I’m sure there are complications that make this much more difficult than it seems on the surface, but we should probably get that Mars thing going just in case haha.
Yeah, genetic constructs often don't work well even when you plan for them to work and are doing something "easy". It's not uncommon to have to try 10-30+ variations of adding a His-Tag to a protein (for purifying a protein product like say, insulin). There isn't a ton known about how prions are formed initially, which would be critical to designing one.