Living during a prelude to Asimov’s Good Taste?
Such organisms are engineered to produce something that is useless to them. This gets them to spend energy and other resources on something their competitors don’t have to bother with. This gives them a serious competitive disadvantage in the cutthroat environment known as The Peaceful Nature.
Also, lateral gene transfer, in principle the same thing that the labs are doing, is fairly common in the world of microbiology; the GMO opponents are suspiciously silent about this aspect of genetics so it is one of the less known things. Viruses regularly take a chunk of a cell’s genetic info and remix it into the firmware of another cell. Bacteria actively exchange plasmids. And there are heaps of eucaryote genes that aparently were laterally transferred. I do not see what is so different with the same done in the lab, except that there it is significantly less haphazard and way better controlled and less risky.
I’d suggest looking around local hackerspaces; some can have a biohack/DIYbio sub-group. There are even entire biohacking-dedicated ones.
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