Biohacking Is a Bitch
Tags: Pets, Dogs, Gene Editing, CRISPR, Dog Breeding

Biohacking Is a Bitch

Dog breeder David Ishee thinks gene editing can spare purebreds from debilitating disorders. But getting the tech to work is just the start.

O n a stage in Oakland, California, David Ishee is talking about glow-in-the-dark puppies.

The dog breeder has come all the way from Mississippi for this conversation. Dressed in a maroon t-shirt that reads “Stand back, I’m going to try science,” his long hair tied back in its customary ponytail, Ishee explains to a rapt audience that it’s time for an update to traditional breeding practices. “We started doing this before agriculture, and we haven’t really changed much,” he says.

What he means is: 40,000 years of breeding and inbreeding have created an obsession with a purebred ideal — and riddled dogs with health problems that shorten their lifespans and diminish their hearing, digestion, or other basic abilities. Now that many of these disorders could at least theoretically be repaired using gene-editing techniques like CRISPR, Ishee wants to help breeders do exactly that, creating healthier dogs that can still be considered purebred.

That’s where the bioluminescent puppies come in. If he can edit dog genes to make the animals glow, he reasons, perhaps he can convince breeders that the technique could be used for more practical purposes. First on his list would be to eliminate a bladder disorder in Dalmatians called hyperuricemia. That’s a painful buildup of uric acid crystals that is caused by a mutation in a gene associated with the dogs’ black spots and often requires surgery. It could be an excellent candidate for a CRISPR fix.

Ishee gathers materials from a homemade incubator in a shed behind his house.

Ishee’s talk in Oakland was part of an event last weekend called Biohack the Planet, a conference celebrating efforts to augment biology outside conventional academic environments. And Ishee is, in many ways, the quintessential biohacker. He lives outside the coastal biotech hubs, was homeschooled from fifth grade, and does his research in a shed in his backyard. He has already gotten in trouble with the Food and Drug Administration, which has declared every intentional genomic edit — and therefore every individual edited animal — to be an “experimental drug” that requires extensive testing. The agency informed Ishee in 2016 that he could neither give away nor sell any edited dogs without its approval.

There’s no question that Ishee’s ideas are inspired, but he’s still a long way from successfully editing dogs, even after several attempts at glowing puppies. And even if he can pull that off, his most significant obstacle may still be ahead: convincing breeders obsessed with creating the best show dogs that gene editing could help them. All this makes Ishee’s story — his struggle to do innovative research while navigating bioethical tensions and regulators trying to monitor a fast-developing technology — a telling case study in the gap between what biohackers can imagine and what they can achieve.

Inspiration from jellyfish

“I love dogs,” Ishee tells me before his presentation in Oakland. “It’s really just as simple as that. I want to fix them.” He grew up around dogs; his great-grandfather and grandfather were breeders, and his brother is too. He balances his own work breeding mastiffs with a job in Mississippi’s oil industry.

What frustrates him about traditional dog breeding is its reliance on trial and error. He describes it as a “very, very blunt tool, like trying to carve stone with an anvil on a stick.” It’s also slow. Dogs’ heat cycles are months apart, and it takes years for successive generations of puppies to mature.