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Good info, but bad formatting. Same quote, more mobile friendly:

- He just possibly infected his whole digestive system. Not just small intestine, but stomach as well. Furthermore, AAV can potentially exhibit transcytosis through epithelial layers, suggesting that it's possible the virus infected more than just his digestive system.

- He did not determine an appropriate dose, and so he likely infected with a HUGE genetic payload. Overexpression with AAV can kill infected cells, which means this man is risking his digestive lining.

- Neither the promoter nor the encoded protein itself are human, potentially risking (possibly severe) autoimmune reaction.

- There are few/no long-term studies on effects of AAV integration and expression in humans. There is indeed evidence that AAV increases risk of cancer, almost certainly in a dose- dependent manner.

- AAVs could integrate randomly into your genome in low frequencies (0.1% to 1%), meaning that they could just by chance disrupt a gene you really need to not get cancer.

None of those answers have anything to do with answering the question of "Is there a real risk of them hurting anyone but themselves?"

Let me rephrase, to make this more explicit: why shouldn't people be allowed to commit probabilistic suicide by non-rigorous experimental protocol, if they want? People do things that could kill them in home machine shops and home chemistry labs all the time, just for fun.

Note that I completely understand why people shouldn't be advertising that they do this, any more than people should be trying to talk other people into building nuclear reactors as a hobby.

I'm more saying that, if the point is just do something for your own sake—with a chance of improving your life, and another chance of killing you—and nobody else is involved or will be involved—then what has anyone else got to do with it?

People shoot up heroin every day and it's pretty bad for your health of course. Now imagine if someone vlogged their heroin habit to the masses, and a handful of those masses were impressionable like minded idiots who also took up H as a result of seeing a video by a supposed internet authority. It's a jackass move, overall.

None of those seem to affect anyone else, so as long as the person experimenting on themselves is of sound mind I don't see the problem.

Not seeming to affect anyone else seems like an insufficient condition. It should be predictably not going to affect anyone else with high reliability - and I strongly suspect this was not the case.

It can also affect people indirectly, which leads to the same reasons we have laws requiring seatbelts or motorcycle helmets.

Not everyone wants to see someone die in a horrible way and have to clean up the mess.

Exactly. As long as your experiments cannot modify the germline, knock yourself out with CRISPR self-experimentation (as long as you're comfortable with the possible consequences).

Absolutely not. It only takes one idiot to fuck up their body horrifically for the technology to get banned for all the non-idiots.

You can’t ban something I can perform in my garage (not effectively at least) with a few thousand dollars in supplies.

Sure they can. They banned explosives (which I agree with) and you can probably do that with a few hundred dollars.

Sure they’re banned but it’s not particularly hard for amateurs to manufacture after some careful reading, The situation is similar to bans on cryptography IMO.

> The situation is similar to bans on cryptography IMO.

No offense, but a misleading and inaccurate analogy. It's much closer to bans on chemical precursors of drugs like MDMA or LSD. Those chemical precursors have many legitimate uses, but since some people use them to make illegal drugs, normal citizens cannot acquire them easily, or without breaking the law.

I don't see how that's different. Again you can manufacture those precursors after careful reading (that's the fundamental idea behind organic synthesis.)

They can ban the actual effective research and use cases though.

Smoking increases the risk of cancer too, and we let people choose to do that, even though it also increases the risk of cancer for everyone around them as well.

Maybe both of these cancer-causing things are bad.

While I'm sure this is true and there are real reasons why performing such experiments on yourself may be a very bad idea, there are few caveats.

First (which I don't really want to concentrate on) is that's why this is an experiment. People did stupid things (and sometimes died because of them) for entire human history and some hundreds of years later are remembered as "great scientists". Trying to monopolize research and experimentation around academia and "certified professionals" (certified by academia, that is) is a most despicable thing I can imagine. I see that this opinion is basically a point of conflict of two different political views, so there isn't much that can be said to (quickly) persuade someone, who does not feel like this in the first place, but I strongly feel that if people can be "free" in any sense at all, they really should be free to do whatever the fuck they want to themselves. If they wanna die, let them die. If they wanna do drugs, let them do drugs. If they wanna perform stupidly dangerous experiments over themselves, let them do that. If they wanna give somebody else a consent to perform a stupidly dangerous experiment over them — it's their prerogative.

Second is much less philosophical and much more grim. This probably depends on your environment quite a lot (country/place, level of income, connections), so take this as my subjective experience. The problem is that dealing with certified medical professionals performing FDA (or whatever) approved procedures over yourself sometimes feels pretty much as dangerous, if not more. You often have no idea what they are really doing to you, and it's sometimes blatantly obvious they don't really understand it either. Often it is not clear if the treatment (which might be totally safe and correct in some cases!) is adequate to your case, not much of analysis is performed and every little bit you have to do along the way costs quite a lot of money and/or prevents you from living normal life, leaving you quite miserable overall. And the more minor the thing you are trying to fix is, the worse it is. And the worst of it, it is pretty clear that your doctors don't really care. They are relatively safe (legally) if they are working by the book, so they are working by the book. And "the book" often happens to be a result of bureaucratic machine, not common sense. And, after all, they have seen (maybe just 30 minutes ago) people in much worse condition than yourself, so unless you are really dying, what's even the trouble? And all of it even when we ignore the fact, that "the book" and the status quo of the field changes all the time, much of recognized medical research lacks the quality you wish it'd had and accepted views today sometimes are vastly different than 20 years ago. And let's be honest: 20 years of "experience" is nothing, when we are talking about high-stake decision making on the frontiers of the scientific research (and whatever affects your health and well-being always feels like "high-stake").

What you have to say about monopoly of research about certified professionals is apposite but I doubt there were 10 chuckleheads looking to replicate Barry Marshall’s experiment for kicks

Well, that's why Barry Marshall is exactly that kind of guy who will be remembered as a great scientist for doing stupid things. And I doubt there were 10 certified professionals looking to replicate his experiment either.

> AAVs integrate randomly into your genome meaning that they could just by chance disrupt a gene you really need to not get cancer.

I watched the video. I am not a biologist.

I could have sworn at one point he said that it would be inserted at "known, and safe" locations. Not "random"... ?

This is mainly true, however we are still observing random integrations at low frequency such as 0.1% to 1% [0], so if you bring a billion virus particles in, it still poses a non-negligible risk to the agent.

Thank you for your input, I'll word it more accurately.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29326962

Very interesting. Thanks for the clarification!