I’m currently working on a project that involves the splicing of genes and creatures into impossibly horrific monsters. In the course of my research, I’ve come across some misconceptions about what’s involved in gene splicing that I’d like to clear up.

The first thing to understand is that it’s a lot easier than you might think. The technical term for spliced genes is “monsters”, but that’s just to make things sound more impressive. There are only two basic techniques for creating monster genes: putting them together from scratch, or combining existing genes and then editing the result to get the desired effect. As far as I can see, both methods are equally likely to work.

A big misconception is that you need a PhD in genetics or something. In fact, all you need is a basic knowledge of biology and an eye for what will look cool when it grows up. If you want to get really serious about it, you can go to university and study bio-engineering or genetic manipulation, but that’s not strictly necessary if you just want a few spliced genes in your basement. Just follow this basic technique:

I have been creating monsters in this fashion for more than ten years. I have created a website dedicated to my monster creations. My monsters have been featured on TV shows, in magazines and on the covers of books. They have been frozen in carbonite and mounted on walls, they have been turned into fine art sculptures and even eaten by the cast of Mythbusters.

In addition to the creatures I create, I am also a consultant on Hollywood films dealing with anything genetic or creature related. I’ve worked on more than a dozen films over the years including such blockbusters as The Island, The Host and Slither.

If you just want to play with the software, it is free to download and use. There are two ways to use it:

* You can create completely new creatures using the

For the last two years I’ve been working with a team of scientists to try and create a new organism. We call it the “creeper”–an organism that lives off of electricity. It looks kind of like a large leech, but instead of hitching a ride on an animal, it literally eats electricity.

Trying to create a new organism is not easy. There are many different steps to creating something new: getting the right DNA, inserting it into the right cells, and so on. And each step has many different things you can do wrong. Our first attempt, for example, failed because we accidentally put all our creeper DNA into human cells instead. If we had turned up the power on the experiment at that point, we’d have ended up with a bunch of people turning into monsters instead of just a few cells.

This didn’t work out so well for us as you can imagine, but even when things go right there are risks. Any time you’re working with something that could potentially get loose and eat your neighbors or worse, there are serious safety concerns about what you’re trying to do.

So far in my career I’ve done everything from inventing artificial spider silk to developing technology that will help clean up oil spills

If you have been working in a lab for any amount of time, then you have probably heard of “Knockout mice.” Basically, these are mice that have been genetically modified to lack certain genes. These can be used to study the role of a particular gene in development or disease.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. I loved books and writing stories seemed like the best thing ever. I wrote dozens of novels, many of which were destroyed by my mother for the sake of the Earth. I also loved computers. There were no graphic user interfaces in those days so if you wanted to write a computer program you had to type it out in binary or assembly language. And that was just plain fun.

Typing in programs from magazines was also fun, but then you’d have to spend hours figuring out why they didn’t work. And they almost never worked because they were written by professional programmers who couldn’t write good code if their lives depended on it. That’s because being a programmer is much more than being able to write code: you have to be able to imagine what the code will do in practice, error check it, maintain it. All things I sucked at as a teenager.

The point is that I really wanted both careers but knew that if I tried for both I’d end up with neither. So I picked one: if all went well, I’d become a writer; if that failed, my fallback plan would be to become a programmer. Which is what happened: I became a writer but only after