---
narrator:  Josette Adeline Zayner
subject: Biohacking
facilitator: Nathan Schneider
date: 2025-07-30
approved: 2025-07-30
summary: "How hacking computers led to hacking biological systems, including her own body."
location: "Austin, TX"
headshot: "josette_zayner.jpg"
topics: [art, gender, health, science, software]
links:
  - text: "Biohack the Planet newsletter"
    url: "https://amateurgods.substack.com/"
  - text: "The Embryo Corporation"
    url: "https://building.life/"
---

*How do you like to introduce yourself?*

Oh, I hate when people---my name is Josie Zayner. I have a PhD from the University of Chicago in biophysics, and I'm CEO of two biotech companies simultaneously. I know. Long story.

*Let's get into that story. How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start?*

I grew up on a tiny farm in Indiana. It wasn't really a farm---I think we just called it a farm because we were so poor and wanted to pretend life was better than it was. We had chickens that we collected eggs from, some goats, dogs. I grew up in rural America in pretty bad poverty.

This was in the eighties, and we actually drank dehydrated milk. I don't know if most people here even know that's a thing. The people I know who know about dehydrated milk come from some third world country. We were really poor.

My mom was divorced at a young age from my biological father, who was violent. Not a lot of good things happened there. My early life was probably pretty foundational for who I am today. I have three brothers, raised by a single mother who had to work all the time. We had no money, so you had to learn to be self-sufficient pretty quick and pretty early. If you needed something, you had to figure out how to get it yourself, because you couldn't ask my mom for money or help.

When I was about eight, nine, or ten, I moved to the Chicago suburbs to live with my grandparents. My grandparents really raised me from then into my teens. I kind of take after my grandma---she taught me how to cook Italian food, and I like to cook Italian food.

I wasn't good in school at all. I did terribly in high school---almost failed out. It wasn't that I was bad at school, I'm just not good at imposed structure. That's just the way I am to this day. I don't like imposed structure, and it's kind of made me who I am, stemming from needing to take care of myself and needing to decide what's best for me.

I was arrested twice before the age of eighteen, which is pretty crazy considering where I am today. I don't know many people who are founders and have raised millions of dollars, or have PhDs, who have been arrested, much less twice. Very non-traditional upbringing compared to most people in my social class.

*When did you finally start to engage? What was the bridge between getting arrested, not doing well in school, and then going to the University of Chicago?*

It was computers. Do you remember "The Conscience of a Hacker," the hacker manifesto?

*I teach it in one of my courses.*

There's this line: "like heroin through an addict's veins." That's how computers were to me. My mom did this job for somebody, and they couldn't afford to pay her, so they gave her an old computer. I experienced being online from my friend who lived across the street, so I was like, "I gotta get my hands on a modem."

I forget exactly how, but maybe I saved up money because I started working---once I was old enough to work, I was at the grocery store bagging groceries. I bought a modem, and it was just like, "Oh shit, this world is crazy. I love it." Got really into computers, into computer programming. Got a job at Motorola doing computer programming when I was eighteen. I was making more money than my mom, which was wild.

I was really enthralled with that world. But then, in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst, and Motorola laid off a bunch of people, including me. I was just like, "Is this really what I want to do with my life?" I was working for this giant, corporate company. I remember working on the Nextel cell phone network, and one weekend we were updating subscriber databases. I uploaded the wrong database or something, so maybe a hundred thousand people were without cell phone service for the weekend.

When that happened, I remember the communication between everybody wasn't about how these people didn't have cell phone service---it was about how much money we lost. I was like, "Is that all I am here? Just a way to make other people more money?" I didn't want to be that. I wanted to work on something bigger.

I decided to go into biology. The natural world has always fascinated me---it should fascinate everybody because it's so wild, but it really fascinated me. I did an undergrad degree in plant biology. I was always enthralled by the idea of plants starting out as a seed, sucking molecules from the soil, eating CO2 and sunlight, and growing. I was like, "How do you do that? That's crazy. I want to understand how you do that."

I'm a reductionist. With computers, I wanted to control things on the lowest level---I wanted to program in assembly and move around all the memory, do different stuff so I had complete control. It's kind of the same way with living things.

*Did that experience with computers leave you approaching biology differently than other people you studied with?*

I think so. I saw it more as---especially in Western culture, we have this view of life as this sacred thing, and I'm not saying it's not at all true. But I approached it more from the idea that it was like a computer, like an operating system, something to be manipulated and programmed. From when I started biology to when I started my first company, I always approached it with that same hacker mindset. It was like, "How do I hack this stuff?" and not, "How do I write scientific papers about this stuff?"

*How did you begin learning biology? What kinds of protocols became part of that practice?*

In undergrad, I was poor enough that the government would pay people at the university to pay me---this work-study program. Basically, find a job and we'll give them money to pay you. So I would go work in labs---scientific labs. All plant biology labs in undergrad.

That really got me excited about research, because undergrad is just learning, you're not necessarily doing. I wanted more of the doing. Once I started doing research, I was like, "Oh, this shit is fun." You can mess around with things and go crazy---if you have a crazy idea, you could just try it out.

After my undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied for some master's degree programs. I had two: one where I went to undergrad, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which was like a six-hour train ride from Chicago where my family lived, and Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, because they had good rock climbing and I was really into rock climbing. I had a couple of friends who lived out there and ended up going to Appalachian State.

*How did the organizational life in research labs compare to working for Motorola?*

I definitely could have more autonomy. I wanted to find somebody who would just let me rip, and that's what I did. I found this person working on understanding the molecular mechanisms of cholera---the bacteria that causes the disease cholera.

She also got pregnant and gave birth within the first six months I was there, so it was literally just me in the lab. I think there was nobody else. She would stop by once a week to have a meeting with me, but otherwise it was just me doing whatever I wanted. I'm somebody who can get super obsessive. I just dug in and went hard and made a lot of progress, had a lot of success---won all these grants and awards.

At Appalachian State, it was a small school, so they didn't pay us big stipends---we had no money. I would work all night and then go to the bar right next to campus and drink dollar beers on dollar beer night. Another living situation with no money in some shitty-ass apartment, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

*Were there particular moments where you found yourself able to achieve something or manipulate something in a way that you experienced with computers early on?*

It was different in that science is this very physical thing. You're using your whole body. Computers is like---typing. It really turned into a form of self-expression to me. I could channel my anger or happiness and express that through my work. Sometimes in labs when experiments would fail, I would throw something across the room. Sometimes when things would succeed, I would scream. It became this art form for me that computers never could be necessarily. They couldn't reach this level because it was all in the digital world. Even when I did some electrical engineering work, building electronics, I felt like it was all in this digital world. Science became more of a real thing for me.

*How did you move toward the PhD?*

For my PhD, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to break it down even further and be really reductionist. I wanted to get into biophysics---to be able to watch these atoms move and manipulate them.

I applied for biophysics PhD programs all across the US and got accepted to University of Chicago, which was the only school I applied for in Chicago. I went because it was probably the best school I got accepted to, it was near my family. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Here's some kid who came from shit, and you get a PhD from University of Chicago. Immediately you start to enter---you're no longer lower-class anymore. Even just the stipend they pay you every year as a graduate student is a reasonable amount of money.

All the people I was around had summer homes and lake houses that we'd go to. I was definitely one of the very few kids who came from poverty. It was one of the moments of my life I'm most proud of---being accepted there.

When I went there, I knew what I wanted to do. I found the nerdiest, smartest professor who tried to work on things in the most reductionist way and worked with them to get a PhD. It was such an amazing lab. A lot of people from that lab have gone on to success. One of the people in my cohort, John Jumper, just won a Nobel Prize. It was a really impressive group of people.

The knowledge I gained there set me up for the rest of my life. It was like a firehose of knowledge and information that I absorbed like a sponge. I spent extra time studying outside of the lab and classes. Nowadays, there's so much shit in my brain that I try to anti-learn. I don't need to learn anything more for the rest of my life.

I had some amazing mentors there who really spent time with me, like Tobin Sosnick. Another professor doing biophysics research would invite me over to his office every other day. He would have fancy whiskey or alcohol that somebody gave him for giving a talk, and we'd sit there for two or three hours sipping whiskey, just talking about science. He would close the shades on his office door window. Amazing mentors there.

But I also realized that academia wasn't the place for me. There were these guidelines of the way you're supposed to do things. It happened twice. 

Once was when I published my first paper---I wrote the whole thing, made all the figures. I think maybe it was just me and my PI as the only two authors on a massive body of work. It was like a work of art. I put my soul into that paper. If somebody could read it and actually understand it on a truly deep level, it is like a work of art. Some of the experiments I did were so novel and wild---a breadth of experiments, from computational stuff to complex NMR measurements. I was super proud of it.

We sent it off to the journal. Initially, they were really excited about it---do some revisions. We did the revisions and they came back, and they're like, "We're not interested in it anymore. Sorry." I was like, "What do you mean you're not interested anymore? What the fuck?" Even my PI wrote a strongly worded email to them.

I was just like, this system---the scientific system---is not about the beauty. It's not about the cleverness, like that hacker world where it's all about the cleverness of stuff and the beauty of what you do.

*How did you find balance between that rigor and regimentation of a lab environment and the art?*

My PI just let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. "Do your shit, go off, go off, homie," and I did. I published four first-author papers, won the best thesis award at the university. I did really well, even by academic standards.

But after that paper I got really jaded, and I decided to start fucking around. I built this musical instrument. I was really interested, because I was studying this protein and looking at the atoms move in this NMR machine. I was so obsessed with it---I had such a strong relationship with this protein molecule. I could tell you where all the amino acids were and where they pointed, what it looks like, how they vibrated. I knew way too much from spending so many hours and days with it. I didn't take days off ever, maybe one or two weeks off around Christmas, and I worked every weekend.

I wanted other people to be able to experience this. I was like, "How can I do that?" Because it was this light-reactive protein that followed this photo cycle, I was like, "What if I could take that cycle, that exponential decay of function, and map that to a musical note?" Then people could kind of experience the life of this molecule and understand it, maybe even a little bit, because I'm taking it from the molecular world to the macro world.

I built this musical instrument. I would be in the lab all day, come home at night, be working on this, and literally just fall asleep. I bought this wooden lap bench off Craigslist for a hundred bucks---person hand-built it and delivered it. I still have it actually, and it's a piece of shit, but it was a hundred bucks.

I had never built a musical instrument. I had no idea about music or sound, never integrated sound with electronics. It was an impossible task to me---how do you even begin doing this? But slowly, over time, I built more and more, got better and better, figured it out more and more.

We used to have this thing called Graduate Student Seminar---just graduate students could go. They had beer and pizza, every Friday. I went and played this musical instrument. Everybody had no idea how to respond and kind of laughed and stared at me.

It was wild, and then it was even more wild because _Scientific American_ and _The Verge_ wanted to write news articles about this shit. I remember talking to my PI in the lab, and they were like, "Oh no, you can't put this in your thesis or anything," but I'm starting to catch recognition from these outside publications.

To me, this has scientific relevance and interest in many different ways. But the fact that I can't include it with my thesis or can't contribute it to my scientific body of work seems silly and dumb. That was kind of the final thing with me. I was like, "I'm done with academia. I'm on this trajectory that I think is totally different, and I want to embrace that."

*Where did you go next?*

I went to this conference wearing a shirt---because in graduate school I was known to be a curmudgeon---that said, "I need my space," and it had a NASA logo on it. At this conference, somebody was like, "There's a guy from NASA here. You should talk to them." This person from NASA talked to me and they're like, "You should apply for this NPP fellowship. It's this prestigious fellowship---you basically write a proposal for research, NASA funds you, and you get to do whatever you want." It was in Silicon Valley.

I wrote this proposal, and it was so weird. I'm coming from this world of watching atoms move in the basement of the library---the NMR room was in the absolute basement underneath the library---to writing a proposal about helping astronauts on Mars do this shit. It was so surreal, and then they accepted it.

This was one of the first times where they're just like, "Here's a bunch of money to move out here, you get a nice salary, amazing health insurance." I lived in a hotel on base for the first two weeks I was there till I found a place to live. I wound up at NASA with a fellowship, which was pretty wild. I got to work on something cool and crazy, and I didn't have to deal with all the fucking academic bullshit.

I worked on engineering bacteria to degrade plastic or degrade human waste so they could reuse it. It was pretty fun. I had two interns who worked with me, and we'd go to all these trash dumps to bio-prospect. I'd just be like, "I'm from NASA. Give me samples of your trash." People would be like, "Okay." It's so funny because you got this official NASA badge, and people just do whatever you say.

*Did you find your way into startups through being in the Bay Area?*

NASA was also really bureaucratic, and nobody worked---seriously, nobody worked. My boss came in one day a month. I was coming from academia where I was working my ass off, working on weekends and everything. So I come into NASA, I'm working on weekends, and they start telling me, "Don't come in on weekends---it's not a good look." I'm just like, "What? Why? What's going on here?" I was this naive person who doesn't understand social dynamics and bureaucracy.

I remember one time the fire alarm went off in the building---it's this six-floor building that's really cool, pockmarked to look like the moon from all the micro-meteors. The base fire department comes, and the fire people were like, "Is everybody out of the building?" We're like, "I think so." There were five of us standing there, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is how many people come into work on any given day?" There's this six-floor building that employed enough people to fill it, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get anything done here."

I worked on engineering. I wanted to start working on stuff that was less molecular because I realized from the musical instrument that if you want to have an impact on the world---the real world, not just mental masturbation that you enjoy---you need to build things that impact the world. That's when I figured out, "Okay, if I want to do something that I want to do, I'm gonna have to build it myself," because all these systems that have been established, I just don't fit into.

When my contract was coming up---the fellowships are for three years---I was just like, "I'm out, homies. We had a good one. I'm taking off."

I was really interested in democratizing this technology. From the computer hacker days, what made computer hacking so great was access---access to the ability to program, access to knowledge and information. I believe that really drove the computer hacker movement. I was like, "I want to recreate that in biology."

I made this CRISPR DIY---a CRISPR genetic engineering kit where anybody could gene-edit some bacteria in their home, and I did a crowdfunding campaign. If I raised $20,000, I thought, I'm just gonna do this full time. I ended up raising like $150,000 and got a ton of press. It started this trajectory of running companies and being in the public eye.

*When you started building these tools that enable people to take things out of the lab and into their homes, how easy was that translation? How is providing access to biology different from doing it with computers?*

It is a lot different. One thing I really learned about science is there's no user interface, no user experience design. It's just terrible. It's not intuitive in any way and requires all this complex equipment, expensive equipment. I was just like, "How do I package this in a $150 kit?" Which was the first problem---how do I make the protocols and experiments for somebody who doesn't have a whole lab full of equipment to use?

There was a lot of translation, a lot of R&D that had to go into making this work for somebody in their kitchen who doesn't even have the ability to control temperature. That's a basic process of biology---you have an incubator, you can control temperature. People don't normally have that in their life. We have a thermostat that we could generally control room temperature, but that's it. You can't go up to 37°C or down to whatever.

I had to adapt things and do things over and over again. I made more kits---letting people engineer human cells in their home, letting people genetically engineer plants in their home. The company still sells this stuff. It was always like, "How do I take this complex scientific experiment and break it down so that somebody without complicated equipment can do it?"

Every time I did something like this, people would be like, "That's impossible. You're never going to be able to do that." And every time I was able to figure something out. I think it was just that hacker mindset---being clever and understanding things. Graduate school really helped because I came from this world where I tried to learn things from first principles. I didn't follow protocols---I wanted to understand the process so that I knew how to do things intuitively because I understood each step and why it was supposed to be done. I think that helped me greatly to take these protocols that people have been doing and still do and just be like, "Fuck that, you can do it this way also. That's way easier, requires way less equipment."

*What did people start doing with these kits, and did it surprise you?*

A lot of the kits are educational. You have to understand that even nowadays---I started the company around ten years ago---people still don't have an intuition for biology, which always blew my mind. We understand these devices, we use computers and cell phones so intuitively, and we have no intuition for ourselves and what we're made of.

Almost all the kits we sell are geared towards, "Here's a basic experiment that's pre-built for you so you can understand the principles by doing this experiment to get this desired result." 99.9% of people do not move past that. But some people do. A couple of people that work with me today started off with those kits.

It's more foundational. We're not at the place yet where people really understand or are willing to put in the effort to take it beyond just learning from a kit. It's like when you buy a little electronics board and you make the LED blink on it or something---it's basically like that for the world of biology or, in programming, writing a "Hello World" program.

You have to understand the difference between playing a song and writing a song. It's really hard to get people to that writing-a-song stage. Very few people make it there in general in the world. With biology, most people are just going to be people who do the experiment, understand it, enjoy the process, brag to their friends, and then move on with their life.

*How has art continued to be a part of your life as you've been a founder of companies?*

When I was at NASA, one of the things I did was apply for this art fellowship at Stochastic Labs. It was this new organization that just opened up in Berkeley---a rich person gave them a bunch of money to buy this mansion and set up this hacker space. It was super cool, a bunch of brilliant people from the Bay Area.

I applied by myself, but they paired me with Lynn Hershman Leeson. She is an icon---a feminist icon and art and technology icon. At the time I didn't know. She's made a bunch of movies with Tilda Swinton---Tilda Swinton starred in a bunch of her weird, crazy movies.

We started doing art together. This brought me into the more professional world of art because the projects we worked on ended up in museums, which was really wild. We worked on some genetic engineering projects together. I think it was called the Infinity Engine---we worked on a bunch of different stuff to create this huge installation. I was combining some of my computer programming knowledge with biology knowledge.

The first place it showed was ZKM, which is this new-media, techno-art museum in Germany. Then it went around Europe---I think it went to the Tate Modern and all these other places. It was really wild. That's when I first started to actually be considered an artist and consider myself an artist.

But at the same time, outside of that, I started doing these weird experiments. I had gut health problems, and people were talking a lot about microbiome transplants. I learned a lot about the microbiome---the bacteria in and on your body. There's this really famous bio-artist at the time who I was friends with, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and she did this DNA sequencing from cigarette butts to facial reconstruction of people, which got a lot of press.

I was like, "Let's do this experiment where we transfer our microbiomes---I transfer yours to me, and I transfer mine to yours." We're like, "Oh yeah, this is gonna be really cool." Eventually, she's like, "I don't know if I want to do this. It seems dangerous, and I don't want to fuck up my microbiome."

We were having this conversation at this event, and some people I met who are filmmakers were just like, "Oh my God, that sounds fucking crazy! We'd love to film this thing." I was like, "Okay, I guess." Heather was out, so it was just me these people wanted to film.

Somehow _The Verge_ got wind of this idea, and they're like, "We want to do a huge feature on this." This was the first time I had serious press coverage---before, I had some articles written about me, but very superficial. This was the first time I actually had serious principal photography and cameras in my face, a cinema camera, people following me around asking me questions, a journalist who's there.

I'm doing this experiment and going through this process over the course of two weeks, and I have people following me around everywhere, asking me questions the whole time, recording every moment of my life. It was so intense---what the fuck is going on?

It was intended to be a science experiment, and it was, but it turned into performance art where the world was interested in this crazy science experiment. It was super rigorous---I took all these samples of bacteria in and on my body, had the DNA sequenced, matched it to the bacteria, looked at how my microbiome changed.

It was a huge success. The film documentary won a bunch of awards and went to South by Southwest and all these places. I'm at South by Southwest on stage answering people's questions because everybody's like, "Oh my God, that's crazy." This huge article comes out about me, and I started to become a public figure at that point. People started caring about what I did and what I said. It was weird. It was really weird.

*How did your approach to science change when you turned it on yourself and your own body? What made you willing to do this?*

It was really freaky because the journalists talked to a lot of scientists, and they were just like, "Oh, they shouldn't do that." At the time I was still male-presenting, so if I refer to myself as "he," just understand that, at the time, people referred to me as he.

I felt like I understood it well enough and deep enough that I was taking a calculated risk---a risk that something could happen, but also I think something profound or really interesting could come of it. And it did. The results were amazing, just to see the shift in the microbiome. Nobody had done an experiment anything like that.

When I started experimenting on myself, I thought there were probably few, if any, people in the world who understood this as good as me, and I understood it well enough that I thought I could make a calculated risk.

It wasn't until later---when there started being copycats, who started copying some of these self-experiments that I was doing---that I was like, "Oh, holy shit, I never imagined that people who didn't have the knowledge would just start doing this shit also." They're crazy motherfuckers. But I think to do good science, to do a lot of this stuff, you need a certain amount of crazy to push boundaries, to do the impossible. You do need a certain amount of crazy, and you do need a certain amount of knowledge.

I think I have a combination of crazy and knowledge that's really unique. Growing up, I never had anything to lose---I wasn't afraid of getting arrested or stealing shit. Where am I gonna go back to? I'm probably not gonna be worse off than I was at one point in time.

It really built in me---this attitude of "I have nothing to lose." I think that's still ingrained in me to a certain extent, even though I've grown up and I do have stuff to lose. I still kind of more than not have that attitude of, "Shit, what's the worst that could happen? I've seen some shit. What's the worst that's gonna happen?"

*I'm curious about whether you're influenced by the legacy of DIY medical interventions in the trans community, where people have had to take these matters into their own hands for a long time.*

Oh, for sure, especially later on. At the time, my transness was really weird---I didn't quite understand. And I don't want to get into specifics because I think it makes me really vulnerable, and I don't like this information out because some journalists do use this shit against you.

At the time I was still understanding who I was, and I think it definitely played into this idea of the body being malleable and not so set in stone like people thought it was.

It wasn't long after that when I started doing more experimenting with medications---hormone replacement therapy in a trans context, DIY outside of medical intervention. To me it was a big deal---if I go to a doctor and say I want to experiment with this stuff, it's like you're either trans or you're not. And if you're trans, it's a big deal. Your partner obviously is going to know you're trans, everybody in your life is going to know you're trans, and it completely changes everything.

I had just started to become a public figure. I did _Gut Hack_, which was huge, and then after that, all these documentaries started getting made about me from 2016 to 2019, culminating in a Netflix documentary coming out in 2019. I was constantly in the spotlight. I can't just one day all of a sudden show up and be like, "I'm a woman now. I'm trans." I mean I could, but to me that's a lot.

There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes---experimenting with different drugs and how they made me feel, how they made me feel about myself, what I thought about it. I think that was really helpful, and it was really amazing to have access to this stuff.

There's a great resource---there's a DIY trans wiki that's associated with Reddit---that was so helpful to me to understand who I was and how I felt about all these things. It was super scary because you're going into the unknown, not just socially but also medically.

*Do you think there are lessons that community has to offer the wider world in terms of thinking about medical interventions, about experimentation, about our relationship with our bodies?*

I think our relationship with our bodies is huge. It really taught me a lot about body autonomy. When most people think of body autonomy, at least in more modern context, a lot of it's centered around abortion. But I think we don't realize how little body autonomy we have in general.

Learning about this stuff, getting involved in the trans community, and just seeing that our bodies are so policed on every aspect---a woman can go and get an estrogen pill for birth control over the counter, there's no requirements. But for somebody who is born male, you have to sign all this paperwork.

In California, when I eventually went and got prescriptions, there was all this paperwork---"I understand the consequences of this, I understand I could go sterile," and all this shit. You're just like, "Holy shit, they really want to control what we can put in our bodies."

It really opened my eyes to that, and I think people don't even realize how much control they're under. It opened up my eyes to the idea that body autonomy is this huge thing---the right to take whatever medications we want, use whatever pharmaceuticals or drugs we want to get high or whatever it is, abortion, surgical medical procedures. It goes deep.

A woman can go and get breast implants and nobody asks any questions. If you're transgender, you need three letters from psychiatrists. How does this make any sense? How is one different than the other when they're both gender-affirming surgery?

It opened up my eyes to the struggles that a lot of people have. I've had it so good because, when I came out, my life was starting to become more upper middle class. I had access to insurance, I had money to pay and see therapists, really try to deal with this. In my life, I have been fortunate to---outside of online---not really experience much bigotry. The group of people I get to be around are very accepting people.

I understand that a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have access to insurance. A lot of people don't have access to people who---everybody around them will be bigoted towards them. It's complicated, and going to a doctor to get access to this stuff can be dangerous.

Still to this day, even though I generally always pass as a woman, I'm still afraid to use women's bathrooms. Shit's crazy out there. Subverting that system again, I think this goes back to being a hacker---be clever enough to subvert the system. When I first started, I took medication off the internet and found websites where you can get a doctor to prescribe you blood tests. So I just go get my blood drawn to see what levels of my testosterone and estrogen levels and all sorts of stuff, so I had an idea of how the medications were affecting my body. It was really cool.

*I wonder if you could say a bit more about your interaction with public health authorities. Where have you run into the limits of the dominant system?*

Once I started to get more public attention and people paying attention to me, then the government started paying attention to me---and not even just the US government. It started at the time it was just me and two other people running this company, and I have the FBI chatting with me, meetings with the FBI, meetings with the FDA, meetings with the California Board of Medicine, California Medical Board. So many organizations just started to come after me.

It was so freaky because here I am---the company is still growing, we don't have much money. If somebody wanted to do some sustained court battle with me, I would totally crumble. I'm flying by the seat of my pants, trying to figure things out as I go, and operating under the premise that I have nothing to hide---I'm not doing anything wrong.

I made sure I would always research all the regulations and rules. Then the government started changing them, and California made a law, and the FDA came out with new guidances to start to try to counteract some of the stuff I was doing. It was so wild to have these government agents. The Bavarian government in Germany came after me, which caused this international incident that got the FBI and other people involved.

It was way too much for somebody who---I don't want to say lowly, but what's all this drama going on? I'm just this farm girl who runs a small company in Oakland, California, out of a house! We didn't even have---because bio labs were so expensive, I just rented a house in this kind of reasonable but also not great neighborhood in West Oakland. It was right by the West Oakland BART stop where people got shot on the regular. I just run this fucking biotech genetic engineering company out of this house in West Oakland. What the fuck?

*Where is the line for you between protection and guarantees that people should be owed, and that autonomy?*

It is really complicated. I guess I'm kind of more libertarian at heart. There's these libertarians who are like, "Oh, you shouldn't need a driver's license to drive, or there shouldn't be stop signs," but when you think about it, stop signs and stoplights and guardrails do protect us, and they don't really infringe on our rights very much. You have to stop when you get to a stop---that's not really infringing on your right too much. These are good things. Having certain stoplights and stop signs aren't necessarily a bad thing when you're trying to prevent people from accidentally hurting themselves. What are those boundaries? I don't know. It's really tough.

I'm sure there's some things we can all agree on---nobody should have access to Ebola. I think 99.9% of people are gonna be like, "All right, reasonable." I think when it gets to those gray areas is when it starts to get complicated.

Honestly, what I've come to learn is that the system does play a role in---it scares, it prevents a lot of people from doing stupid shit, but it also allows room for pushback. If you're actually thoughtful about the pushback, I think you can actually hack the government, so to speak, in certain ways. Hack the regulations, find these loopholes and bypass them. That's what I've worked to do and still do today---find these loopholes and bypass them to your advantage, where they can't do anything to you because that doesn't break any of the things.

And learning what's important to the system---what does the system value? How do I not fuck with the things that they value? I think I've become way smarter about it by understanding that the system does have a role to play. There should be some amount of pushback because I think just giving people freedom to do whatever they want isn't necessarily in everyone's best interest.

So pushback so that the thoughtful people who are trying to push the boundaries end up making it through, and the people who are just doing dumb, crazy shit kind of get---don't make it as far. It's kind of like a self-selective sieve---if you made it this far where you're talking to the FBI, you probably hopefully have done it in such a way where they're not going to arrest you. If they are, you deserve it.

*When you think of yourself encountering that computer and discovering your power as a hacker, what are you hoping to convey to people who are experiencing something similar with the tools you're providing now? What do you hope they learn?*

I'm just trying to open people's eyes. I want them to see the beauty that I saw or see, because once you see that beauty---I call it "the illness"---it becomes this illness where you become obsessed. It's just like, "Oh my God, that thing is so beautiful. I just want to know more. I just want to feel it. I just want to touch it. I want to experience it in every way possible."

That starts with showing people the beauty. That's why I started my new company. My first company was this bottom-up approach---people are never going to be able to see that beauty if they don't understand it. My new company is like, people are never going to be able to completely express that beauty if they don't see what's possible.

In my new company, we're gene-editing animals, gene-editing embryos, which has been so wild and surreal. I want people to have the power to be able to be hackers, but I need to show them what's cool first. Just like when I was a hacker, there was a lot of code that inspired me---a lot of code that inspired a lot of the programming and clever hacking stuff that I did. People need that inspiration.

It's also something I've learned being a trans person---I used to never understand what representation meant until I was the only woman, trans woman, queer person in a room. Then you're just like, "Holy shit---wow, it's very isolating." You start to realize people need representations of cool, interesting, beautiful things. I'm just trying to bring that to them, I guess.

That's kind of one of my mottos---I even tattooed it on my arm myself: "create something beautiful." I want to inspire other people to create beautiful things, because what's the point if you're not seeing beauty?
