Yes, the tech is old. Most of what that paper is describing is not mRNA, it is synthetic gene editing via nanotech. mRNA is gene editing via a virus. In the late 90s I was going to do some biohacking of e coli by introducing the gene responsible for silk production from Orb weaver spiders. You need to infect the e coli with a engineered virus to introduce the new genes. This would make my hybrid e coli produce spiderweb silk as excrement, I would feed them chicken scraps and they would eat, eat, eat... poop out white fluid. They pass on the gene when they reproduce so I would only have to infect a few. Unlimited supply of silk. I had set up a lab, got the isolated sequencing (spider DNA data from a university). I wanted to extract the DNA and isolate in my lab but it was too costly.

I was set to go,... Viruses carry out their replication process, transcription of the genome, and translation of the mRNA. I wanted to use a simple, non-dangerous (DNA) virus to introduce the code, but that does not work. I needed an RNA virus and I was unwilling to mess with those. I am more of a computer coder than bio tech so I dropped the project. Many others were having success in real labs. BUT, not in humans as far as I remember it was being done to low level bacteria and such.

There were rumors of a super soldier program where mRNA was being used to create hybrid humans,... That was in the late 90s when I heard of that.