What if biohackers injected themselves with mRNA?
economist.com
economist.com
"The question now is whether governments can put the genie back in the bottle through concerted, co-ordinated action. Many politicians say the power to tinker with biology is too dangerous to have in the hands even just of doctors and must be regulated."
Similar arguments are being made regarding the public's access to general-purpose computing, 3D fabrication equipment, AI agents, and indeed: drugs (both psychoactive and medical). Putting this increasing number of "genies back in the bottle" is infeasible and I would argue harmful. We'll be putting an ever-growing amount of our civilization's resources into controlling technologies and behavior just so we can act as if it's still 1975, while unaccountable mega corporations reap all the benefits of modern technology.
I am utterly unconcerned by what people choose to do to their own bodies and minds. What does keep me up is the potential harm to bystanders, both in premeditated acts of terrorism as well as uncontained accidents. I really don't have an answer to this, but I do know that iron-fisted government control of citizen technology is not going to prevent these horror scenarios.
I don't know, do you think the world would be better if people could sell their organs? "Voluntarily?" Also, I'm confident you think there should be limits on what children can choose to do with their bodies and minds, and I'm confident the line you draw would be as unsophisticated as an age.
Compare this to mass scams: If many people are tricked (by a person or by a mass histeria) to do something, then it makes perfect sense to have a regulatory agency step in (e.g. FTC, FDA, SEC, etc). And compare that to people with a medical disability: if someone is permanently or temporarily mentally impaired, then some of these rights are curtailed.
I suspect people generally agree with this, but will extend the "affecting only themselves" a degree out. Did a Father who orphans a child due to drug use only affect themselves? Did the narco terrorists who were funded by his purchase only affect himself?
Taking a job, quitting to start a company, walking back on a contractual relationship, marrying a partner. While it's true that the direction of impact has outsized and measurable impact on children and dependents, there are other interactions we can't even begin to fathom.
Barry Marshall was criticized in the 80's for his H. pylori hypothesis. Then he drank some to prove his point, and now we know the cause of peptic ulcers and several stomach cancers.
mRRNA self-experimentation is undoubtably risky and I wouldn't do it myself, but it may yield dividends even if it does induce disease state or kill some of those that attempt it.
I don't think we should police it. Not when you can legally buy a car and drive it off a bridge. There are far worse things a person can do.
Do not criminalize the things that make your society worse at scale, rather ensure the positive incentives draw your population in a better direction. I.e. carrot, not stick.
Edit: I'll walk this back to 'is always worth regulating'
Obviously, even in cases where it is illegal to both buy and sell we still have black markets, but making it ok to buy but not sell seems like a recipe for a giant black market.
On the other hand, sure, regulating and ensuring tax revenue comes from the vice is not a bad idea (and it works ok for gambling, alcohol, and now pot too).
> I don't know, do you think the world would be better if people could sell their organs?
Freedom of destiny. If a spouse wanted to sell their organs to improve the life of the remainder of their family, and made the choice with sound mind, then absolutely. If a person requests assisted suicide when suffering from a terrible disease, then absolutely. Why should someone be forced to die in disgrace, purely to satisfy the dogmatic morals of those around them?
Less moral systems force a certain life on people, but they argue that it is moral. We are forcing a certain death on people, and are arguing it's moral. This line of thinking is in line with the current zeitgeist, and the truth of the matter is that no zeitgeist will ever be perfect - but we can improve things by challenging our core morals (just as we did with slavery, women, LGTBQ+).
This is probably a reasonable medium term comparison to selling organs (where using someone else's flesh will become an aesthetic choice more than a necessity or the medically superior option).
What's the argument against allowing this? That it's distasteful?
Edit: pun not intended, but noticed immediately and preserved.
Just because something is (considered) harmful to society doesn’t mean that it is right of the government to use monopoly of violence to prevent individuals from it. Some things, of course, but it is not sufficient.
Lest you’re looking at a moralizing authoritarian government as a good thing.
Say you're a middle class gentleman, rich but humane cannibals offer you 5 million dollars if they can have a surgeon remove your arm, so they can eat it.
Losing and arm will be tough, without that $5 mill it'd be very tough, especially to keep work. Since you're rich you're not going on disability or anything, so really it's self-sustained.
The only person out anything is the person who lost the arm. How is this harmful to society?
I'm not certain it is, I'm not saying it's right either... I mean obvious it's not normal, but is it really "harmful"?
I (probably) wouldn't go for assisted suicide, but I have no right to demand someone else suffer because of my own insecurities about death.
I (probably) wouldn't even volunteer my spare kidney, but I have no right to say that a 70y parent can't give their heart to their dying 30y.
Freedom of destiny wouldn't be the only freedom that allows societal problems, but freedom is not the cause: inequality and power are.
> Freedom of destiny. If a spouse wanted to sell their organs to improve the life of the remainder of their family, and made the choice with sound mind, then absolutely.
How is that world better than this one ?
With all the resources we have in the world, why don't we strive to allow for people to have better options than organ selling ?
The thing is, nobody of sound mind who has a choice (and I mean a real choice, not "give us your organs or your family starves") would choose to do this.
Nobody wants to sell their organs. People that want to purchase organs would love your suggestion however, as it allows them to justify exploitation of the desperate under the guise of "it was their decision".
Freedom of destiny indeed.
Otherwise some entity will "keep you safe from yourself".
My context was adults. Of course babies mustn't have the right to operate heavy machinery unsupervised, among many other things. But once society declares a person fully grown, they should have all the rights.
I'm a bit of an individualist. I understand why society, like an ant hive, would like to control some/many aspects of its constituents. But I also think that freedom isn't a mere cost, but is actually a portal to a better world overall.
The problem is that almost any labor is unethical under certain systems. We just notice it more when it's in the extremes, like sex-work or selling an organ.
If we didn't have a situation where people could be taken such advantage of, this wouldn't be a problem. The cost of buying an organ might be very high, because no one would be forced into it.
But yes, if suddenly selling organs were legal in the US, that would be a very unfortunate thing because it would immediately be abused.
If someone meets the criteria to donate organs, for free, why shouldn't they also be able to charge for it?
Second, because we know exactly how this would end up. Poor people would become de facto organ factories. Many would get coerced into it. Similar to prostitution. A lot of the same arguments (both for and against) would apply.
Maybe it should be legal, but there's certainly a lot of nuance to consider.
Sure its a serious operation but these points apply to donating a kidney as well.
> Poor people would become de facto organ factories.
If you don't think someone who is poor has the where with-all to sell their kidney, why should they be allowed to give it away for free?
Maybe we should make that sort of business transaction illegal, maybe we shouldn't, but it has no bearing on whether or not people should be allowed to do what they want with their own minds and bodies.
People should be allowed to remove their own organs, it's only the selling (the business transaction) that you might (or might not) want to outlaw.
whats the "GreyGoo" concept in biohacking.
I’d argue that the only way to put that many genies back into their bottles is an authoritarian government, which is never worth it no matter what promises a would be tyrant makes.
Another good example is how you can't photocopy money. Did that stop counterfeiting... no. but it sure did tamp down a lot of casual counterfeiting - and i don't think it actually did harm people's liberty very much.
Furthermore, there is a clear difference between “you can’t do this to other people” and “you can’t do X or Y to your own body”, the latter of which is at play here. Photocopying money, selling dangerous medicine, and spamming the radio waves with noise actually affects other people. Personal experimentation with mRNA does not.
Regulating mass market mRNA products before they can be sold? Sure. Banning individual experimentation? Hell no.
We've already accepted as a society that some technologies are too big and dangerous for private individuals to have access to, for the sheer pragmatic reason that there are people crazy enough to do literally anything. Technology that allows a single human to kill every other human on Earth is a really good candidate for restriction. Biohacking is such technology. It's real-life nanobots.
The rest of the channel is pure biohacking gold. The yeast spider silk video is much recommended.
But the answer is probably nothing isn’t it? You need some kind of delivery mechanism. Even then, what do you expect some random fragment of mRNA to do? You might get some temporary effect, but RNA gets digested relatively quickly. I’m sure you can come up some random horrific scenario that is in practice very hard to get working but…
More realistic scenario is “what if biohackers start making their own COVID19-like viruses”. Perhaps someone gets the crazy idea of creating a less harmless variant and synthesizing it? (This suggestion was pretty popular on HN a while back, it’s a bad idea FYI).
Probably possible for a Biohacker to try this now, but also not very easy to pull off…