Unicorns, dragons, pixies, and the like are the stuff of kids’ stories, or at least they should be. But now a new Texas startup, a bioengineering firm, The Embryo Corporation, is looking at the possibility of producing these creatures for real, and that new company is headed by a woman who doesn’t shy away from experimenting on herself.
That’s taking putting one’s money where one’s mouth is to a rather extreme extent.
Perched beneath a “Hippies use the back door” sign was Josie Zayner, sipping coffee in a crop top, jean shorts, and a patchwork of video game– and anime-themed tattoos. Zayner, a former NASA research fellow and world-famous biohacker turned gene-editing start-up CEO, relishes Bebo’s. She feels more at home here, laughing with the waitress about cheese sticks, than she ever did in the Bay Area.
“Nobody wants to be a San Franciscan except for the tech world,” said Zayner, 45, who’s called Austin, Texas, home since 2021. “These people show more warmth than you’d ever experience in San Francisco,” she continued, nodding at the dizzying decor. “This is the soul of America.”
Zayner gained infamy in the 2010s through a series of audacious gene-editing stunts and experiments conducted in California, during which she spliced jellyfish DNA into her own skin, injected herself onstage at a conference with a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) solution designed to knock out the gene that limits muscle growth, performed her own fecal transplant to cure her chronic gut problems, and even livestreamed herself on YouTube self-injecting a Covid DNA vaccine.
This is the kind of person we want messing around with genetic engineering? At least Colossal Bioscience claims to be “de-extinctioning.” They aren’t, of course; they are producing, to quote a famous movie scientist, genetically engineered theme park monsters. But Zayner has some more radical goals.
Hellbound and Down 