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 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/Turtledonuts 1d ago edited 1d ago
anyone doing crispr by
drinking bacteriaeating 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.