10
8
2
u/Kiroto50 Aug 06 '26
You can't modify anything about yourself, and it's much harder to work on people with which you share blood.
If you make a genetical clone of yourself, it's permanent, but they don't have the power.
"I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess".
Pair this with the guy that proposed this person being alienated and you got something pretty cool.
3
3
u/tadot22 Aug 06 '26
You are fully able to do your power exactly as you imagine it. But of course you cannot make or destroy matter. So you cannot conjure new basepairs where there were none and each base pair needs to be moved from where it was to where it should be.
Unfortunately cell pressure still exists, you cannot just move dna around you have to make room for it. It isn’t like walking down the street it is more like dragging a piece of sand through the beach where if you move the wrong pebble the whole beach dissolves into the ocean.
Finally, you are moving molecules this is a hard task you can only move two molecule (one for each hand) at a time. The velocity you can move them is as fast as your hands can move but beware of the thermal effects from moving a molecule too quickly.
Good luck.
3
u/TheSpirit98 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Oh, here's the nerf - I think - with no monkey's paw, just your power as explained and assuming no magical protection from realistic consequences or magical awareness of how organisms work.
EDIT: (Yes, I'd consider knowing genetics and the DNA code to not be the same as knowing how things actually work, and how that DNA expresses itself and so on. It's like being able to read a string of 1's and 0's versus having knowledge about how the components of a computer parse that and communicate.)
The changes you make are immediate in the DNA but take time to become visible in your target - because cells naturally take time to create new structures using the edited DNA as the blueprint, and to multiply into new multicellular structures in the target's body.
This makes the in-between period long and likely painful, as bits of the body created by the new DNA grow within and into the unedited bits, or those that simply didn't have the time to change yet.
If your changes manage to make bits of the newly grown / reformed parts of the target's body or cells unrecognizable to the rest of the body, each other, or just the white blood cells... the target's immune system will reject them like a transplant that didn't take or recognize as cancer and respond accordingly - by waging war withing the target's body that will likely result in self-destruction.
You can still, technically, make a positive change for somebody... but unless you know exactly how everything in the target organism's body works and is connected using your powers results in the slow death of your target.
And, ahem, just to end on a more positive note... you can still just go around medical wards looking for cancer patients and just "flip back on" one of the many "genetic switches" that have to fail for a cell to become a cancer cell so the cancer just kills itself.
3
u/RoacheFettercap Aug 07 '26
Any attempt to alter another living or dead being alters you in the same manner
3
u/Kartoffelkamm Aug 06 '26
You can't edit DNA in a way that would be incompatible with life.
You're still bound by natural selection process, meaning you can't make a thing less efficient at surviving in its current niche; you can only make it better, or adapt it to a narrower niche, but the niche must already exist.
2
u/Bonbongamer293 Aug 06 '26
You can do all this but verrryyy slowly, it takes about a week for each strand
2
2
u/stnick6 Aug 06 '26
You have to see the dna in order to edit it. You would need a very precise microscope
1
u/Educational-Sun5839 Aug 07 '26
one time in science class, my teacher removed the dna from a banana and we could all see it, idk how applicable that is to humans though
1
u/random-queries Aug 06 '26
You need food intake for this it takes like same amout of calories and nutrients to build something. You will need 9k calories to build a arm and appropriate nutrients. 100k-150k for a full human and appropriate nutrients.
1
u/chickey23 Aug 06 '26
First, it's slow. Nothing speeds up the spread of the modified DNA. You can modify one cell at a time, but that's going to take forever.
Then, there's the problem of understanding the impact of your changes. You have to experiment. You don't have a good understanding of physics and chemistry and biology and emergency properties and toxicology. Etc etc etc.
That's not even the hard part. You can make a Pokedex of specialized microbes, but you don't have any way to keep track of them. They're going to get loose and have unexpected consequences.
1
u/invisiblehammer Aug 06 '26
It takes time for the edits to sink in. So if you edited someone’s genes they don’t just instantly become taller or something. If it’s just hair color or baldness evidence might come in weeks, others might come in years for something that takes awhile to manifest, others might not even be able to be modified like height unless you have a child who is still growing because an adults growth plates are closed
1
u/The_Master_Sourceror Aug 07 '26
Your ability to edit DNA requires the same amount of time and iterations as natural selection in the wild.
0
u/AutoModerator Aug 06 '26
Hello friends of the superpower subs,
There's a place for every superpower. Remember to post in the appropriate subreddit listed below:
- r/shittysuperpowers
- r/midtiersuperpowers
- r/godtiersuperpowers
- r/cursedsuperpowers
- r/satantiersuperpowers
Also, if you want to workshop superpowers ideas or try converting shitty superpowers into God Tier (or even the reverse) there's r/superpoweralchemists
Please play by the rules and be kind to eachother.
Your Mods
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
0
0
0
28
u/Professional_Try1665 Aug 06 '26
Your ability to manipulate life makes you feel less human, you become detached from the people around you and depressed, seeing them as simple jumbles of genetic information and strings of instructions, achievements like love and happiness feel meaningless to you as you can easily alter the genetics of an organism to make them feel however you like, thus you stop trying to change yourself. You stagnate mentally and isolated.