I have in my head, but have not written down, a sci fi story similar to that- "diybio" where some smart grad students clone cephalopod camoflague genes and make a crispr delivery system to give people the ability to grow moving tattoos that glow (go look at a cuttlefish). They go to burning man and give it away- massive night raves with people dancing around, etc.

based on those good results, they go back to the lab and cook up a general purpose "edit your own genome for free!" project and put all the steps to reproduce it in a github repo. But... after half the world has downloaded and started playing, those burning man people start dying of cancer.

The answer is clear, time to edit more to get rid of the cancer :)

and that's how the zombie plague started

Neat idea! You should write it up.

BioShock vibes. I like it!