Here is where I immediately have a red flag from the author:<p>"sometimes I hide the fact that I have PhD because I don't want it to be a symbol of authority or intelligence for myself"<p>yet, at the top of the site "Josiah Zayner, PhD"."<p>well, which one is it Josiah?
Can any biologist confirm there is some actual science going on there? (otherwise, we should flag this).<p>The live-stream is no longer available. The main documentary output seems to be here <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SracILuRbiZt4f7EVH2JBvefaHmsOUsC" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SracILuRbiZt4f7EVH2J...</a>
This sentiment is not unique to biomedicine. It's pretty often you see people finger elitism or capitalism for screwing people over because "I can make it myself."<p>Ethically, you are more than welcome to experiment on yourself. That's your prerogative. But, as has already been expressed here, the issue is once you start giving your creation to others. Even when the science is conceptually very simple, like in the case of nucleic acid vaccines, a huge number of variables can impact the safety and efficacy endpoints for the recipient. That's why trials and regulation are essential.<p>Are these regulatory systems perfect? Absolutely not (they are in dire need of reform). But they form an essential safety barrier for the general public. Decrying them as class warfare is incredibly naive.
This was flagged (I don't know why), but it seems like a very interesting article to me and would like to read the discussion here, so I vouched for it. I don't know enough about the science to opine on the content, but I think it's worth a second chance.
> I know it sounds a bit dramatic but there really is a class war going on. [...] Your life, your child’s life, your mother, your loved one depends on how much money you make. The government and Pharma companies aren’t going to help you when you can’t afford it either.<p>> If one were to replicate the experiment from scratch, the total individual cost would end up being around $3500, the major costs being $1600 for DNA synthesis and $1200 for the kits to measure coronavirus spike protein antibodies.<p>Ah yes, fighting the good fight by spending several thousand dollars of disposable income on your hobby, to show people that the government-subsidized vaccine is class violence. :)
I think he wants to spread awareness that people in power can use technology and medicine to widen the class divide, and biotechnology shows signs of going that direction.<p>I think that a biohackers’ line of reasoning goes: the same way that some pills once existed as ground-up herbs, today’s biotech (and vaccines) started as ground-up biomaterial.<p>Of course people have been hurt from eating herbs and injecting biomaterial, so testing and quality control will always be a massive issue.<p>I still see a biohackers’ rebuttal, however: sometimes people are hurt by their own cooking, or restaurant food, so the issue of quality control among mass-distributed biomaterial is not totally new, and not insurmountable.
> All three of us developed SARS-CoV2 spike protein neutralizing antibodies. I still can't fucking believe it. Not only did we create and test a successful vaccine, we showed that we could get a gene therapy to work (a DNA vaccine changes the DNA in your cells and so is a gene therapy also)<p>Seems incredibly dangerous. What if 3 years from now, he realizes the changes he made are crashing his immune system? There is no "undo" button.
Is the immune response as strong as in individuals receiving one of the approved vaccines? From what I’ve read about the mRNA one, what stood out was the fine tuning they applied to the sequence so that the effect is much stronger than what would be obtained by just using the virus sequence directly. Sounds like that would be lacking here.
um. biontech made their vaccine in a couple of hours. thats not where the problem is at. pfizer's role. is logistics(run trials involving 50k ppl) and manufacturing(how do you make a billion doses?).
An interesting bit...<p>"I know it sounds a bit dramatic but there really is a class war going on. There is a group of people who are actively making choices that cause a disproportionate amount of deaths among those in lower social classes."<p>Thoughts?