'Biohacker' Who Injected Himself With DIY Herpes Treatment Found Dead (livescience.com) 251
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior quotes Live Science:
The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science. Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C., according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28 years old. According to the website News2Share.com, Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are soundproof pods filled with body-temperature saltwater that are used to promote "sensory deprivation."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
Cause of death? (Score:5, Funny)
In a sensory deprivation tank, nobody can hear you scream...
Re:Cause of death? (Score:5, Funny)
That tank really worked as advertised. Now he is truly deprived of all sensation.
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Because apparently a mike with a wire to the outside of the tank is impossible technology.
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I hope more people will do this (Score:3, Insightful)
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress and not be subject to million dollar a shot monopoly pricing. Drug companies don't like these kinds of grassroots efforts because they undercut their business.
Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
Well, since you don't understand how gene editing works, that's the kind of nonsense you believe.
Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
Absolutely. However, the consequences of those very predictable edits is not well understood.
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That's saying that the consequences of editing a text file with emacs are not well understood; it's a meaningless statement, since the consequences depend on the edit.
There are many edits with predictable consequences. There are many edits with unpredictable consequences. But the range of consequences is pretty straightforward: most of the time, nothing happens, and rarely the person either gets sick or gets better.
Re: I hope more people will do this (Score:2)
There are many edits with predictable consequences.
Sure we might have a good idea that a certain gene controls X but we don't necessarily know other things it might control. For instance viagra dialates blood vessels in the eyes and cancer drugs kill all fast growing cells including hair. Gene editing could be 10 times more unpredictable. Some snippet of dna might do one thing in muscle cells and something completely different in brain cells. Even animal testing isn't a sure thing because we still don't really know what is unique about humans that makes
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So what? Worst case, the person dies. It was their choice and their life.
And as I was pointing out, when it comes to gene editing, there
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> Worst case, the person dies.
Worst case, you introduce a change that gets into the gene pool that makes us more vulnerable to a common disease, shortens lifespan, increases infant mortality, etc. With genetics, the results could be terribly subtle or take decades to reveal themselves.
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Germ line modifications with CRISPR take a lot of extra effort to produce. Even if the self-experiment did result in vertical transmission, how is that different from any other deleterious mutation? Right now, not only do we tolerate deleterious mutations from propagating in the human gene pool, we actively and massively subsidize deleterious m
Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:4, Insightful)
That's saying that the consequences of editing a text file with emacs are not well understood; it's a meaningless statement, since the consequences depend on the edit.
There are many edits with predictable consequences. There are many edits with unpredictable consequences. But the range of consequences is pretty straightforward: most of the time, nothing happens, and rarely the person either gets sick or gets better.
I think the better analogy is it is like using emacs to edit a large binary executable (something I've actually done before in trying to crack licensed programs). One would hope that, through a debugger, one has a good idea of what the edit is supposed to do in order to exact the changes expected. Even when I was pretty sure I understood what changes I needed to make, I was still not eliminating the license checks, and causing random crashes. I don't claim to be an expert at doing this. However, our biological understanding (the debugger) is currently similarly lacking, if not more so. We know that editing DNA sequences modifies the transcribed proteins, and that there are also epigenetic factors that are affected (which was only established relatively recently), among other things (possibly yet to be discovered). I personally believe it is presumptuous and premature to declare that consequences of edits are predictable, since there could be subtle long-term decades-later effects of edits, or perhaps consequences for progeny of those subject to gene editing.
There are some implausible scenarios under which gene editing might pose a risk to other humans, but regulations are not going to stop those anyway, so you might as well not bother making those illegal.
What should be, and what is, as you point out, are two different things. I would rather be overly cautious in the case.
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Just like lots of people are irrationally afraid of GMO, vaccinations, and other technologies. The fact that their "caution", translated into legislation, causes people to die just obviously doesn't matter to you.
Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:4, Informative)
Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
- Seth Brundle
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Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've just described how we got Facebook
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There is no evidence that antibacterial soap actually creates antibiotics resistance in the real world. Furthermore, the gene editing is done on the humans, not on the pathogens.
You'd be amazed at how much more cautious people are who experiment on themselves than doctors who experiment on othe
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Be fair, at least the doctors got educated first.
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Doctors know very little molecular biology and are generally lack the skills to design gene therapies.
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Now imagine that instead of cutting and pasting the normal way you have to take a text file, chop it in half, and the operating system will automatically insert whatever happens to be the next thing received by your network card, in promiscuous mode.
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Gene-editing itself is well understood (I'd hesitate to call it "extremely" well understood, though). What the consequences of a given gene edit might be are often not well understood at all, because our understanding of cellular machinery is still rudimentary.
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"Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction."
No, it doesn't. CRISPR is reasonably good at shutting off genes you want shut off... if you can identify the gene correctly, make a good template, deliver the therapy effectively, etc.
Gene "editing" is a whole different matter. You're basically chopping up a DNA strand and hoping some other DNA of your choosing happens to be floating by and gets shoved in the gap. There's been a lot of progress i
Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Cars and parachutes are a poor analogy anyways. This is more like opening up a binary copy of the Linux kernel with a hex editor, and making changes to it with only a very rudimentary knowledge of assembly, and hardly any knowledge of the Linux kernel in general. Screwing up with that means the kernel crashes or something just doesn't work right. Screwing up with CRISPR, assuming something besides nothing at all happens, is going to fail spectacularly...like oh say...cancer formation in multiple major organs simultaneously.
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If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress and not be subject to million dollar a shot monopoly pricing. Drug companies don't like these kinds of grassroots efforts because they undercut their business.
I don't think any of these grassroots efforts have actually undercut their business in any meaningful way. I think that, if anything, people who sell fake cures that are already known to not work (i.e. using hyperbaric chambers to cure AIDS) would be much bigger targets since at least they divert much bigger sums of money than grassroots cures that nobody even produces to begin with.
Besides, most of these grassroots efforts ARE fake.
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There is a huge number of home remedies that work just as well as patented drugs. And, yes, they do cut into drug company profits.
That's like saying that people shouldn't develop software on their home computers because other people used to build fake perpetual motion mac
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It's not like programming. We know how computers work. We know how to build them and debug them. But for DNA we are still vastly ignorant. We know about genes and where they are and how to change them, but we DO NOT know what the genes do specifically. We may have a broad idea that a particular gene is involved in a highly complicated process but not what the effects are of changing that gene.
What you are suggesting is equivalent to hacking your computer to change byte #76,238,110 of a kernel and reboot
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And if it's my computer, then I should be allowed to do that. (And it isn't really the equivalent of that; there are plenty of genes that we understand quite well.)
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Pot. It's good for what ails ya.
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If you really don't think drug companies under FDA regulation are better equipped to do trials as safe as possible than amateurs disregarding safety entirely in order to earn easy money...
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That belief is merely a testament to your ignorance.
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I'm a research scientist in biotech. The only reason I would try self-CRISPR/Cas9 would be if I had a gun pointed at my head. Here's the deal: biology is hard. Figuring out a target for drug discovery--a single enzyme--is usually based off of years to decades of basic academic research. From there the rule of thumb is 10 years and $1 billion to come up with an actual marketable drug; a great many compounds--hundreds of thousands to millions--will be tried from initial high throughput screening to anima
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Re:I hope more people will do this (Score:5, Insightful)
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
More like building your own car or parachute. This isn't "non-expert does something that experts do routinely" it's "non-expert attempts something that experts are still trying to figure out how to do safely".
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments. As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments. DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.
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You're sure... why? What the hell do you know about gene therapy?
And given the strong placebo effect we observe in many patients, homeopathy is a safe and effective treatment, even if it doesn't work in the way it claims it does.
Re: I hope more people will do this (Score:3)
People are not islands. They have dependants, friends, family, etc. They can pass on desease. They can land on other people. Cleaning up bodies costs money and has an emotional cost. Societies cannot and should not be expected to bear the full cost of people who take very bad risks. This notion that people make choices for self in isolation is wishful thinking and over simplification. Part of the function of a society is to set limits on what those risks are.
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I have a right to kill myself in any way I see fit, even if that hurts my family, my friends, etc. No, you do not have a right to limit the risks competent adults take with their lives. In addition to not having the right, you also do not have the ability. Notice that this guy was going to do his experiment in Mexico.
Re: I hope more people will do this (Score:2)
It costs money to throw your body out. You cannot make killing yourself impact nothing. You live in the world with other people. I don't consider your attitude particularly adult.
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Yes, I can impose costs on you and there is nothing you can do about it. It isn't fair.
The adult thing to do is to recognize that life isn't fair, and that trying to turn society into a totalitarian shithole in an attempt to make it fair doesn't work.
Obviously, you are not an adult.
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Yes, freedom can cost money.
Freedom is more important.
Re: I hope more people will do this (Score:2)
And you don't have that right, legally speaking, anywhere on earth. You can choose to end your life in certain places if you meet a fairly strict set of criteria that those societies have agreed on. People can also make mistakes when trying to end their lives, and society bears the cost of taking care of these people flight for no other natural reason than human compassion (but also often whatever social safety nets exist where it happens.) You're trying to make a case by saying that it's a right simply bec
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Suicide is legal in much of the world. [wikipedia.org]
Compassion is something individual feel, and it leads to charity, a voluntary act. To argue that you should restrict people's liberties because other people might be charitable towards them otherwise is obscene.
When society provid
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The issue is not people treating themselves with their own money. The issue is with quacks advocating for and encouraging patients to try out their dangerous theories.
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Great!
Well, good then that that's not what we are talking about here.
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Doing nothing is a better option than making things worse.
Irrelevant - I don't.
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You gave "being alive" as your evidence that you knew "enough about gene therapy" to give an informed opinion. Since, by your own admission, you have not had a need for gene therapy, your argument doesn't work: you're still alive not because of your (obviously non-existent) understanding of gene therapy, but because you have never had the need for it.
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If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress...
Correct. That's why I think this guy is a hero like Barry J. Marshall that drank a culture of organisms extracted from a person with a stomach ulcer and five days later developed an inflation of the lining of his stomach which all but proved ulcers are usually caused by H. pylori. He received a Nobel Prize for that! Doctors for decades stood against that theory since it would take one of their key excuses to push their judgmental beliefs that ulcers were caused by things like not enough exercise, eating
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I had very low vitamin B12 levels.
I do think that's part of it, but a friend that works for Univ of Washington School of Medicine looked into it for me, and she said there's no evidence of that since there weren't any studies investigating that. I guess since you can't patent B12 there's no financial incentive to do so. IIRC my levels were 5 picograms per milliliter and normal was about 450. I know my level since at work we paid to have tests done for all of the developers. The Indian guys that are vegans.were all very low too, but not
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Cars, Parachutes and gliders are also, per Nassim Taleb, not complex systems. In complex systems -- living creatures, planet, societies, human or animal -- it is often very difficult to deduce the arrow of cause and effect, if one even exists at all.
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People attempting gene therapy on themselves or others don't inject random sequences, they usually start with a reasonable theory based on extensive prior experimental results, and the risks are fairly predictable. The usual outcome is that it simply doesn't work. The next most likely outcome is that it has some beneficial effect. All oth
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This is more like a pre-teen building a bomb; dangerous, you can hurt or kill yourself, and you certainly don't know what you're doing. Nobody knows what they're doing with gene therapies without a sufficient amount of testing. Let me repeat, these tests have not been performed on animal, vegetables, or even rocks, and there is not even a theory that it might work, so no one knows what the result will be. Sure, there are patients with no hope of having an effective cure, but that gives no reason to hand t
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How is an adult doing something dangerous to themselves like a pre-teen doing something dangerous to themselves?
And how would you test CRISPR gene editing for a human disease on animals? Come on, go ahead, explain that.
Correcti
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Things like this really don't help advance medicine at all. Giving someone a drug isn't an "oh, look they're cured"/"oh, crap, they're dead" dichotomy. Treatment works to different degrees, works differently in different people, has short, medium and long term effects, etc. And there's the placebo effect.
This is the very embodiment of the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data."
Also, a medical treatment, particularly something like gene therapy, is nothing like repairing your own car.
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A lot of science starts with anecdotes and individual observations. They are not sufficient to prove a scientific theory, but they are sufficient to formulate it and formulate good controlled experiments.
And your platitudes are not an argument.
And your platitudes ar
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Actually I'm more in favor of him injecting himself with a cure he created himself than him repairing his own car. The former can only kill himself, a faulty car with shot brakes can well kill innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with him not knowing what he's doing.
Where I draw the line is when he tries to convince others that his quackery has any merit. Which this person didn't, as far as I can tell, so it's absolutely ok in my books.
Your body is yours. It's about the last thing you still really own.
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That seems like an odd position to take. Are you saying that after he injected himself with a gene therapy treatment, he shouldn't be able to talk truthfully about his experiences?
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but if you know what you're doing
The world's top most minds in this field can be described as "not knowing what they are doing" which is why there is so much trial and testing in the first place.
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There are thousands of reasonable potential gene therapy treatments that a reasonably competent molecular biologist can underrstand and that have an excellent, rational basis in decades of research.
No, there is so much "trial and testing" going on because the FDA, drug companies, and doctors are covering their asses. People experimenting on themselv
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#2 is a little silly, since replacing a flat tire with a spare had a potential for extreme danger if you do it won't, but it's impossible to have it inspected in any reasonable way. And how often is failed car repair the cause for wrecks involving other parties?
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Causing a cytokine storm means it worked. I've always expected that to be the result from anything that changed the immune system very rapidly. The fix would be, I assume, to somewhat suppress the immune system to be sure nothing happened too fast.
Darwin award nominee? (Score:3)
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Depends on what killed him. Despite the summary, we really have no reason to conflate his self-experimentation with his death.
Odds are, if anyone is paying attention in a few weeks, we'll find out he committed suicide in some conventional boring manner.
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Re:Darwin award nominee? (Score:4, Informative)
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It was an new experimental flotation tank made by a startup who was taking on Big Tank.
OK, it was actually a washing machine.
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OK, I'm pulling that hypothesis out of thin air, but I'm trying to do so in an Ockham-complete way.
1. Guy injects himself with probably inert liquid as dangerous as isotonic saline solution, but labled "untested drug"
2. Guy grows more and more anxious fearing for possible dangers, but it's too late
3. Guy is so afraid of what he may have done, starts to go insane. (Checkpoint 1: Reports of him loosing contact to the rest of his startup, irritating business descicions)
4. Guy decides he needs to relax. In a fa
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Because nothing but drowning has ever killed a man that was found face down in the water.
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Indeed. Probably more of a meta-problem of being willing to take unreasonable risks. He may just have tried other things as well or ignored medical problems he had. Or, as you said, a meta-meta problem of being ad odds with reality and finally having deciding to remove it. The indicators for the first are strong, and the second thing is at least plausible.
yeah (Score:2)
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The FCC did what?
this guy doesnt fuck (Score:3)
Biohacking sounds like the worst possible way to get herpes.
No evidence it was done by the "cure" (Score:3)
While I doubt he came anywhere close to curing himself (when your cure is more buzzwords than products....) I don't think the attempt had anything to do with the death. The body is versatile for lots of those things, and the immune system and kidneys probably got rid of just about everything before any effect.
It was probably an accidental drowning of some type, drugs, overdose, or something. I doubt this is the first death in a sensory deprivation chamber....
Re: No evidence it was done by the "cure" (Score:2)
Re:No evidence it was done by the "cure" (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt this is the first death in a sensory deprivation chamber....
Police are still investigating the cause of his death.
Until more information is available... Occam's razor say, this the simplest
explanation: This was probably just another unfortunate fatal accident in a sensory
deprivation chamber...
NO it's not the first death in such a chamber.
These chambers can be quite dangerous.... others have died in them by cause of hyperthermia,
or drugs/alcohol toxicity. Drowning or electrocution are major risks.
This could also have been a suicide. From this person's documented past behavior.... it is possible the fellow was not sane and had some other issues; Most people aren't comfortable "Injecting themselves" with anything ---- he may have later injected himself with more dangerous stuff, such as heroine, LSD or other hallucinogenics shortly before going into this chamber.
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A could cause B. Possible.
B could cause A. Not possible, since A happened before B.
C could cause both A and B.
I reckon C is stupidity.
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Are there no drugs, poisons, or other bad-things that can take a while to kill a person after initial injection?
Suspicious - A new Aaron Swartz? (Score:3, Interesting)
The title implies that he died from his treatment. He would have continuously been tested since injection in multiple sites across his body as well as blood work. Herpes itself is not fatal. A preliminary examination on the scene would be more informative. If it was his treatment I would have expected him to have been admitted to the hospital for weeks before death.
It sounds to me like depression and maybe a suicide. The FDA probably came down on him and told him he was blacklisted and no company he was associated with would ever get anything approved.
Could this be another Aaron Swartz?
no the AMA killed him to keep there profits (Score:2)
no the AMA killed him to keep there profits
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It sounds to me like depression and maybe a suicide.
It sounds like a probable accident and gross negligence on the part of the SPA operators; failing to adequately monitor their customer's status while using a deprivation tank.
These chambers can be dangerous. There have been past cases where people died from hyperthermia, by floating in the warm fluid for too long a period of time. Use of certain drugs before entering the chamber or certain health conditions can put a person at risk of a medica
Lets all get our genes edited in Tijuana! (Score:2)
What could go wrong?
Big pharma did it! (Score:2)
Take home from this (Score:2)
When you die in a sensory deprivation tank (Score:2)
So ... he died of boredom?
Stuff for a crime novel: perfect alibi if murder (Score:2)
Such a tank is perfect for concealing time of death: body is permanently kept warm.
Maybe I've watched too much Columbo.
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Re:Visionnary retards (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately, the world is rather Darwinian. Experiment on yourself - if you do manage to create something useful / helpful, great. Otherwise you're likely dead, certainly ill.
Given how many humans are running around trying to do things, it is hardly surprising that wack noodle narcissists will get some media exposure, claim their 15 minutes of fame and then .... explode. Perhaps there will be some sort of middle ground that will use the new techniques and their own knowledge to advance things. Perhaps not.
I do fail to see why people think that just because you're doing something in your garage, you have a leg up on the tens of thousands of grad students and post docs who are working in better equipped labs with more intellectual support. If this stuff were that easy, there would be happy molecular biology departments throughout the world.
It's not easy at all, CRISPR or not.
Re: Visionnary retards (Score:2)
Fortunately, the world is rather Darwinian.
No it isn't. This is a monumentally stupid thing to be believe, right up there with believing in a just world.
Re: Visionnary retards (Score:2)
The world is "rather darwinian" just as the world is somewhat just. Sure there is a huge spectrum there. People can do stupid stuff and/or immoral stuff (especially the rich and powerful) and get away with it for a long time but there is a pendulum there and for the majority of people karma eventually catches up. Sure bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people but on average more bad things happen to bad people. And that's not even counting the having to look yourself in the m
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Biotechnology should not be the property of just of ivory towers and corporate interests, and putting that into the hands of the people is a laudable goal.
Please read Bruce Sterling's story "Our Neural Chernobyl".
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Well, maybe he's not actually dead. Given how eccentric the guy is, maybe this is just phase 1 of his latest experiment: He wants to see if, with the power of CRISPR, he can become undead.
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