Genetically Engineering Yourself Sounds Like a Horrible Idea—But This Guy Is Doing It Anyway
By Kristen V. Brown,
Gizmodo
| 11. 29. 2017
Josiah Zayner took a swig from his beer and squinted into the spotlight. He was already kind of drunk. He also hadn’t bothered to write a speech. Tattooed and heavily pierced with a shock of blue-gray hair, he shuffled around uneasily on stage. But 150-odd people had flown in from around the country to hear him speak—the mad pirate-king of biotech.
“It all is coming from my heart,” he said, choking up a little. “Everything you’re going to hear today is me to the core.”
Zayner’s audience sat in the fashionably decaying ballroom of an old garbage collectors’ social club in Oakland. They had come from universities, startups and do-it-yourself garage biolabs, united if not by a love of citizen science then by a curiosity as to what it is exactly that Zayner is up to. A computer nerd turned NASA scientist turned establishment-science cynic, Zayner is something like the self-appointed leader of a small but burgeoning biohacking movement. He presides over a loose coterie of professional and self-taught scientists who believe that ground-breaking science does not require either...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi, The New York Times | 07.15.2024
By Rachel Clayton, ABC News | 07.08.2024
In her early 30s, Michelle Galea wasn't convinced motherhood was for her.
"I didn't know if I wanted a child or if society was telling me I should have a child right now," she said.
But as she watched two...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...