“What we’ve got here is some DNA, and this is a syringe,” Josiah Zayner tells a room full of synthetic biologists and other researchers. He fills the needle and plunges it into his skin. “This will modify my muscle genes and give me bigger muscles.”

Zayner, a biohacker–basically meaning he experiments with biology in a DIY lab rather than a traditional one–was giving a talk called “A Step-by-Step Guide to Genetically Modifying Yourself With CRISPR” at the SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco, where other presentations featured academics in suits and the young CEOs of typical biotech startups. Unlike the others, he started his workshop by handing out shots of scotch and a booklet explaining the basics of DIY genome engineering.

If you want to genetically modify yourself, it turns out, it’s not necessarily complicated. As he offered samples in small baggies to the crowd, Zayner explained that it took him about five minutes to make the DNA that he brought to the presentation. The vial held Cas9, an enzyme that snips DNA at a particular location targeted by guide RNA, in the gene-editing system known as CRISPR. In this case, it was designed to knock out the myostatin gene, which produces a hormone that limits muscle growth and lets muscles atrophy. In a study in China, dogs with the edited gene had double the muscle mass of normal dogs. If anyone in the audience wanted to try it, they could take a vial home and inject it later. Even rubbing it on skin, Zayner said, would have some effect on cells, albeit limited.

Zayner has a PhD in molecular biology and biophysics, and worked as a research fellow at NASA modifying organisms for life on Mars. But he envisions that synthetic biology for editing other organisms or yourself could become as simple to use as, say, a drag-and-drop platform for making a website.

“You don’t need to know what promoter to use to make this gene or this piece of DNA work,” he says, using some technical terms for the DNA engineering process. “You don’t want to know what terminator to use, or origin of replication . . . The DNA programmer should know how to do that stuff. But the only thing you should have to know is, alright, I want to engineer a mushroom to be purple. That’s as difficult as it should be for a human being to genetically modify something. All of that’s totally possible–it’s just building the infrastructure and platform so someone can do that.”

Of course, an app store for genetic editing doesn’t yet exist. But a growing number of biohackers have learned enough that they are beginning–however ill-advisedly–to experiment on themselves. Several people Zayner knows, for example, have started injecting themselves with myostatin. “This is happening right now,” he says. “All this stuff is starting to come to an inflection point in the last few weeks.” It’s too early to say whether the shots will leave experimenters jacked, or potentially cause problems, but some people hope to start to see results in the coming months.

Despite his time in academia, Zayner is clearly not a typical researcher, and eschews the idea that experimentation should be confined to labs. While at NASA, he started connecting with other biohackers through a mailing list, and recognizing the problems for those who wanted to do DIY work–supplies were hard to find, and suppliers wouldn’t necessarily ship to someone who didn’t have a lab–he started a business in 2013 called The ODIN (Open Discovery Institute, and an homage to the Norse god) to start shipping kits and tools to people who wanted to work in their garage or living room. In 2015, after deciding to leave NASA because he didn’t like working in its traditional environment, he launched a successful crowdfunding campaign for a DIY CRISPR kit.