Yet when I asked a lot of “average” people — people who weren’t part of my circle — what they would do with the kind of self-transformative power that may perhaps be ours to wield, I was increasingly appalled. The jocks I talked to wanted to be bigger and stronger so they could beat the shit out of everybody else; the women wanted to morph into their ideal role models. I began to realize that what most people wanted was conformity; their “ideals” would turn us into a world of underachieving Nicole Kidmans and eight-foot Brad Pitts, identical cut-outs with no individualism.

My previous rather naive notion that biotechnology would free us from the tyranny of “normalcy,” that we could become anything we wanted, morph ourselves into elongated, blue-skinned, orange-haired, sixteen-fingered geniuses or perhaps flying ribbons of sensual bliss that performed acrobatic choreographies above the sunset, was a very utopian and, as it turns out, unpopular dream. Individuality or creative improvisation is the last thing most people want. So Botox is really a dreadful symptom of a new, radical mundanity enabled by biotechnology. And that’s disillusioning.

H+: Botox Parties, Michael Jackson, and the Disillusioned Transhumanist

This has been in my virtual “to read” pile for a long time. It’s more interesting than I expected.

If we eventually decide that neuroenhancers work, and are basically safe, will we one day enforce their use? Lawmakers might compel certain workers—emergency-room doctors, air-traffic controllers—to take them. (Indeed, the Air Force already makes modafinil available to pilots embarking on long missions.)

New Yorker: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

I tried piracetam in college, but between the cost (I had to order it from Biogenesis Labs and the way it made my stomach feel, I didn’t think it was worth the slight boost.

I have found that Biotest Laboratory’s Spike is an effective “cognitive enhancer,” however. I used it during both Esozones to keep alert and productive on very little sleep under high pressure circumstances. You used to be able to buy it at GNC, but it seems they don’t carry it any more. You can still buy it online. I didn’t find the energy drink they market to be as effective as the pills.

Spike’s “secret sauce” is “thiamine di(2-methylpropionate) disulfide.” It sounds fancy, and they make an effort to make it appear they have something new and exclusive, but it’s really just a chemical name for sulbutiamine, which has been around since the classic Smart Drugs book and was reviewed in Mondo 2000.

Although it’s old, by no means do I consider this product “safe” - use at your own risk.

In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.

These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.

But are biohackers a threat to national security? [...]

The man on the other end of the line was Nils Gilman, a researcher with Monitor 360, a San Francisco company that provides “geo-strategic” research. Mr. Gilman declined to identify his client, saying only that it’s a branch of the U.S. government involved in biosecurity. “I think they want to know, is this something we need to worry about?” he said — particularly, could the biohackers’ gadgets and methods, in the wrong hands, create dangerous pathogens?

Wall Street Journal: In Attics and Closets, ‘Biohackers’ Discover Their Inner Frankenstein

Dan Gilmore guest post at BB:

That’s great. Except for one thing, which the article completely misses: You won’t find too many people in their middle ages or older in this category. Why? Because they can’t get health insurance. America’s health-care system makes it all but impossible for an older worker to try something new.

Even younger startup owners who are relatively healthy and have insurance are just a half-step from disaster. The insurance industry is in the business of not paying claims whenever possible, after all, and health insurers are working hardest to find ways not to cover people who might get sick even as they deny as many claims as possible from people who’ve been paying premiums.

The day we have national health care is the day that we unleash a wave of entrepreneurship the likes of which we’ve never seen before. That’s one of the best reasons for moving toward such a system.

Full Story: Boing Boing

You know what I’m sick of? Bullshit medical “journalism”.

Where some fucking doctor in LA tries to hype up his IVF clinic by calling it a designer baby factory; just so that when Paris cunting Hilton decides it’s time to procreate, and thusly have her indentured servant carry the perfect anti-Christ to term, she’ll look this guy up.

So he puts out a press-release.

And the BBC picks it up and gets blue-sky quotes from Dr Gillian Lockwood, a “UK fertility expert” and member of the “Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ ethics committee” [...]

China didn’t need any fancy tech to get a roughly 20million strong population gap between males and females. They just threw out the girls.

Selection isn’t the same thing as design. Sure, it’s good to talk and workshop future ethical scenarios, but don’t make that the focus of your story. Please. Because when we actually can design life, blue eyes will be the last thing anyone will be asking for. Or, it will be the most boring thing, anyway.

You can worry about the missing green-eyed, I’ll be asking for a chameleon DNA-splice.

Full Story: Grinding

So I wanted to put together a simple example of a bio reactor using simple off the shelf parts and aquarium parts available from nearly any big chain store to make a simple reactor on the cheap. This is the most basic algae reactor design overall and while I used some glass containers for my reactor other ideal containers would be an empty 2 leader bottle or plastic milk jug. This design is really perfect for backup cultures or to keep unique strings of algae’s to start larger reactors off. Using simple off the shelf parts and aquarium parts available from nearly any big chain store these days you can make this simple reactor on the cheap.

Instructions and more projects: AlgaeGeek

(via Grinding)

he Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly. [...]

Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow.

Cowell said such unfettered creativity could produce important discoveries.

“We should try to make science more sexy and more fun and more like a game,” he said.

Full Story: AP

(via Cryptogon)

See also: Biopunk: the biotechnology black market

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

“I was very surprised,” said the doctor, Gero Hütter.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn’t an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient’s bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Full Story: Wall Street Journal

(via Grinding)

R.U. Sirius, the editor of the seminal Mondo 2000 and about a billion other things is back with a new project: H+, a transhumanist web magazine. The first issue include Aubrey de Grey, Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, and much more.

H+

(via Dose Nation)

Funny thing about DNA science: when huge breakthroughs get proclaimed, they generally only lead to more questions and collapse into hype upon any serious scrutiny.� Likewise, when baffling new mysteries are announced, they tend to point the way towards a fuller understanding of the DNA cipher. Case in point — this weekend’s headline, Mysterious DNA Found to Survive Eons of Evolution.

The precise term is “ultraconserved sequences,” and as one observer on the RI forum eloquently summarized it, “this mutation-free DNA has shared eveolutionary benefits through out the entire class Mammilia without producing a visible or identifiable shared characteristic.” More meat from the article itself:

…about 500 regions of our DNA have apparently remained intact throughout the history of mammalian evolution, or the past 80 million to 100 million years, basically free of mutations. The researchers call these mystery snippets “ultraconserved regions,” and found that they are about 300 times less likely than other regions of the genome to be lost during the course of mammalian evolution.� “These regions seem to be under intense purifying selection - almost no mutations take hold permanently,” said researcher Gill Bejerano.

Technoccult readers might also be interested in the lucid heresy of Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz, author of the Fractogene website. This new discovery connects quite perfectly with the Pellionisz theory that genes aren’t a sequential list of instructions but rather a fractal and iterative template for organic growth. I would also highly recommend the work of Chris King, who’s been making the same assertion about the fabric of the entire universe.� He recently published a dense but readable 7 page summary of his work, Why the Universe is Fractal, that’s worth printing out and chewing over.

Scientists are reporting today that they have overcome a major obstacle to using a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells, bolstering the prospects for bypassing the political and ethical tempest that has embroiled hopes for a new generation of medical treatments.

The researchers said they found a safe way to coax adult cells to regress into an embryonic state, alleviating what had been the most worrisome uncertainty about developing the cells into potential cures.

Full Story: Washington Post

(Thanks Nick!)

A collaboration of various medical researchers in the academic field has led to proof that pacemakers can be remotely hacked with simple and accessible equipment. [Kevin Fu], an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, led the team. [Kevin] first tried to get documentation from the manufacturers, believing they would support the effort, but they were not interested in helping. They were forced to get access to an old pacemaker and reverse engineer it. They found that the communication protocol used to remotely program the device was unencrypted. They then used a GNU radio system to find access to some of the machine’s reprogrammable functions, including accessing patient data and even turning it off.

Full Story: Hack a Day

It “doesn’t look like something you’d want dripping into your veins,” wrote Wil McCarthy in the August 2002 issue of Wired. At the time, he had no way of knowing just how right he was about Hemopure, the artificial blood that seemed so promising. It was universally compatible and had a three-year shelf life (unrefrigerated). But a recent meta-analysis of trials on several substitutes - including Hemopure - contains some gory results. Turns out, the fake bloods scavenge nitric oxide, causing vasoconstriction; patients who get them are 2.7 times more likely to have a heart attack and 30 percent more likely to die. A Journal of the American Medical Association editorial has called for a halt to trials.

From: Wired

(via Grinding)

Five pit bull terrier puppies have been born in the world’s first cloning of a pet dog for a paying customer.

They are the genetic doubles of Booger, a pit bull whose death from cancer two years ago left his owner Bernann McKinney so bereft that she sold her house to raise the �25,000 needed to - in her eyes - bring him back to life. [...]

RNL Bio, the Seoul cloning company, said the process was so straightforward it could clone 300 dogs a year for bereaved pet owners around the world.

Duplicate camels for Middle Eastern customers also figure in RNL Bio’s plans.
Animal charities last night condemned the practice as �abhorrent’

Full Story: Daily Mail

(via Robot Wisdom)

Tissue engineers are ambitious. If they had their way, a dialysis patient could receive a new kidney made in the lab from his own cells, instead of waiting for a donor organ that his immune system might reject. Likewise, a diabetic could, with grafts of lab-made pancreatic tissue, be given the ability to make insulin again. But tissue engineering has stalled in part because bioengineers haven’t been able to replicate the structural complexity of human tissues. Now researchers have taken an important first step toward building complex tissues from the bottom up by creating what they call living Legos. These building blocks, biofriendly gels of various shapes studded with cells, can self-assemble into complex structures resembling those found in tissues.

Full Story: Technology Review

(via Kurzweil)

One of the two French research students found dead in a burnt-out London flat had been stabbed 196 times, the detective leading the murder investigation said today. His friend had 47 separate injuries.

[...]

An Imperial College spokesman said that Mr Bonomo was studying a parasite which can spread from cats to human foetuses. Mr Ferez’s research was into bacteria which create ethanol for use as fuel.

Full Story: Times

(via Cryptogon)

Two fascinating projects:

Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell:

cells were very different when life began 3.5 billion to four billion years ago. Rather than small metropolises, they were more like a purse that carried instructions-consisting of just a membrane with genetic information inside. They lacked the structures and proteins that now make them tick. The question is: How then were they able to take in the nutrients necessary to survive and reproduce?

Harvard Medical School researchers report in Nature that they have built a model of what they believe the very first living cell may have looked like, which contains a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane. The membranes of modern cells consist of a double layer of fatty acids known as phospholipids. But in designing a membrane for their cell, scientists worked with much simpler fatty acids that they believe existed on a primeval Earth, when the first cell likely formed. The key, says study co-author Jack Szostak, a Harvard geneticist, was to develop one porous enough to let in needed nutrients (such as nucleotides, the units that make up genetic material, or DNA) but strong enough to protect the genetic material inside and keep it from slipping out after replicating.

(via Kurzeil)

A New Step In Evolution:

Lenski and his colleagues have witnessed a significant change. And their new paper makes clear that just because the odds of such a significant change are incredibly rare doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. Natural selection, in fact, ensures that sometimes it does. And, finally, it demonstrates that after twenty years, Lenski’s invisible dynasty still has some surprises in store.

(via OVO)

Scientists have created what is believed to be the first genetically modified (GM) human embryo.

A team from Cornell University in New York produced the GM embryo to study how early cells and diseases develop. It was destroyed after five days.

The British regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has warned that such controversial experiments cause ‘large ethical and public interest issues’.

Full Story: Times Online

(via Wired Science)

We live in exciting times.

“There are wars going on in London to get the oil,” said Tom Lasica, who runs Pure Fuels, London’s largest refiner of vegetable oil. “Spanish and German companies are moving in to buy up British used vegetable oil. People are stealing it from each other and selling it abroad. We heard that one fish and chip shop in Southend was broken into just to steal the waste oil.”

Full Story: Guardian

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week’s In Vitro Meat Symposium in �s, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.

Full Story: Wired

(via Grinding)

Combining animal and human genes provokes unease among some philosophers, theologians, and ordinary citizens. Currently, scientists want to inject the nuclei of human cells into animal eggs-generally from cows and rabbits–that have been stripped of their nuclei to create cell hybrids, or cybrids. Human eggs are hard to come by and expensive whereas animal eggs are plentiful and cheap. The aim is to produce embryonic stem cells for research.

No one knows if such cybrid embryos might grow into human babies if implanted in an appropriate womb. Would such cybrid babies suffer some physical or mental problems as a result of their animal genetic heritage? That heritage would basically be the energy producing mitochondria derived from the cytoplasm of the animal cells into which the human nuclei were inserted. Since cows and rabbits live much shorter lives than do humans it might be that any cybrid humans with cow or rabbit mitochondria would not live as long as normal humans. In addition, the operation of animal mitochondria in cybrids might mimic some mutational mitochondrial diseases that already afflict people. These real risks of creating physically and mentally diminished human beings mean that it would be immoral to grow human-animal cybrids into full-term babies.

But let’s flip the question-instead of diminishing humans, what about uplifting animals by boosting their intelligence and physical dexterity? Uplifting animals to human-like sapience has been explored by many speculative writers. For example, in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), humanized animals are commanded to follow Moreau’s law: “Not to go on all-fours; Not to suck up Drink; Not to eat Fish or Flesh; Not to claw the Bark of Trees; Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” But they are not Men and they eventually revert to their beast natures and destroy their hubristic creator. Even worse is Pierre Boulle’s novel, The Planet of the Apes (1963), in which uplifted apes are now the masters of animal-like degenerate humans. On the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia (1975), the underpeople, humanlike beings created from animals, struggle for their rights and are morally superior in many respects to their human masters.

Full Story: Reason.

Take the test.

I scored as a Transhumanist: Biotech, but I wish there was more room for “maybe” or “unsure.”

I hate to admit it, but sometimes I do learn things from OldMedia. Take the the recent episode of the Australian 60 Minutes about body modification, ‘Freaking Out’. Sure, it had the same examples of body-moding we’ve all been seeing for years. But it also featured an interview with Steve Haworth, who I’m ashamed to admit, I’d previously been completely ignorant of. This part of the transcript introduces him:

“PETER OVERTON: If body modification is an art form, then Steve Haworth is a modern master. In a makeshift surgery at his home in Arizona he transforms thousands of individuals helping them find their inner freak. Remarkably, he has no formal medical qualifications, and is entirely self-taught.”

Full Story: Grinding.

Pictured above: my friend Rex Church, who is one of Haworth’s clients.

Progress on the road to regenerating major body parts, salamander-style, could transform the treatment of amputations and major wounds

The gold standard for limb regeneration is the salamander, which can grow perfect replacements for lost body parts throughout its lifetime. Understanding how can provide a road map for human limb regeneration.

The early responses of tissues at an amputation site are not that different in salamanders and in humans, but eventually human tissues form a scar, whereas the salamander’s reactivate an embryonic development program to build a new limb.

Learning to control the human wound environment to trigger salamanderlike healing could make it possible to regenerate large body parts.

Full Story: Scientific American.

(via Grinding).

Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

Full Story: Comcast.

(Thanks Bill).