What Does an Infamous Biohacker’s Death Mean for the Future of DIY Science?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Love it when they wait until like five paragraphs into the article to include the sentence that tells you the whole article is a waste of time.
And it's "losses" :)
It doesn't put an ounce of confidence in his company.
Medicine isn't easy - he wasn't a pioneer, he was a wannabe and he died chasing the dream of eternal life.
I am all for the development of these incredible new treatments and therapies, but the biohacker community needed a wake-up call badly. If Aaron's death encourages others in the field to slow down and be more deliberate, and to avoid high-risk testing for publicity's sake, then hopefully it won't be in vain.
> The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Having an otherwise healthy person perform high-risk experiments on his own body and then drop dead before hitting 30 doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination.
Obviously, the autopsy will tell us everything we need to know, but let's not pretend that his biohacking didn't play a role in his demise, because it seems highly likely that it did.
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but you should cut it out with the ridiculous and baseless speculation. He was found dead in an immersion tank. What sounds more likely: death from biohacking, death from drowning after blacking out?
I'd wait for the autopsy.
I am operating under the assumption that while he liked attention, it is entirely possible he did something significant/relevant without public disclosure (possibly around the same time as his death).
That's not obvious at all. The autopsy could come back "inconclusive". They do, quite frequently. Not every cause of death leaves a marker behind.
It leaves a lot actually. There are plenty of stories of otherwise healthy young people dying from an array of ailments. It could have been an undiagnosed condition. It could have been drugs. Perhaps a freak accident in the tank. Or a combination. But until the autopsy results, stop speculating.
I'm not so sure about that.
A quick glance at the SSA's actuarial table[0] shows that a male at age 20 has a ~1.3% chance on not seeing his 30th birthday.
While intuitively it does seem likely that his experimentation contributed to this, it strikes me as likely that he had other compounding factors as well. For example - he died in a sensory deprivation tank. That's certainly not an activity that I would expect the general public to engage in, and I'm not familiar with its associated health risks.
I was surprised at first to learn that biohacking in this sense was about medical treatments, I've always looked at it as becoming one with technoloy, such as putting chips in your hands that serve specific functions(unlocking doors, logging in, etc).
A bit later, I think about people who synth their own custom peptide chains, and the people who try to CRISPR/CAS9 their own DNA. Maybe also the people who make designer drugs in the quest for the ultimate legal high or the ultimate undetectable sport doping.
Taking medications developed by someone else, that have not gone through FDA approval, doesn't even register on the radar.
In my opinion, simply ignoring industry regulations aka "pulling an Uber" is not hacking by any sense of the word.
edit: source is the-scientist.com
Look at the ISS, just look at them, tar and feathers everywhere, because they flew to close to the sun. They are still falling. Every day.
He who challenges the gods soon develops a liver problem. He who develops a vacaccine against the liver problem, challenges the writers of moral outrage pieces.
Author of said piece, would still welcome a working liver cure. Cheers!
PS: Projecting the hatred of ones own cowardice onto the late explorers is not considered enlightment.
I don't have any particular knowledge or opinion on this person's work, how liable it was to lead to breakthroughs and whether it could have been accomplished as quickly with less risk. But medical science has a long and, frankly, glorious history of self experimentation featuring both Nobel Prizes[1] and deaths[2]. I'm sure most of the people who do this are overconfident just based on the selection process but still medical science, and hence all of us, have benefited from their attempts and I'm not going to look down on someone who is willing to risk their own life in pursuing the frontiers of medicine, even if they might be after fame or notoriety.
The question is whether you can really know what you are doing with this kind of process. There is a reason why biotech companies are spending billions on rigorous scientific research and well constructed, multi-stage studies. But even then a lot of that research fails to produce anything useful. Or something like the infamous Contergan slips through and causes massive harm despite all of this effort. How much can we really expect from a bunch of outsiders doing (at best) very flimsy science when even the best and brightest experts in the field regularly waste years pursuing ideas that do not work out?
I'd guess "a lot".
Certainly this is higher risk. It's also much faster and less constrained - there's nothing stopping someone who believes a certain process will have a certain effect from trying it, regardless of what others believe. That will result in data that can be potentially useful for subsequent research regardless of the outcome.
At the end of the day, I believe that people own themselves. If they want to risk their life and health to be their own test subject, more power to them.
Consider that someone, somewhere, once saw the round white thing that came out of a chicken's butt and though "Hmm... I wonder how that tastes..." If not for that intrepid soul we might never have discovered omelets :)