biopunk

Using equipment ordered from online biopunk shops, he is trying to manipulate the genome of a common (but not necessarily harmless) bacterium, Serratia marcescens.

[I]t's the biopunk revolution. Biopunks are the visionaries and biotech wizards whose imaginations were set on fire by the knowledge that scientists had finally sequenced the human genome last year. Biopunks get off on creative genetic engineering, RNA research, cloning, and protein synthesis. Biopunks hack genomic data, lining up human genomes next to mouse genomes to find out what the two species have in common and what they don't (surprise: they have way more in common than you could possibly ever imagine).

In the early nineties there grew up biopunk, a derivative sub-genre building not on IT but on biology, the other dominating scientific field of the end of the twentieth century. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation of their very chromosomes.