"Mr. Smith, can you dig this bent?"
Yep. Freddie seems to know his molecular biology.
The part about the blood and moldy coffee cups is a joke, though.
I'd love to do experiments like this, but right now my living conditions aren't conducive to it. You need a lab to carry out this kind of work... room for lots of culture jars and petri dishes and such. Granted, a lot of the equipment is commonplace or can be improvised: an incubator from a cooler with a thermometer and an adjustable heating pad, a centrifuge from an old blender, a large pressure canner for an autoclave, etc...etc... Someone might be able to pull it off in their basement.
Oh yeah, and isolating the gene /should/ be easy, beacuse safrole is toxic. By placing your randomly transformed organisms on a media with a high safrole content, selection should take care of the rest, without the need to slice in an antibiotic resistance gene and all that jazz.