One Man’s Quest to Hack His Own Genes

I find it almost offensive when they entertain that it is the public's business to dictate what one man does to a small section of his bodily tissue.

Human life is not precious anymore. If somebody wants to risk their life for scientific progress, I feel that we should support them instead of discouraging them.

Just as we did when life was more precious.

As I've been saying for the past couple of years, gene therapies are straightforward enough and cheap enough to carry out that people are doing it, usually quietly, but it is happening. You only have to be connected enough to know a biotechnologist or two with the right skills, as the example here shows. The stage of the adventurous and the self-experimenters is an important part of the development of any new medical technology, helping to overcome institutional reluctance while gathering initial data on how best to approach such treatments in practice. The next part of the process, something that does requires much greater funding and participation from the research and development community, will happen over the next few years; it involves making the therapies more robust, the outcomes more reliable, and assembling the suite of tools and clinics needed for those tasks. That is certainly the goal of BioViva, and as they move forward, others will join them.

There is more than enough evidence for the potential utility of enhancement gene therapies based on producing greater muscle growth and improved metabolism via increased follistatin or myostatin knockout, ranging from numerous animal studies to existing natural human and animal mutants to myostatin antibody trials. There is also considerable interest in telomerase gene therapies, though I'd like to wait for more data on that front before diving in myself, given the potential cancer risk. Once these initial approaches are out there, available, and the methodologies of gene therapy have progressed to the point at which there is reliably comprehensive cell coverage - especially in stem cells, as that will determine how lasting the effect is - then a score of other genes bear further investigation and consideration as targets for enhancement therapies.

While I applaud those who set out to undergo gene therapy today, as their work is necessary to move matters along in this age of overabundant caution and oppressive regulation of every activity, I can't say as I think the fellow here made a good choice of gene. This has the look of a more sophisticated form of the hormone therapies practiced over the past few decades, approaches that really don't have a good impact on aging, and outside of correcting deficiencies are not something that should benefit or is expected to benefit someone in normal health for their age. Increased growth hormone, if anything, is exactly the opposite of what animal and human studies suggest is good for longevity.

He's not 'hacking his own genes' though, is he? There's no modification of his germ cells, nor is there stable incorporation of the exogenous material into the genome of the affected cells - more just transient expression of the protein he's interested in.

Giving the extraordinary complexity of the ageing process, with the interplay between multiple genes, each with multiple splice variants and post-translation modifications, and whose expression is modulated by both genetic and epigenetic factors, the chance of success with this approach is minimal.

Am I the only one to foresee that such changes can do way more harm than good?

As comments went on a previous post on a similar topic: Genetic changes are a lot like assembler software changes.

The best part? In living things there's very little documentation, based on "poor" reverse engineering (as we know little about it).

7 Billion People on Planet Earth

3 Billionish Genetic Base Pairs

15,000 disease modalities-ish(and many that are obfuscated or clustered as one disease)

60,000 genetic marker tests on the market.

8-10 new ones each day.

Knowing what they actually do? --- Costs Billions.

>Hanley says he did not secure the approval of the FDA before carrying out his experiment either. The agency requires companies to seek an authorization called an investigational new drug application, or IND, before administering any novel drug or gene therapy to people. “They said ‘You need an IND’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t,’” recalls Hanley, who traded e-mails with officials at the federal agency. He argued that self-experiments should be exempt, in part because they don’t pose any risk to the public.

Until you start modifying the germ line, of course.

This is a bold step on the path towards comic book super-villains existing in the real world.

Reminds me a lot of the TDCS people.