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'Biohacker' Who Injected Himself With DIY Herpes Treatment Found Dead (livescience.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior quotes Live Science:
The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science. Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C., according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28 years old. According to the website News2Share.com, Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are soundproof pods filled with body-temperature saltwater that are used to promote "sensory deprivation."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
In a sensory deprivation tank, nobody can hear you scream...
Cars, Parachutes and gliders are a very well known problem space. It's not terribly hard to find someone in those problem spaces who can tell you if what you're doing is going to kill you. Gene editing is not a well-understood field at this point. We're just poking at things and seeing what happens. Even if you find something that looks like it's going to work, you really need to study that process for years to make sure that all the potential consequences are well understood. We're not at that point yet, and I'd honestly be surprised if it was less than another 2 - 5 decades before we're even remotely certain of anything that modifies human DNA for non-terminal diseases. For all we know at this point, this guy died of turbo-herpes and has introduced turbo-herpes into the ecosystem. That's why we need to be careful with this stuff.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
More like building your own car or parachute. This isn't "non-expert does something that experts do routinely" it's "non-expert attempts something that experts are still trying to figure out how to do safely".
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments. As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments. DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.
I stole this Sig
Cars and parachutes are a poor analogy anyways. This is more like opening up a binary copy of the Linux kernel with a hex editor, and making changes to it with only a very rudimentary knowledge of assembly, and hardly any knowledge of the Linux kernel in general. Screwing up with that means the kernel crashes or something just doesn't work right. Screwing up with CRISPR, assuming something besides nothing at all happens, is going to fail spectacularly...like oh say...cancer formation in multiple major organs simultaneously.
Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
Absolutely. However, the consequences of those very predictable edits is not well understood.
Fortunately, the world is rather Darwinian. Experiment on yourself - if you do manage to create something useful / helpful, great. Otherwise you're likely dead, certainly ill.
Given how many humans are running around trying to do things, it is hardly surprising that wack noodle narcissists will get some media exposure, claim their 15 minutes of fame and then .... explode. Perhaps there will be some sort of middle ground that will use the new techniques and their own knowledge to advance things. Perhaps not.
I do fail to see why people think that just because you're doing something in your garage, you have a leg up on the tens of thousands of grad students and post docs who are working in better equipped labs with more intellectual support. If this stuff were that easy, there would be happy molecular biology departments throughout the world.
It's not easy at all, CRISPR or not.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Right. I don't understand how gene editing works. I do understand how programming works, though. And I understand what happens when some jackass who doesn't understand about programming starts cutting and pasting code around and finds that he's occasionally somewhat successful at getting something to do sort of what he wants it to. We're doing that now with systems more complex than anything humanity has ever built. Given that we can't even change the formulation of soap without accidentally unleashing antibiotic-resistant E-Coli on an unsuspecting world, we really should approach this shit with a little bit of humility and caution.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?