Late Aaron Traywick: Interview on Biohacking, Transhumanism

{{embed|t=9aAhV_1525131989}}

Aaron Traywick, CEO of Ascendance Biomedical and a figure in the biohacking and transhumanist movements, was found dead this weekend in a flotation tank in Washington DC, according to Tristan Roberts. He was 28 years old.

News2Share's last sit-down interview with Traywick took place February 2nd. Although included as part of a livestream profiling a bio-hacking lab, the raw interview was previously unreleased.

Biohacking is a form of science research that hopes to push medical technology without invoking academic, state, or big corporate actors. It tends to heavily emphasize independent and experimentation. Transhumanism is a movement that seak to evolve the human species beyond its natural limits, primarily through technology.

"Floating" is meditation method where an individual places themselves into a sound-proof pod filled with salt water at body temperature, which gives the sensation of floating in empty space. The practice is meant to promote a state of deep meditation.

"He was found face down," Roberts explained. Other details were not immediately available.

News2Share first covered Traywick's work in October, when he provided a DIY HIV gene-editing substance to Tristan Roberts, who self-injected it.

The following February, Traywick publicly injected himself with a substance he co-created as a gene-editing cure and immunization against herpes.

"The procedure itself is a simple one," Traywick told News2Share. "If my herpes goes away, and the vaccine remains detectable in the blood upon subsequent lab analysis, we know it works as a cure. For Andreas, so long as the same happens, and he still doesn't have herpes, then we have 90 percent of the data necessary to prove the vaccine works."

"Essentially 1%, and really even less than 1%, of persons currently with HIV, for reasons that are aren't really clearly known, these persons developed a genetic immunity once they contracted the HIV," explained Traywick. His mission, he said, is to share the 1%'s immunity "with the 99%."

Results in that experiment are currently inconclusive.

The Food and Drug Administration responded with a thinly-veiled swipe that, while avoiding specific mention of Traywick's experiment, expressed concern about the safety of self-administered gene therapies and advised consumers to refrain from undergoing treatments not approved or studied "under appropriate regulatory oversight."

Production specialist Machiavelli Davis regarded the absence of a corporate or academic hierarchy as a strength, not a weakness. "Working with a tight knit team of passionate friends is also a far better experience than just being brought together because of a corporate job," Davis said, noting that each of the team's members had prior experience with self-experimentation.