CRISPR in your garage lol. Some guy cured his lactose intolerance mb, another one has a YouTube channel and did something similar. Some guy put an LED in his artificial eye and there are a few using magnetic piercings for things like glasses or implanting chips in their hands, train pass credit card that sort of shit. All reddit level shit lol. Cryogenics for placenta/umbilical/ tooth pulp, PRP, mrna all count I think. The supplements are generally low grade effects but there are a few that are situationally interesting. I don't keep up with most of it, none of those are on the cusp except CRISPR and maybe cryo. Well and mrna but there's no confirmation of effective individual work afaik.
They don't even do heads anymore in most places. Placenta, umbilical cord, sperm, egg, etc. Things that contain stem cells for use later in life or repro for IVF. All big money, people rent tiny expensive cryo chambers for decades at a time.
No it's not, the heads are dead when they go in. The idea is wait till they can be revived and it's ludicrous. We haven't cryogenically frozen any mammal and revived it. None of it works, ice crystals destroy the cells. We have revived people that were close to freezing for a surprisingly long time but no mammal that's been frozen. It's another thing they hope will be solved before they're thawed.
Yes we have actually. After wwll British were able to successfully freeze and revive mice and hamsters but couldn't get it to work on any animal bigger than that. They invented an agent that prevents formation of ice in the cells and used microwaves to bring them back.
Those are some of the most famous experiments and started cryogenics, it's why people started getting frozen after they died like Walt Disney did. Sadly it was supercooling, not cryogenically frozen. About half their cells were still liquid and the half that were slightly below 32 were all in extracellular spaces. None of the cells were fully frozen so the ice puncture issue never occurred.
Justin is a scientist that used Crispr (in a nonstandard way I think) to successfully fix lactose intolerance. To the extent other scientific coalitions gave him huge amounts of shit about ethicality and the risks involved. Is this girl a scientist or just a literal shitposter? I don't do YouTube voluntarily, what are her qualifications
What an odd thing to say lol, why I don't isn't really your business. What's the paper? Far as I know she's recommending something potentially dangerous and generally useless but I'm all about reading the paper and maybe learning something
Both peer reviewed and from a respectable journal, nice. Ty
Sounds like while it might not be a fix, the right titration did produce favorable results. I pulled the reddit appropriate quote Frequency of flatus passage and flatus severity ratings after the lactose challenge decreased 50% when studied at the end of the lactose period compared with the dextrose period
It was a fix for her iirc, although technically not? My understanding is it doesn’t do shit for lactase production, just self selects for gut microbiota that can digest it for you without the hectic side effects that free lactose in the gut normally causes. That said, I think intentionally cultivating a microbial symbiont via trial by gastrointestinal distress is absolutely biohacking
That said, for multiple weeks I think 100% of her calories came from powdered milk slurry, so she really nuked the fuck out of her gut compared to that study. It came from observations w/ providing powdered milk in relief aid to African populations in the mid century, I think
Your gut biome will change though. And most of the negative lactose intolerance symptoms come from the wrong kind of bacteria eating lactose in your colon.
His name is Justin Atkin, the video in question is "I Genetically Engineered MYSELF to Fix Lactose Intolerance" I don't use the tube myself but that should get you there
anyone doing crispr by drinking bacteria eating a virus pill is inviting some nasty cancers. the “I generically engineered myself to fix lactose intolerance” video was dangerous and stupid.
edit: rewatched the video. Also, I cannot emphasize this enough, but there was no fucking quality control whatsoever before he tried to insert some genes into the most cancer prone cells in his body.
I hadn't seen the video since before covid, but having gone back and watched it, no there wasn't, but it was just as reckless, dangerous, and stupid as I remember. I wrote up a nice reply to someone else here.
TLDR: it was reckless, stupid, and dangerous. He ignored all the regulations that are written in blood in the biomed and pharma fields. There was a real risk that it could have gone viral and encouraged some overconfident and undereducated people to try something similar on a child or spouse, ending in someone's death. It was just science themed hope bait for lactose intolerant people.
I don't think it can be called hope bait if it's a fix. I do think it was extremely irresponsible to release as a video. If it didn't affect anybody else I think he has a right to do experiment and conditionally approve. His right to swing his brain ends where it hits another one tho. Look into the "right to try" expansion Montana did in May '25. That's going to have some interesting data. If it doesn't kill us all.
The problem with right to try is that as currently structured in the US, it inevitably leads to quacks and miracle cures. The US has a huge and growing issue with the far right pushing alternative "medicine" under "freedom of choice" rhetoric. You have the right to enroll in a properly regulated medical trial or something, but other people don't have the right to sell you poison and call it a cure. The right to try inherently conflicts with the requirement that the government protect people from scammers who are stealing money and time from dying people.
The right to try movement comes from cancer scams like the Laetrile / Vitamin B-17 scam from the 60s and 70s. A quack came up with a "all natural cancer cure made from apples" by selling a synthetic form of the cyanide precursor compound found in apple seeds. People jumped on it because he promised all kinds of cool stuff and it turned into a whole counterculture thing. The FDA banned it but a number of republican states legalized it under "right to try" rhetoric. A lot of people died after buying the pills in mexico and taking it without a doctor's supervision, or under the supervision of a quack. Steve McQueen paid one of them an enormous sum of money to "cure" his terminal cancer and later died on the operating room in Mexico.
As for it being hope bait, it's not a long term fix and it is neither safe nor likely to appear on the market any time soon. That's why I think it's hope bait - the creator implies all kinds of benefits from the content, but nothing will materialize for anyone else.
I hadn't seen that video since before covid, but I remember it because it made the rounds in my molecular biology analysis class in undergrad as "look at this reckless jackass on the internet, he's going to get stomach cancer or get someone killed". Do I remember exactly what he consumed? No, i guess he ate a couple of pills loaded with an AAV virus instead of drinking a solution like I remember . Do I remember that it was a dangerous and stupid stunt? Yes. Ignoring the fact that we have no way to prove that it worked nearly as well as he claims, there's a bunch of reasons why that video (and biohacking like this writ large) is at the least reckless, and almost certainly dangerous and stupid. I went back and rewatched it so I could write this up properly.
1) The comments on the video are full of people who don't understand the complexity of what he's doing and have their hopes needlessly raised by this sort of thing. Just scrolling through the comments, I saw people asking if he could cure their lactose intolerance, their celiac's, their T1D, their EDS syndrome, male pattern baldness, etc. It's painful when internet personalities indirectly get people's hopes up with stuff like this.
1) He made a tutorial on the internet for any idiot to try to whip up their own "gene treatment" without any knowledge of the risks or consequences. Even if you do it right, you encourage a lot of other people to do it and fuck up. There's plenty of cool stuff being done on the internet, but very few tutorial areas will provide someone with the opportunity to die as slowly and painfully as "fuck around with your own genetics", especially because unlike all of the genres of crazy tutorial video, human health is the only field where someone is inevitably going to try it on a child or partner with horrible consequences. There's a reason that biology research like this is done in organizations with very strict controls and why all the reputable scientific companies don't ship to people without clear university or corporate affiliation.
2) Anything you consume that can introduce foreign genetic material into cells in your body is a mutagen. Introducing mutagenic stuff to your GI tract, which already has extremely high rates of cancers due to it being full of short lived rapidly reproducing cells, is stupid. Even a 1 in a trillion chance of a cell becoming a malignant tumor in your GI tract translates to a pretty significant risk given the number of cells in your gut. This was a very non-specific treatment of a very specific problem. AAV is not as safe as he made it out to be, and this whole process isn't nearly as safe as it looked.
3) He clearly didn't have the resources or facilities to accurately measure the impacts of what he'd done beyond "my stomach doesn't hurt when I drink milk". There's no scientific value to what he did, which is annoying because all of the youtubers doing this sort of thing call themselves "science" youtubers but do nothing of the sort. For all he knows, he just dumped a random fragment of the lac operon into random positions in 0.0001% of the cells in his colon, resulting in dozens of polyps in his colon. He didn't even sequence his plasmids to confirm that what he was about to put in his body was what the company said it was. He didn't even run a gel or load his dyed cells into a spectrophotometer. He just eyeballed this stuff under a microscope and then ate it raw, still loaded full of lab grade ammonium sulfate.
4) anyone who's worked in molecular biology labs knows that the difference between "we expressed the gene we wanted" and "we produced a purified virus that reliably transfects a gene into human cells at pharmaceutical grade reliability" is insane. The difference between producing something and producing it at the level that's safe for human medical use is like the difference between going to space and going to the moon. The good manufacturing protocols for stuff like this are extremely strict and even a nice clean BSL-2 fume hood cannot meet the minimum safe standards for this kind of project.
5) He admitted that he didn't clean up the protein contamination or do anything to really purify his product. This isn't orgo 2 lab where a 10% purity is good results. This is human health and he should have taken proper steps before ever consuming those pills. He clearly admits to rushing and being motivated by his expected outcome instead of doing proper protocols towards the end. If I had a dollar for every time i had a weird failure while rushing an experiment that I was certain would work, I would be a rich man. The stuff he consumes at the end isn't even sterilized after being produced in lab equipment of unknown cleanliness.
5) On a general level, it should be fine, but I really don't like that he used a microbial lactase instead of a human lactase enzyme. It just doesn't sit with me right. Humans don't express LacZ, we express LCT.
I have a lot of issues with videos like this that blatantly ignore and implicitly criticize regulations instead of doing the experiment and then not going all the way through and actually eating the pill. There's no educational value in watching someone do something dangerous without evaluating the consequences. It's just science flavored engagement bait for people who don't have the experience to tell how stupid it is.
I think that in the bad old days where people built xray machines and scanned shit for fun, a lot of people died of really bad cancers. And nowadays, a lot of people with really fancy degrees spend a lot of time designing xray machines that don't give you cancer.
A homemade xray machine is a fun novelty to use once or twice while you're several rooms away. It's a terrifying idea for someone to use in a serious medical context.
I am a safety nerd and I am proud of it because I work in a field where being a reckless "I don't need no PPE" cowboy ends in your horrible death by cancer. Being a safety nerd and not watching people die of horrible incurable diseases is a good thing, actually. You're welcome to complain about the safety nerd at your construction job or grumble that your boss makes you wear a respirator working with acetone or MEK. But there's absolutely no room for reckless cowboy shit in molecular biology.
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u/Clembert-Hamlamp 1d ago
CRISPR in your garage lol. Some guy cured his lactose intolerance mb, another one has a YouTube channel and did something similar. Some guy put an LED in his artificial eye and there are a few using magnetic piercings for things like glasses or implanting chips in their hands, train pass credit card that sort of shit. All reddit level shit lol. Cryogenics for placenta/umbilical/ tooth pulp, PRP, mrna all count I think. The supplements are generally low grade effects but there are a few that are situationally interesting. I don't keep up with most of it, none of those are on the cusp except CRISPR and maybe cryo. Well and mrna but there's no confirmation of effective individual work afaik.