Biohacker Aaron Traywick, who self-experimented with unregulated medical products in front of live audiences, was found dead in a flotation tank at a spa in Washington, DC on Sunday.
The 28-year-old CEO of Ascendance Biomedical was known for promoting self-medicating and used himself as a guinea pig at public events. For instance, Traywick, who had herpes, appeared before an audience earlier this year and took off his pants so that he could be the first to inject himself with an unregulated medication his company created to combat herpes and AIDS (watch video below).
According to BBC:
Traywick, who had herpes, had performed a stunt at the event, apparently injecting his company's unregulated product into his leg.
On stage, he had referred to the product as a "research compound".
But in conversation with the BBC he described it as a "treatment" - a claim that had the potential to attract the attention of the US Food and Drug Administration...
When questioned whether it was ethical to encourage sick people to effectively act as guinea pigs, Traywick responded: "The best we can do is we can say to these people, 'We know you don't have access to this medication.'
"They don't have any other options.
"All we know is that if it works they don't die."
The cause of his death hasn't yet been disclosed.
For the full video click here. Read the rest
Biohacker Josiah Zayner suffered from persistent digestive problems so he decided to undertake an extreme self-experiment: He isolated himself in a hotel room, took massive doses of antibiotics, and then gave himself a fecal transplant to transform his own microbiome. Mark Frauenfelder and I interviewed Josiah about biohacking, cheap genetic engineering kits, and, of course, his own full body microbiome transplant in this episode of For Future Reference, a new podcast from Institute for the Future:
Please subscribe to For Future Reference: iTunes, RSS, Soundcloud Read the rest
Self-experimenters, inspired by a 2011 presentation by The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide author James Fadiman, are taking tiny "sub-perceptual" doses of LSD and psilocybin to encourage workplace creativity and give them pep and a positive outcome in life overall. Read the rest
Dave Asprey, the far-out biohacker and self-experimenter who skeptics love to hate, just got $9 million to build coffee shops that sell "Bulletproof Coffee," which is mold-free coffee blended with unsalted grass fed butter and medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil. I've had it before and the only thing I can say about it is that it is delicious.
Here's Asprey showing how to make Bulletproof Coffee.
Here's a video in which podcaster Joe Rogan, who used to be a fan of Dave Asprey, debunks Asprey's claims that mycotoxins in coffee are common and bad for you.
Joe Rogan exposes the lies of Dave Asprey the owner of Bulletproof Coffee about how he lied and said 70% of coffee is contaminated with mycotoxins without any evidence. Onnit labs tested random coffee including Starbucks, and the results showed they contained NO mycotoxins. Coffee growers have already known how to remove toxins from their beans decades ago.
Here is Kris Gunnars' takedown of Bulletproof Coffee.
And here is Chris Gayomali's article on what it was like to drink Bulletproof Coffee every morning for two weeks. Read the rest
Martha Rotter, a software engineer, grew up near St. Louis. She did not have skin problems in high school or college. After college, she spent six years in Seattle. Her skin got a little worse. In 2007, she moved to Dublin to work for an Irish branch of Microsoft. Six months after the move, she noticed her skin was worse than it had been in Seattle. In Seattle she would get a little acne or blemishes for a week or so and then they would go away. In Dublin, they weren't going away.
Her skin got worse. A year after moving to Dublin, it was always bad. The spots and sores were always uncomfortable -- "a headache on my face," she says. They were painful to touch. At one point Martha got a massage. Forgetting her warning, the masseuse rubbed oil on Martha's face. She screamed. "One of the most painful things ever," she says.
Is my job making my skin bad? she wondered. She was working a lot, taking clients out, losing sleep. She started to go out less so that she could get more sleep. She stopped working on weekends. This didn't help.
She tried many skin creams and face washes. "Neutrogena and Clearasil make a lot of products," she says. "On a bad day I could easily drop $50 on two or three things." For several months, she spent $100/month on creams, astringents, and soaps trying to find something that worked. Nothing did.
She tried fitness. She went to the gym four or five times per week. Read the rest
