Introduction

I bought presents, by the way. Just like last year. My name is Gabriel. I work for a 501c3 non-profit called Scihouse. I actually made notes. This is a big deal for me. It's going to be different from most of my talks, which is why I'm sitting instead of ranting. What I'm talking about is important, so I've put some effort into it.

I am not really a biohacker anymore. I'm pretty burnt out on that term. If you have a Thermo Fischer account, you're not really hacking biology. If you're buying your materials second hand from someone, then you're not really a biohacker either. Buying from Jimmy Johns doesn't make you a sandwhich hacker. No, you just fucking ordered a sandwhich, so be okay with that.

As much as we would like to pretend we live in a Doctor Sleepless comic, we have to kind of face the facts. That's what this talk is going to be about. I am going to be used certain language.

I am going to talk about how some friends did something really amazing and how we want to share it with you and how we want your participation to move forward on that. The next thing is about outlining some of the flaws we've run into. What would Gabriel be without being hypercritical about things? The third thing is the next big project for me, and I hope for you as well, and how you guys can help. I honestly believe all of you are capable of giving me free labor for this.

Glybera

Gene therapy got approved in the European Union. It deals with lipase deficiency. Glybera. If you're part of this small population, an extremely small popualtion that has this thing, your body is incapable of breaking down triglycerides in a responsible fashion. One of the symptoms of having this disease is that your blood is white because it's so filled with fat. Is that my timer already? Your blood has become white. It's actually really, really bad. It causes a lot of suffering. It's the first gene therapy that was approved in the European Union back in 2015. They put it on the market for $1 million dollars. One person got it, after they put it on the market. They had 38 people that got it as--- they were test subjects. It has been tested in mice, dogs, cats, monkeys, and it's been tested in human beings. It works. But it's $1 million dollars.

It's a million dollars because the pharma companies that-- they didn't build the drug. We think the pharma companies make drugs, but they don't. The pharma companies that were selling the drug decided that this was the price for a therapy that made it so that these people don't suffer anymore. So it got pulled from the market because $1 million-- nobody can pay a million dollars. There was one insurance company in Germany that covered it, for one human being. It was really rough on the academics that created it, because they had no idea this was going to happen. They thought they were going to make something that would actually help a lot of people. Clinical trials happened, and then the super price.

Andreas Strumer one day-- wave, say hi. He's brilliant. He messaged me one day and said let's reverse engineering Glybera. We got a hold of a friend, David Ishee. He is also a brilliant man. He deserves as much time as I do, I'm just louder. So we said, let's do this thing. We used a backbone that was developed by David Ishee. Andreas put together the gene sequence that he then responsibly had printed out by a third party company because building things from scratch in your home lab is stupid and tedious and dumb. I have a mammalian cell lab, so I tested it. Oh my god, it actually works. For the cost of I think all included everything that it took, it cost $7,000 to do this. This was a one time cost. It won't be $7,000 every time. Doing this again is only going to take a handful of pennies. In fact, I brought some to share with everyone.

What you can see here, if you're interested in the data-- and I also have raw data from the machine. Message me, I will send you the excel file and you could get all the information because this is important. This is our standardized curve. We want a professional kit to test this. This is an LPL deficiency kit. Researchers and doctors use this all the time. Here's our standardized curve of the data we should be expecting, and this is what we're calling the DMEM peak, because we're doing mammalian cells. Here's our expression of LPL. Pretty dope, right? It worked. It cost $7,000 and we did it in 2 months.

The new low bar

That's it. This is the new low bar. We have set the low bar for the most basic bullshit biohackers get together and make something that doesn't look like garbage, which might actually work and help people. Good job, team. Yay.

This was developed in a shed in Mississipi. A warehouse in Florida. A bedroom in Indiana and on a computer in Austria because he's in Austria and he does the computer things, and I handle physical things, and neither of us technically break the law. So this is the new low bar.

Focus on things that are important instead of drama and hype, media people.

Step zero is to not inject yourself with this thing. For the love of god, please stop stabbing yourselves. The first step is to get the material tested by others. Which is why I brought it, to get it tested by others. This is the plasmid in ecoli. You can turn it into minicircles or whatever you want. If there's anyone here from a professional university, I have purified plasmids right here. I am sure there's a bored grad student out there, who can prove me wrong, or prove me right. This is called peer review, have you guys heard of that?

I have brought these materials to share with you people so that you can do this as well. I know this is against the biohacker ethic because the primary theme of the biohacker ethic lately has been "eh, I'm going to do something cool that someone else has already done and something something entrepreneurialism". I would like the community to move beyond htat. I would like people to start doing responsible work. We have no splash page for this, we have no investors, it's Creative Commons licensed. Nobody can make any money off of this, but you might do something good for the world.

What's the new big hurdle?

I would like to propose that the biohackers grow up a little bit. We can pump something out like this every 2 months for just a few thousand dollars each time. We need to fix some of our bigger problems. I am an old man who likes to yell at clouds. The next cloud I am yelling at is when Florida is going to get wiped away by a hurricane. Climate change is a big problem. Go stand outside for 10 minutes. Doing Glybera or whatever is masturbatory at this point. It doesn't matter how big your muscles get, you can't eat sand or breath under water. There's no biohack for that.

Right now people are buying into the hype so far, and talking about how great they are, but really they are sitting in their grandmother's basement shooting each other with rubber bands and bragging about making "glowing beer". Cool, but it's super embarrassing. Sorry to burst your bubble.

What we need to understand right now is that this is our cathedral moment. This is our victory gardens for the war for the world. This is a time where we might actually watch our families and our loved ones die in front of us. I'm not being ridiculous here. Look at the data. Anyone who has looked at the data knows that this is the case. This is the time for us to stop dicking around with our petty self-centered projects and actually do something that matters to me. You might not see the benefit, but don't some of you have kids or something? Wouldn't it be great if they didn't die? If you guys don't think that's what about to happen, then you haven't been paying attention to scientific reality and I think it's very irresponsible.

If you don't know what to do about climate change, that's totally okay. How are you supposed to do geoengineering? How are you supposed to respond to being called out? That's fine. Find someone who does know what to do. Tell them, you're willing to put down your petty bullshit and work for them. If you're working on something actually important, then demand work. Tell people, your glowing flowers are shit, come here and transfect plants to make them better. Your glowing flowers aren't going to live if they don't have anywhere to go. Your dogs aren't going to have fields to play in, no matter how healthy you make your dogs. It's kind of important.

All cathedrals look basically like lego blocks made out of giant bricks. You're all here because you're passionate at biohacking. But some of you are really bad at pipetting and also moving liquid back and forth is really boring. It's not for everyone. It doesn't make you feel good, and it's not for everyone. I like it for some reason. But maybe you're good at something else, like accounting. So go join your local lab and offer those skills. Instead of wasting their supplies, help them with accounting and balancing their books. It's terrible to have to have 40 jobs. You don't need to do every job. Every single one of you should delegate. You all have 4 freaking jobs right now. You don't have to be good at everything; just be good at one thing and then work with someone else. Andreas is really good at using snapgene. I have a lifetime subscription to Snapgene, and that's expensive. After watching him work on it, I transferred it over to him. I told him sure, yeah, you're way better at this than me. Andreas does design, and I do wetwork. Between the two of us, we're one functional human being.

That's the take. You don't need to be the entire castle. Nobody should have to bare that entire weight. Maybe you're not good at pipetting, but rather something else.

It's obvious that I am not sugarcoating how I feel about any of this. I believe we have a responsibility as a community and as human beings to face the facts and then act upon them. Everything that you care about is basically useless in the fact of what's going to happen. So give it away, stop selling yourself for pennies and media clicks. Do something bigger than yourself.

For those of you smirking and you're going to go back to your private projects and labs, and you're going to be in a small world of getting funding and selling product. That's how you get the easy dick, that VC dime. You can't buyout the laws of thermodynamics, though. You have to understand that. You can't pay to make a hurricane go away. You can't use geoengineering.

The next slide here was actually supposed to be a movie; but I have no audio so I'm going to read it. We have a higher purpose here. We demand free access to data. It comes with some responsibility. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.

Why is everyone in this room? It's because of "HACK THE PLANET" from the movie Hackers. This is the voice that this community chose to adopt. This isn't about me, it's about who you said you wanted to be. Or at least what someone tried to sell that you could be. You're going to listen to Aubrey de Grey and then later you will talk about Josiah Zayner talking about medical-industrial complex.

Life extension is pretty useless if most people die from extreme weather and drought in the next 30 years.

The same goes for medicine. Having really dope medicine is totally fucking useless if you're just going to starve to death. My friends and I made this, where we try to point out on the regular--- if nobody can enjoy the smug self-satisfaction of doing the right thing, how often do yo uget to do that? You're all passionate people, so put it to use. For yourself, your families and your friends.

We need testing hardware. We need to start working together, getting into groups, understand that not everyone needs to be biohackers. Some people are good at hardware. Some people are good at money. Some people are good at cleaning shit. That's why I have an autoclave- I'm not good at that. I have my project, and other people are working on it with me. There's a poster in there.

If anyone wants to make superpowered plants, I have a gene with me. Anyone who wants it can get a copy. No, I am not going to throw plasmids at everyone, just walk up and get it. This is where it needs to go, though.

Does anyone else here actually care about not dying? Oh, a few more hands. We're so fucked.

Upregulation of certain genes in plants causes an increase in growth and photosynthetic efficiency, greater drought tolerance, greater salinity tolerance. It grows fast and it grows big. We're really wonderful at burning things down, but really shit at growing things. It's a mash-up of permaculture techniques but without the hippy nonsense. It's like from the sugarcane industry, without the boot stomping in your face.

Aloza is amazing. It caused a snowball earth event in geological history. I'm not saying you should do this, you should totally not cover the great lakes in a microfern that doubles it mass in 8 days, and it would suck carbon out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum. That would be super irresponsible, don't do that.

The number of people on the planet isn't the problem. It's that y'alls are stupids. Have less stupid babies. The thing is, I don't think I'm in the top 2.5% of the long tail of the bail curve. Stupid means almost everything in that 95 percentile. There's been people talking about community building: hwy don't we work on developing communities where greed is no longer useful? You don't have to be good at biohacking, you can be good at other things and that's okay.

Q: How should patients reach your glybera?

I did one test, and your question is when it is going to patients. That's super irresponsible. I don't have a plan. I need more data. I can't even responsibly say that it works, with just my one data point. We're so far away, not in a 13 years of clinical trials type of way, but I'm just one person with a set of data points. It's totally irresponsible for me to say "well I got some good data, I guess the next step is to inject someone". That's not how it should work. I think that's part of the problem. We're so frantic to get away from the regulatory systems that already exist that we're running hard in the opposite direction into Mad Max yeah I'm just going to-- in 3-5 years I'm going to be stabbing all sorts of people? It doesn't make any sense man. I need more data. I don't know.

Q: If the data is good, what are you going to do?

I'd like to work with the FDA. There's pre-existing infrastructure that allow you to do this.

Q: No, I mean you personally. You were complaining about masturbatory projects.

I'm going to hand it over to someone way more competent at scaling and then walk away from the project. That's not what I do. So once we get better data, someone else can have it and run with it because that's not my job. I do research.

Extinction events are usually 95% all species die. If you think you're going to be in that 5% that doesn't die, you're insane. We have killed off 80% of the fish, intersects and the terrestrial mammals. The data speaks for itself. Does anyone here remember driving a car 40 years ago as a child, and how you had to stop at a gas station and clean off the windshield? It's not required anymore. Those insects are gone. It's different now, and you know it. Things are bad. We should acknowledge that.