oh its still on like donkey kong with big funding .
In 2011, right as the legalization movement was picking up steam in several states, Kevin McKernan left biotech giant Life Technologies, the company that had acquihired him just a few years before. On his way out, he signed a non-compete promising he wouldn’t tinker with any DNA-related projects.
“We couldn’t pick up a pipette,” McKernan recalls, “except for cannabis because they couldn’t touch
that.” He founded
Medicinal Genomics, a company focused on marijuana genetics.
Still, he needed to be cautious. The feds weren’t as tolerant as states like Delaware or Connecticut, which had just passed medical cannabis legalization and marijuana decriminalization laws, respectively. His own state, Massachusetts wouldn’t pass medical marijuana laws until the following year. The lawyers told him to keep his paws off pot, in the U.S. anyway.
So McKernan, a veteran of the Human Genome Project, slipped a DNA purification kit through airport security and jerry-rigged a lab in the Dylan Hotel in pot-friendly Amsterdam. His mission was simple: take a sample of a cannabis plant, macerate it, isolate its DNA, and take that back to the States for sequencing. He’d done DNA extraction many times before, though never in a hotel room. Still, he succeeded. He traveled back with a container that housed Chemdawg’s DNA. (He didn’t declare it.) DNA is just information, so it’s perfectly legal to work with, even if it comes from cannabis.
http://fusion.net/story/40949/marijuana-genetics/