Writer's Block Magazine

New bodies are coming — DIY mutants who will wield the language of DNA like poets, creatively rewriting their own genetic structures at will. At least, that’s how biohackers see the future. The biohacking movement made its dramatic entry into public debates on the future of medical science and healthcare in 2017, when startup company Ascendence Biomedical had its first test subject, a nobody software engineer named Tristan Roberts, livestream on Facebook how he voluntarily injected himself with an untested gene-therapy, designed as a cure for HIV. None of the people involved in this experiment were medical professionals; the employees of Ascendence Biomedical described themselves as “citizen scientists” and the livestream showed Roberts injecting himself while lying on his living room sofa. Although bioethicists and various other commentators working in the field of public health policy were quick to label the experiment as anywhere from risky to delusional and even dangerous, since it might inspire others to try such unsupervised medical interventions, the unprofessional edge was part of their message: biohackers see themselves as the punks of the medical sciences.

Biohacking brings together a hacker ethos of freedom of information and anti-authoritarianism with transhumanism, a philosophy of transcending the limitations of human bodies and minds, usually through technological modifications. The do-it-yourself approach of biohackers rebels against a medical establishment they find inefficient and paternalistic; to them, the complex rules and regulations installed to ensure the safety, effectiveness, and ethics of medications are nothing but blockades, hindering new therapeutic drugs from getting to the market and denying people a more open choice on what kinds of treatment to take. Although biohacking may forward a partially valid critique of the authorial role of medical institutions in our lives, I wonder how its DIY character may slip easily into an anarcho-capitalist mindset in which individual freedom of choice and technological innovation are valued more highly than a broad, societal commitment to providing adequate care to those who need it. To navigate these competing conceptions of innovation and regulation, as well as cure and care, I’ve been re-reading stories about mad scientists, particularly getting hung up on the Gothic monster-making in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). As fictional ancestors of modern biohackers, Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau can help better understand the life story of Tristan Roberts and all it might foreshadow about the future of DIY genetic experimentation.

Roberts suffered from HIV, a virus modern medicine has not been able to eradicate. Pessimistic about the chances of a cure coming on the market anytime soon, the unregulated, unapproved gene-therapy Ascendence Biomedical offered him seemed appealing. The mysterious biohacker company was a research startup that didn’t produce for commercial use, and was therefore not hindered by the obstacles of institutionalized medicine; approval procedures for new medications can take up to 15 years and the costs average around 2.6 billion dollars, which studies show discourages innovation in healthcare. Rather than having to make do with whatever drugs medical policy allowed him to purchase, Roberts chose to leave the world of regulated medicine behind and took his chances with the wild experimentation of Ascendence Biomedical.

The conflict between the promises of experimental innovation and the demands of medical institutions leads biohackers to dream of cures that might exist outside the norms of conventional medical science. The fantasy of such fringe medicine originates in the late nineteenth century, when medical science as a regulated field of specialists first emerged. It is in this milieu that a fictional character like doctor Henry Jekyll, the mad scientist at the center of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, becomes relevant.

Jekyll is a transitional figure, with one foot still in the era of wealthy gentlemen scientists, who spent their free time conducting self-funded research in homemade labs, and the other in a new professionalized environment where modern distinctions between science and pseudoscience were slowly beginning to crystallize. The central drama of his character, then, lies in how the “narrow and material views” of his shortsighted colleagues cannot offer release from his affliction. Jekyll struggles with the self-indulgent urges and aggressive behaviors he constantly needs to repress in order to fulfill his social role as a gentleman of the Victorian era. Although not chronically ill in the same way as Roberts is, Jekyll still finds himself caught up in a similar feverish longing for a cure not yet in existence. And like Roberts, Jekyll takes to his home laboratory in order to go beyond what accepted medical practice allows. Alchemically mixing different arcane powders, he cooks up a “transcendental medicine” that exposes the “mist-like transience” of his “seemingly so solid body;” the potion enables him to transform at will into a monstrous twin who goes by the name of Mr. Hyde, allowing him to express those aspects of his character unbecoming of a man of Jekyll’s status, all the while protecting his good name. 

Although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often read as a classic Victorian morality tale about the psychological dualities hidden in even the most respected gentlemen, with Roberts’s biohacking in mind I start to see it more as a precursor of modern fantasies about the secret potential unlocked when scientific innovation isn’t bound by the general consensus of professionals; the “new province of knowledge” Jekyll taps into is too much to bear for his peers in the medical field — Dr. Lanyon, who narrates a part of the novel, literally dies of disbelief when he learns of Jekyll’s esoteric self-experimentation. 

The public shock that came with the biohacking movement and the horror associated with the mad scientists of late Victorian sci-fi both express a fear of how far the limits of human bodies might stretch when a conventional code of medical ethics no longer guides biological research. The maniacal Dr. Moreau in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) goes a step further in this than Jekyll’s desperate self-medication. Moreau’s medical practice is an extreme form of animal vivisection — or, performing surgery on live animals without the use of anesthesia, banned in Britain under the Animal Cruelty Act of 1876. After suspicious journalists get the word out about his unsavory work, Moreau sets up shop in a secret lab on a nameless, faraway island. Unbothered by public scrutiny and professional pressure, the “notorious vivisector” continues his research into the “plasticity of all living forms,” which basically consists of him cutting open and stitching together body parts of different animals to see what new, hybrid creatures can take shape. On Moreau’s island, populated with manufactured monsters of all shapes and sizes, it’s not about finding new cures, but exploring the endless malleability of organic forms, with unregulated innovation opening up the unlimited potential of bodies to change.

As the life story of Tristan Roberts continues, he starts to resemble Dr. Moreau more than Dr. Jekyll. In the aftermath of his publicly shunned genetic experimentation, Roberts started working at a new biohacker startup called Minicircle (basically, the successor of Ascendence Biomedical). The company is situated in Próspera, an unregulated economic zone on a Honduran island where the civil laws of Honduras don’t apply and registered companies are free to set their own legal and regulatory policies. H.G Wells’s character and those working at Minicircle employ the same strategy of withdrawal: the setting of the unsupervised island allows them to bypass what they perceive as the gatekeeping function of state-funded laboratories and institutions headed by specialists to become masters of their own biological fate. And as with Moreau, the focus shifts from simply developing new cures to exploring the possibilities of endless mutation. 

In Próspera, Roberts and the other employees of Minicircle work towards a future in which each individual enjoys full control over the genetic buildup of their bodies; gene-editing kits would be made available on the market for affordable prices, allowing anyone to genetically modify themselves in the comfort of their own home. Mac Davis, the CEO of Minicircle, thinks of “DNA as a language” and believes that his company will allow our generation “to be poets of that language.” Ultimately, his mission is to grant people absolute sovereignty and creative license over the genes that make up their bodies. With such a libertarian logic of freedom informing how biohackers think of DNA as something customizable, it should come as no surprise that among the money shooters behind this project are venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, an important ideologue behind the current U.S. regime, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Biohacking perfectly fits their vision of a thoroughly anti-democratic world system in which everything from enhanced cognitive abilities to basic human rights like medical treatment becomes a matter of free consumer choices, guaranteed by CEO-kings whose only duty it is to endlessly widen the plethora of services and commodities to choose from. 

Part of their appeal to unbridled innovation, unbothered by the slow policies of the state, makes sense. Currently, new gene-therapies proven to effectively treat certain rare, hereditary diseases struggle to appear on the market in the EU. Especially in the case of many CRISPR medicines, which allow for very precise gene-editing by targeting unwanted DNA sequences with bacteria that can slice chemicals in the body, healthcare providers fail to reach pricing agreements with national governments. These treatments consist of highly personalized medications usually aimed at extremely rare genetic conditions, meaning that it would be unlikely for the exceptionally high costs of decades-long testing procedures to be reimbursed when the niche drugs would hit the market. Even though CRISPR gene-therapies have passed approval procedures for effectiveness and medical ethics, they often fail to become accessible due to the financial pressures of extensive research.

In this regard, the emergence of biohacking may be an understandable response to the incompatibility of innovation and regulation. However, the libertarianism of companies like Minicircle misses the point entirely: gene-therapy is not about slicing and dicing DNA in whichever way you please, but providing options to disabled and chronically ill people. Their Dr. Moreau-esque approach to medical science is all about the freedom to experiment, but never about a societal commitment to healthcare. And this commitment, to bring back the Dr. Jekyll-end of the biohacking spectrum, shouldn’t solely be about chasing definitive cures, relying on techno-fixes to turn monsters into gentlemen. Following recent shifts in bioethics, health is not an end-point to be reached by the application of medical technologies, but a process of navigating daily physical, emotional, and social challenges. Medicine can help, of course, but shouldn’t come with a normalized, pre-determined conception of well-being.DNA, after all, hardly behaves like a language to be mastered by skilled poets. People in the field of bioinformatics have been working since the late nineteen-eighties to transfer biological samples into datasets, thus making an organism’s entire genetic structure readable as four-letter code sequences (consisting of the letters A T G C, which stand for the four chemicals that instruct your body on how to make all its proteins). But the more this tech is used in research, the more it seems that the datasets extracted from DNA samples do not amount to clearly readable, coherent texts: in 2013, computational biologists started to admit that “the data from which [they] construct networks is noisy and imprecise” and they “often don’t know exactly what we are looking at yet.” Warning for this misconception way back in 1988, prominent biologist-turned-feminist-philosopher Donna Haraway points out that “human nature, encoded in its genome and its other writing practices, is a vast library worthy of Umberto Eco’s imagined secret labyrinth in The Name of the Rose,” rather than a simple instruction manual. Taking the maze-like library from Eco’s novel as a metaphor, filled as it is with esoteric scrolls in different languages from different cultures, Haraway captures the open-ended and co-constitutive, yet cryptic and opaque, nature of genes more adequately, shaped as they are by biological processes like epigenetics, when the behavior of an organism’s DNA is affected by their environment and behavior, and non-vertical evolution, when genetic info travels not from parent to offspring, but across different organisms. Far from a language that can be read and rewritten at will, DNA functions more like a library — a social space where texts are lent out, exchanged, and delivered as people come and go, where unexpected, new titles may arrive and some books may never return again. Perhaps mad scientists and their DIY bodies can learn something from caring librarians and their commitment to fostering literary communities.

Written by Victor Keyser