Originally Posted by hilbert25

Nah, the custom order works like this, you pay them $1 a base pair, give them the sequence you want. They make it for you. Now $1 a base pair seems cheap. But to do anything even basic, like create a simple protein, that's a couple thousand dollars. As it gets bigger, it gets harder, hence the $1 a base pair. The problem of course if getting the correct gene sequence to use, and also being able to insert that sequence into dna at the correct point. Since genes really just control things like protein production, we really don't know their effects in complex organisms, well anything more complex than single cellular. So that's why we don't see people with lizard skin, although there was a glowing goldfish once.