In the 90's I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about a computer lab at my school . A student had been thrown out ass-over-kettle for 'dangerous hacking'. Their crime? Opening their mail in PINE over Telnet.
Most of the stuff Sarah Stanley was doing here are things you can technically do in your own kitchen, if you're a little careful. Just because you've never done them personally yourself, doesn't mean lots of other folks can't or haven't! (And I can totally see someone doing it to get some of the scout merit badges even [1] )
There's really no way to reassure you that I can think of though. Except maybe get you over to a (home?) lab and have you mess with some genes yourself. You'll see it's utterly mundane.
Obviously; I wouldn't quite recommend starting with TBC. That one is a wee bit more exciting. hence the protected lab. But what this research group was doing with it is/was otherwise not more dangerous beyond that.
[1] There's several stem badges for biology that include genetics, but none that are specifically molecular genetics - yet.
In the 90's I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about a computer lab at my school . A student had been thrown out ass-over-kettle for 'dangerous hacking'. Their crime? Opening their mail in PINE over Telnet.
Most of the stuff Sarah Stanley was doing here are things you can technically do in your own kitchen, if you're a little careful. Just because you've never done them personally yourself, doesn't mean lots of other folks can't or haven't! (And I can totally see someone doing it to get some of the scout merit badges even [1] )
There's really no way to reassure you that I can think of though. Except maybe get you over to a (home?) lab and have you mess with some genes yourself. You'll see it's utterly mundane.
Obviously; I wouldn't quite recommend starting with TBC. That one is a wee bit more exciting. hence the protected lab. But what this research group was doing with it is/was otherwise not more dangerous beyond that.
[1] There's several stem badges for biology that include genetics, but none that are specifically molecular genetics - yet.