The Renegade Biohackers Testing COVID Vaccines on Themselves
When one thinks about scientific study, the images that spring to mind generally involve studious men and women in lab coats performing careful research in sterile environments. Those notions don’t pertain to biohackers, however, who carry out cutting-edge—and often legally and morally dubious—DIY experiments on themselves and others in the name of pushing the boundaries of what’s technologically possible. They’re punk rock dreamers dedicated to figuring out tomorrow’s evolutionary breakthroughs and cures today.
Take, for example, Josiah Zayner, a former NASA scientist who made waves in 2017 when, on a livestream at a San Francisco biotech conference, he injected himself in the arm with the gene-editing tool CRISPR as a means of increasing the size of his muscles. Earlier this year, Zayner decided to help the American scientific community in its race for a COVID-19 cure by personally taking a potential DNA vaccine that was first discussed in a Harvard University paper, and had only been tested on monkeys. The results were underwhelming, but the attitude behind the trial was pure rebel biohacker boldness—and is emblematic of a community that views the coronavirus as an ideal opportunity to research, test, and show the world that taking scientific measures into your own hands is the key to progress.
Yet as Citizen Bio suggests, the behavior of Zayner and his ilk may do more harm than good. Director Trish Dolman’s documentary (premiering Oct. 30 on Showtime) examines this subculture via the tale of Aaron Traywick, founder of Ascendance Biomedical, an outfit designed to create affordable and readily-available treatments for a variety of ailments. Traywick attracted national media attention when, on an October 2017 Facebook livestream, his associate Tristan Roberts injected himself with an unproven HIV remedy. Traywick followed that up by pulling his own pants down and sticking himself with an experimental cocktail purported to eradicate herpes at the 2018 BDYHAX Conference. With long hair, a big smile, and seemingly prodigious financial resources, Traywick struck a pose as a charismatic pioneer, dedicated to fostering a self-improvement movement that didn’t wait for the government, or corporations, to confront issues of disease, degeneration, and aging.