Question: What is the weirdest thing you can do to a human using different DNA?

Claire Shooter answered on 19 Jun 2014:

Gene therapy is an emerging field of medicine that allows you to alter someone’s genetic makeup by infecting them with a virus containing new genes. Scientists are currently trialing this as a way to cure diseases that are caused by mutation or deletions of genes, by replacing the broken copy with one that works.
Gene therapy is still at an early stage and there are a lot of problems to be ironed out before it can be done effectively. Once it is however, you could potentially put any new gene into a human!
Things you could maybe potentially do with this:
-Change your eye colour
-Make yourself glow green
-Give yourself stripes (if you infected some cells and not others)
-Grow hair all over your body
-Enhanced strength
-Enhanced intelligence/memory
-Dramatically enhance your vision and sense of taste (tetrachromacy- where your eyes have four colour receptor cells rather than three is a genetic quality some women have; around 35% of women and 15% of men are supertasters, which we think is thanks to the TAS2R38 gene. If you aren’t one now you could be!)

Anything which can be achieved by turning one gene on or off is easy. Anything complicated which requires several different genes to work together will be considerably harder. Things that would need more than one gene working in concert, and thus are less likely than Sci-Fi may make you think include:
-Growing wings
-Changing shape
-Producing venom