How to extract your own DNA

December 14th, 2007

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)

So I’m at home, the kids are in bed, and I have vodka, so what you gonna do. Well the story is I got this text from a friend about how to extract and see your own DNA, the idea sounded vaguely familiar, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

The ingredients

The experiment

Let me say for starters when your sat and the house is quiet, your watching the latest episode of bones wondering what exactly is a gormagon, don’t under any circumstances decide as I did to swill your mouth with salty water.

Anyway, getting past all that swilling business, swilling for about 30 seconds, I emptied the contents of my mouth into a clean glass containing 15ml water and 5ml washing up liquid, had a quick swig of my vodka laced with diet coke as indeed it should be enjoyed and commenced slowly stirring previously mentioned concoction. Scientists call this mechanical agitation, and the idea is to break up the skin cells from your mouth to allow the DNA to escape.
Get vodka from freezer and poor slowly so it remains on top of the salty you solution. This is when the magic should, or might happen.
If indeed it does work you should see a spindly white substance on top of the salty mixture. My sample fizzed a little, but alas no noticeable DNA strands.

Conclusion

Did I use too much alcohol, or was it the cheap tesco detergent, or perhaps I am an android like Data from the next generation, without the computational prowess. Who knows, questions like these have plagued scientist for millennia, but they do serve to push the frontiers of our understanding forward, and consolidate our place in the universe.
Hoorah..

A nice pic of what you might see, if unlike me you hadn’t been drinking the experiment before commencement.