Scientists Used CRISPR to Engineer a New ‘Superbug’ That’s Invincible to All Viruses

Can we reprogram existing life at will? To synthetic biologists, the answer is yes... If we tap into those redundant “extra” codons of all living beings, and instead insert our own code?..

A team at the University of Cambridge recently did just that. In a technological tour de force, they used CRISPR to replace over 18,000 codons with synthetic amino acids that don’t exist anywhere in the natural world. The new work opens the door to hacking multiple existing codons at once. When it’s 3 out of 20, that’s enough to rewrite life as it exists on Earth.

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What could possibly go wrong?