Elon didn't say that. i did. I'm sure Elon understands the situation very well. That's why he is saying sane things about it.

But mRNA is basically cellular code. You write up a recipe, translate it into mmRNA (modified messenger, designed to defeat cellular defense against foreign code intrusion) and then distribute. YOu can make cells make anything you want. You can add in reverse transcriptase code, maybe hiden in the codon, and have those new functions written to the hard drive (DNA) in the cell nucleus. It really is biohacking .

If you wanted to make people express glowing patterns in their skin, you could program that into mmRNA and add it to vaccines, and people would start expressing, say, luciferin. whatever you want.

With 6 billion people, a small % (a few million, say), may die due to unforseen or un cared about incompatibilities with messily evolved H-OS (human operating System) but those lines would soon die out and you'd be left with a more predictable base load of machines, sorry, people, to work with.