By GARRET ROBINSON
Staff Writer
Patrick Boyle remembers a time when he and a few other people managed to manufacture six genes, which are the basic units of heredity, but now they are synthesizing more than ten thousand genes every month. The making of genes used to be very laborious and time-consuming, but recently that has changed. The first effort to read all of the genetic code in DNA took more than a decade and cost billions of dollars but these days anybody’s genetic code can be read for about one thousand dollars. The technology used for Inkjet printing has been adapted to actually print short fragments of DNA onto glass slides and then from there, they can assemble them into larger pieces. However, they are worried that people may want to create dangerous viruses and bio-weapons which have been tested and proven possible by scientists. They also have an intensive background check and make sure that the DNA that people are ordering can’t cause any harm because on multiple occasions they have had to deny people the opportunity to receive their DNA.