G.M.O. Lecture No. 2

G.M.O. Lecture No. 1 by Anonymous

Dr. J.A. Karl delivered the second in his series of lectures on unexpected side-effects of recombinant D.N.A. as applied to gene therapy:



Ladies and Gentlemen, I recognize many of you from yesterday’s lecture on the effects of clownfish D.N.A. on a human test subject. I think you’ll consider the case of a single male subject, whom I shall refer to as “Ryan”, to be similarly intriguing.

Ryan agreed to subject himself to an experimental attempt to endow humans with acute orientation. That is, we hoped that Ryan would end up with the magnetoreception, the sense of direction that migratory birds and fish have.

We spliced D.N.A. from Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, onto one of his chromosomes to give him this ability.

The experiment was successful. Ryan, an avid yachtsman, agreed to experiment with his new sense of orientation. He recruited his flatmate to leave behind their comfortable home in the city to be his first mate on a voyage to the Sargasso Sea where eels spawn. Ryan needed no navigational instruments to complete the trip.

However, there was a side-effect. 

While out at sea with no one else but his mate, Ryan went through a second sexual maturation that turned him into a cute female. 

He became his mate’s mate. 

It seems that we had inadvertently spliced onto Ryan’s D.N.A. an eel gene giving him the ability to turn female when in a situation of low population density.


Last we heard from Ryan, she and her mate requested that they be left alone for a time as she adjusts to her new orientation and finds her way around. The two of them will be “spawning”, so to speak, in and around a secluded beach house in Bermuda.