
Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR - crypto-jeronimo
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/this-biohacker-wants-to-edit-his-own-dna
======
bluedevil2k
"I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving
themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself."

Ok, scary thought already. But, casting aside all the safety concerns, how
many attributes would someone in general want to change as an adult? You can't
change your height, you can't change your hair color, you can't change your
eyes. Is a myostatin-inhibitor going to be the "killer app" of DIY Crispr, so
we can all look like a Belgian Blue cow?

~~~
nomel
How about genes involved in the production of dopamine, maybe to help chronic
depression. Or neuron growth, wakefullness, testosterone production, etc.

As adults, we're still chemical machines. There are a million knobs to tweak.

~~~
bluedevil2k
Your examples lean towards the "managed by a trained physician", which would
make sense. Treat depression, reverse neurodegenerative disorders, sure, a Dr
can oversee that and treat that.

I was referring specifically to the DIY crowd, which this articles discusses.
Things a Dr would say "no, I'm not going to help you with that". Or as the
quote discusses, things a drunk person would say "I think this is a good
idea".

~~~
yayana
Definitely these are not extreme joy riding, but I don't think an ethical
doctor would help with highly above normal neuron growth, wakefulness,
testosterone, or get involved with experiments starting from near normal
levels in a patient. They might have some serious problems with a medical
board.

It's a bizarre case that doctors will help normal people (journalists)
experiment with some levels of sport doping, but it comes from knowing a
little about the experimental professional sport dopers (where doctors try to
stay anonymous.)

To give a different example, what about an anorexic that wants their genes to
ensure their desired body image, i.e. 0 retention of normal fat? (Personally,
I would be more concerned about bulk experiments in the beauty salons than the
tattoo parlours.)

------
alevskaya
What is it about biology that attracts crazy people? As a profession genetic
engineer (I've worked on successful engineered CAR-T cell therapy startups,
etc.) the most appalling thing about this isn't the hubris or defiance of
norms. It's how sloppy and technically laughable all of these preparations and
experiments are from a biological point of view - both in terms of what I know
about the viral/crispr vector design as well as the biological targets chosen
(you're not going to do much by sparsely manipulating myostatin that way as an
adult!). This is technical incompetence attempting to masquerade itself as
maverick, edgy research for press attention. If you want to be a "biohacker":
make a high-penetrance GFP/mCherry tattoo visible to the eye on a patch of
your skin that doesn't get rejected by the immune system. i.e. Why take
seriously claims about building a supercomputer from people that can't even
wire up an 8-bit toy?

~~~
xkcd-sucks
The pros are worried about career prospects should they publish something
pearl-clutchers deem "unethical."

There certainly at least three grad students who have transformed skin cells
w/ eGFP (very very low efficiency w/ Lipofectamine) and one with a cosmetic
tumor (later removed after it grew too much)

------
MiddleEndian
Regardless of how well this particular case works, I'm in favor of people
being able to modify their bodies as they see fit. If he wants to become more
muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right.

Unfortunately, I could see things like this becoming illegal solely because
they help people play sports too well.

~~~
beaconstudios
I think the ethics on this wander close to the ethics of personal drug
consumption, or at least smoking. Sure, it's his body and he should have
personal autonomy, but there's a possibility (maybe high, maybe low, I don't
know) that he could end up sick and reliant on others (medical professionals,
family). I know its slightly different in the US what with the lack of
socialised medicine, but it seems reasonable for society to place some
restrictions on this behavior to deter or limit the potential impact on
society at large. Personally, I lean more towards permitting experimentation
but there's an argument to be made there.

~~~
phkahler
> he could end up sick and reliant on others...

He could also get that way from driving a car, being thrown from a horse, or
any number of activities that are a personal choice.

Maybe a bunch of people try this and end up with terrible side effects.
Researchers will still be interested in the results if they know what a person
did to themself. And then maybe some of them will have good results and then
we'll all know. It's a mixed bag and probably a very tiny percent of the
population. I say let em go for it.

~~~
beaconstudios
So do I, but I'm accepting it on the belief that the benefit to liberty is
greater than the cost to society and potentially themselves. I don't think
amateur injections would provide any meaningful data due to the sample size of
1 plus most likely lower standards of protocol and rigour. But you need a damn
good reason to curtail individual liberty.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
2017 but also here's a bit of follow up on Josiah:

>So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical’s CEO injecting himself on a live-
stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of
recognition.

>Ascendance Bio soon fell apart in almost comical fashion. The company’s own
biohackers—who created the treatment but who were not being paid—revolted and
the CEO locked himself in a lab. Even before all that, the company had another
man inject himself with an untested HIV treatment on Facebook Live. And just
days after the pants-less herpes treatment stunt, another biohacker who shared
lab space with Ascendance posted a video detailing a self-created gene therapy
for lactose intolerance. The stakes in biohacking seem to be getting higher
and higher.

>“Honestly, I kind of blame myself,” Zayner told me recently. He’s been in a
soul-searching mood; he recently had a kid and the backlash to the CRISPR
stunt in October had been getting to him. “There’s no doubt in my mind that
somebody is going to end up hurt eventually,” he said.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacki...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacking-
stunts-crispr/553511/)

~~~
beaconstudios
Self experimentation has a long history within medical science so I don't
think it's too alarming.

------
SSchick
> Biohacker

I find this highly concerning, biological organisms are orders of magnitude
more complicated than man made hardware and software. I think all he will
achieve is either giving himself an infection or cancer.

~~~
interlocutor
Yes, highly concerning but not because biological organisms are more
complicated, but because biological organisms reproduce. Any "hacking" mistake
will reproduce for eternity.

~~~
peteey
Only changes to the gamete cells (sperm and eggs) will move on to the next
generation.

You can change the DNA of specific cells. A change in you skin cell's DNA will
not propagate to your bone cells. The skin cell has instructions to make a
bone cell, but skin cells do not make use of that part of the code.

~~~
Someone
_”The skin cell has instructions to make a bone cell, but skin cells do not
make use of that part of the code.”_

The scary thing is that it may require only a small change to change that.
Muscle cells also have instructions to make bone and do not make use of that
code, except when things go wrong as in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_prog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva)

------
UltimateFloofy
I am all for self-experimentation, however, when it exposes risk to humanity,
I think we should tread carefully. In the long run, will these genes or other
self-experiments be introduced into the global genome with unintended
consequences?

~~~
jerf
The probability of that is basically the same as the probability of an
already-existing known deleterious mutation being transmitted into the "global
genome". Only if he has children in the future, and not necessarily even then.

Gene changes aren't intrinsically infectious; they're only infectious at all
because we tend to modify infectious organisms to carry our changes (e.g.,
viral gene therapy).

------
codeulike
This was over a year ago, I posted it at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021738)

His reasons for doing it seem a bit confused. But one interesting point he
makes it that it's not particularly expensive or difficult to brew up some
CRISPR. If this guy can do it in his garage, imagine what's going on in secret
labs elsewhere.

------
kyrra
It likely it didn't do anything if a previous study on this was correct[0]. It
showed that possibly 96% of people have a pre-existing immunity to CRISPR-
Cas9.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334240)

~~~
harias
The first comment on that page says otherwise. Apparently, there are
workarounds.

~~~
kyrra
Thanks! I somehow missed that.

------
bronzeage
This shouldn't be legal. If people fuck themselves up the worst case isn't
just them dying, they can accidently unleash a virus. Pretty unlikely, but
just the smallest possibility is still too much when the outcome can be so
bad.

It's not unreasonable that tinkering with dna will unleash some dormant
retrovirus.

~~~
tectonic
That seems unlikely to me.

What does seem likely is that they give both themselves and their germ line a
genetic mutation. Editing yourself and then having children would be
incredibly irresponsible. If you affect your germ cells, you're not just
editing yourself, but all of your descendants.

~~~
nexuist
if you can edit yourself to change your genes....can't your children edit
themselves to fix whatever you mess up? Or to just revert to normal genes,
regardless of what their parents had?

------
java_script
I hope David Cronenberg makes a movie about him.

------
sgt101
I don't know anything about gene editing, but is there any chance that doing
this could cut loose viruses buried in the human genome?

~~~
sgt101
This is a genuine question! Does anyone know, and if it can't why can't it?

------
rrggrr
Transmissible CRISPR gene edits are not impossible (Paywall link below).
Vectors for these edits probably aren't limited to injection. Which makes me
wonder if the obsession over 3D printed firearms ought to share a bit of
worryshare with do-it-youself genome editing.

[https://www.genomeweb.com/gene-silencinggene-
editing/paper-o...](https://www.genomeweb.com/gene-silencinggene-
editing/paper-outlines-scheme-create-transmissible-crisprcas9-gene-edits)

~~~
beaconstudios
The problem is that neither of these things can truly be prevented without
introducing totalitarian state measures.

------
searine
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

------
thrillgore
This is how that movie starts, where it ends with cancer becoming airborne,
contagious, and terminal in hours.

