In 2017, bioengineering researchers at Harvard University in Massachusetts made a remarkable announcement. They had placed a movie inside a living cell. Yep, you heard that right. They’d inserted a copy of the forerunner of motion pictures into the DNA code of a form of bacteria.
This unusual experiment wasn’t a movie stunt. Dramatic though it may be, it represented an exciting new possible approach in science: the ability to insert and record precise streams of information inside living cells. Such an innovation could help lead to new insights about how living things function and make possible new medical breakthroughs. And on an individual level, it could help doctors diagnose patients.
Seth Shipman is a geneticist, now at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the project. “Right now, we often need to destroy the cells that we’re studying to analyze them,” he says. “This permanently interrupts the
