3 ms·

Biohacking is 100% gonna happen, probably sooner than later. Trying to pretend otherwise is ignoring all the technologies becoming available on a ramen budget.

• logfromblammo 11y ago
  And also ignoring all the commercial pharmaceuticals whose prices are being jacked up by orders of magnitude with no warning. Martin Skreli can make the mainstream news by jacking up the price of anti-infection drug pyrimethamine by 5555%. Cycloserine can go up 2160%. Isoproterenol, nitroprusside, tetracycline, and doxycycline went up abruptly. When your quality of life, or even the remaining duration of it, is largely in the hands of a few executives at a single company, it's generally a good move to do whatever is necessary to reduce your dependence on them, before they realize that they can bleed you dry--along with those like you--with a few keystrokes in their inventory system. It is inevitable that people made desperate by medical circumstance will do dangerous things with biology on a shockingly low budget. For instance, did you know that some people are doing at-home fecal transplants using thrift-store blenders and over-the-counter enema kits? How long do you think it will be before someone tries converting cells in their intestinal lining into beta cells, or implanting an artificial pancreas made from their own cells? It is very likely that any successes will be unknown, while the first person to inadvertently kill himself while attempting to cure his own diseases with garage-scale biotech will be criticized and demonized worldwide. And that will be the spark falling on dry tinder, as people realize that the cost of biohacking is now low enough to be within reach of ordinary people.