Throughout history, people have experimented and performed various procedures on themselves. They tried different foods and medical remedies, underwent diverse rituals, and so on. In some cases, such experimentation even had significant scientific value. For example, one article cites 465 instances where researchers tested disease pathogens, tried new drugs, or performed other procedures on themselves. And although 8 of these cases ended in death, indicating a certain level of risk in such experiments, the vast majority (89%) led to positive results—confirmation of previously proposed hypotheses or the acquisition of valuable data.
Of course, today there is a negative attitude toward such experimentation, and toward independent intervention in the human body and health in general. State regulation has played a huge role in this, imposing strict restrictions on what a person can and cannot do, often insisting and deciding on behalf of ordinary people that this is allegedly safer. The state has done everything to ensure that biomedical experiments and procedures do not take place outside of approved institutions.
However, none of this has prevented the existence of biohacking. First of all, it should be noted that many means for its implementation are very common and not regulated at all, being simply bioactive supplements. No one can forbid you, based on current research or biohacking books, from purchasing certain vitamins or nootropics and taking them in the specified dosages and manner, let alone modifying your lifestyle or diet based on experimental data or even hypothetical assumptions. By the way, a good collection of useful tools and practices can be found in Daria Babkina’s book “Brain Biohacking: How to Manage Neurochemistry, Emotions, and Intelligence,” which was released this year.
But the matter doesn’t end there. Modern technologies make it possible to organize entire genetic laboratories at home, and there are already ready-made solutions for this. For example, for just 3,000 dollars, you can purchase a home laboratory with all the additions for bioengineering from “The Odin” (and educational kits for simple experiments cost only hundreds of dollars). You don’t have to go far for instructions on what exactly to do with such a laboratory—you can simply replicate step-by-step what has been done in various studies. This is exactly what one biohacker did—whose video you can see here—to correct his lactose intolerance; he simply recreated a gene therapy drug from an experiment on mice and tested it on himself. The result was excellent—a single pill allows for the free consumption of dairy products for over a year without experiencing any negative consequences whatsoever.
Considering how deeply modern science is stuck in countless regulations and the need to wait for state approval, sometimes even for decades, biohacking can give a boost to progress in the field of biotechnology, especially if we are talking about solutions that people need here and now to treat their diseases and various conditions that cause discomfort but do not yet have a sufficiently effective solution among those approved and allowed on the market by the state regulator.
Is there a danger in this? Naturally, among those engaged in biohacking, undesirable outcomes will sometimes occur. But people have every right to voluntarily assume such a risk, and an attempt to introduce a total ban on self-experimentation would not be justified, and to a large extent, would not even be feasible. Even now, there are fully approved activities that carry huge risks, such as extreme sports. And if a person can choose to do base jumping, rock climbing, or motocross, then why can’t they choose to control the biochemical processes of their own body, or even edit their genome?
