Sublime

Genetic engineering is, by now, middle-aged. The first genetically engineered bacterium was produced in 1973. This was soon followed by a genetically engineered mouse, in 1974, and a genetically engineered tobacco plant, in 1983. The first genetically engineered food approved for human consumption, the Flavr Savr tomato, was licensed in 1994; it

Although it might seem a little bass-ackward that the brain uses hormones to influence its own activities, this sort of biological hack job is the type of thing that evolution by selection specializes in: solutions to problems that are cobbled together based on hardware that already exists.

But FliA is also controlled by another protein, called FlgM. It grabs new copies of FliA as soon as E. coli makes them, preventing them from switching on the flagella genes.

(Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers. He also was the first to synthesize MDMA since it had been patented by Merck in 1912 and forgotten. Recognizing its psychoactive properties, he introduced the so-called