cringe inducing stuff at the end but an interesting (and unusually for him biological) stuff. (No warranties about legality but) Text at https://www.willmorgan.org/Robert_A_Heinlein-Jerry_Was_A_Man.htm. See also https://law.stanford.edu/2012/10/17/lawandbiosciences-2012-10-17-science-fiction-law-and-biosciences-jerry-was-a-man-robert-a-heinlein-1947/
We are a frivolous and playful species – look at the chihuahuas we made from wolves or (classier) banzai trees (not genetic but definitely manmade). We will use molecular biology to do the same thing. I would love to believe that we’ll do it with some care for animal welfare (plant welfare not so much) and the environment.