Publicity stunt instead of scientific paper in reviewed journal, "we don't care about FDA approval" attitude, undisclosed location in latin America - sounds totally credible.
The gene therapies used are well exercised in animal studies. At some point you have to move to humans, but that costs money. This is one approach to raising the funding to perform small trials, you get the first trial member done first since that's what you have the funds for, and move on from there.
Parrish has been a member of the community interested in aging and biotech for some years. Look at the the advisory board of BioViva. You don't magically get George Church on your board without having paid your dues.
Meanwhile if you happen to be someone who disagrees with the existence and current practice of the FDA - and this may be a minority position, but it isn't a small minority position - then linking this all with regulatory arbitrage makes perfect sense. There is an enormous gap between what can be done safely (large set) and what the FDA permits (small set), and with the cost of biotechnology and medicine falling rapidly, sooner or later something has to give.
The FDA is all about maintaining the position of FDA bureaucrats. That's the only real way to interpret the 2.5x cost increase in trials over the past decade. They are willing to suppress as much medical progress as it takes in order to look like people who are doing a non-phony-baloney job. But medicine is inherently risky. There will always be people who die as a result of new therapies: it should be up to the patients to make informed decisions, not a matter of bureaucrats pushing the cost of development upwards to a point at which only a trickle of new treatments emerges on the other side. The public doesn't react to the invisible death toll of people who would have been saved by the medicines that are no longer cost-effective to develop.
It's a sad situation.
Given how conservative the FDA is in allowing companies to inform customers what's in their own bodies, it's unlikely companies will get any form of approval for modification.
Most people are not properly equipped to handle such information. I see this as a failure of education, that could probably be easily fixed if e.g. high-school curriculum taught basic statistics and probability theory as applied to interpreting medical results. It's the simple things, like "just because you got a positive test on X doesn't mean you have X", "think of horses before zebras" and "if you read 'X causes cancer' or 'X increases risk of cancer by 1000%' in the news, take note if anyone is providing the base level - an increase of 0.00001% probability to 0.0001% means you can ignore the news and keep enjoying X", and "if commonly-used-in-food-X was really dangerous, you'd see people dying like flies around you; if you don't, it means it's mostly safe so don't panic".
1: I don't doubt it's some people's underlying motivation, I just hope it's not overt enough that it's valid reasoning in official reports.
In the United States, pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey M.D.
withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell company
and refused Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval
to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed.