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基因工程的迅速发展让简单、廉价的基因编辑实验成为可能。以自己的身体为实验品的基因黑客因此不断涌现。这些大胆的实验者引起了专业人士的担忧……
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
Bespectacledadj. 戴眼镜的 /bɪ'spektəkld/
encompassvt. 围绕；包含，包括 /ɪn'kʌmpəs/
faecaladj. 排泄物的，渣滓的 /'fiːkl/
eugenicsn. 优生学 /juː'dʒenɪks/
scoffv. 嘲笑，愚弄，狼吞虎咽 /skɒf/
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
Justin Atkin, bearded and bespectacled, holds three white pills. These capsules, he says, contain a cure for lactose intolerance that he has made himself. I'm watching Atkin's YouTube video through my fingers. He is not wearing a white coat in a sterile laboratory. The Canadian, 22, sits cross-legged, sharing the floor with two louche cats. I cannot see how this ends well.
“Well, bottoms up,” Atkin says as he swigs water from a Mason jar and down go the capsules of home-grown virus, into which he has inserted genetic information coding a dairy-digesting protein his body fails to produce. The virus will, he hopes, infect his intestinal lining and set about producing the lactase enzyme, curing his painful milk-related gas. Or, I think to myself, this turns into a horror movie and Atkin's guts fall out.
This is biohacking — submitting your body to untested procedures in a quest for physical perfection. The label encompasses simple lifestyle cheats that I tried when living in San Francisco, such as fasting to improve concentration, but it extends to more extreme self-experimentation, such as faecal transplants to boost gut bacteria and DIY genetic modification.
Atkin's gene-editing experiment is actually a relatively mild case of self-produced, self-administered therapy. At a body hacking convention in Texas in February, one man injected himself with an experimental treatment for herpes live on stage. Another, a friend of Atkin's, subjected himself to an untested, genetically engineered HIV treatment, and livestreamed it on Facebook.
The rush of stunts, and growing trade in kits to help you engineer your own DNA, prompted a warning from the US Food and Drug Administration late last year — and a reminder that selling such products is illegal.
This is all happening because of quantum leaps in the affordability and ease of manipulating DNA.Gene editing holds huge promise in helping tackle disease and conditions that resist existing medicines and treatments. But given how complex and sensitive the code for life is — not to mention ethical concerns about eugenics — clinical trials on people have been slow.
Atkin didn't want to wait for someone else to solve his dairy problems. “I went to a well-renowned gastroenterologist and he asked me if I'd tried turmeric and smoking weed,” he tells me, adding that he's tried eight different types of stomach medication. His attitude was: “The medical field is doing exactly dick for me, so I'm going to have to do something myself.”
Scientists warn that powerful DNA editing technologies could have startling unintended consequences. Mutations in DNA are what cause cancer, for example. Atkin assures me he can handle the risks. Am I wrong to be unnerved by 22-year-olds altering their own DNA, practically unsupervised, while broadcasting the methodology?
For just $159, you can legally buy a DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering kit （not specifically for human use） from The Odin, an outfit run by Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa biologist who advocates that science should be unleashed outside traditional academic settings （although one of The Odin's advisers is George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.）
“This is the first time in the history of the Earth that humans are no longer slaves to the genetics they are born with,” wrote Zayner in 2017. He publicly injected himself with an enzyme that would delete the gene from his DNA that stops muscles over-developing. The idea was that this would make him extremely buff （it didn't work）.
Under the YouTube video portraying Atkin's experiment, culminating in him scoffing quadruple-cheese pizza and reporting no ill effects, comments swing from congratulations to criticism. “This is how the zombie apocalypse starts cuz some dude wanted to eat cheese,” reads one.
Atkin says the only individuals who contacted him to object were “people who've been professors for 40 years”. He brushes off their concerns. “The world is changing. There's access to new technology and it freaks some people out.” Count me as one of them.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.Because he wants a fast relief for lactose intolerance.
B.Because he needs faecal transplants to boost gut bacteria.
C.Because he is a disciple of NASA biologist Josiah Zayner.
D.Because he wants to figure out an easy way to edit DNA.
答案 (1)
A.Using nutritional genomics to change and take control of other people's genome.
B.Conducting untested gene therapies on your own in pursuit of physical perfection.
C.Trying to improve human body functions with do-it-yourself cybernetic devices.
D.Conducting self-experiments to avoid interventions from a formal organisation.
答案 (2)
A.Manipulating DNA is still unaffordable for most of people.
B.Quantum leaps in gene editing accelerate clinical trials on people.
C.There is no evidence that gene editing can help tackle disease.
D.Gene editing faces a multitude of ethical and safety concerns.
答案 (3)
A.Disapproving.
B.Ambivalent.
C.Objective.
D.Cautionary.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案A.Because he wants a fast relief for lactose intolerance.他说，这些自制的胶囊可以治愈他的乳糖不耐症。
(2) 答案B.Conducting untested gene therapies on your own in pursuit of physical perfection.这是生物入侵——将你的身体提供给未经测试的治疗程序以获得完美的身体。
(3) 答案D.Gene editing faces a multitude of ethical and safety concerns.但考虑到生命密码的复杂性和敏感性——更不用说对优生学在伦理上的担忧——临床人体试验进展缓慢。
(4) 答案A.Disapproving.Atkin称：“世界在变化。很多新兴技术的出现让很多人难以接受。”我就是其中之一。