Community-supported biolabs still exist, but experimentation has taken a backseat to off-label purposes like anti-aging.
Gabriel Licina, who first gained media attention for developing night vision eye drops in 2015, says that over time biohacking and bodyhacking have been conflated as the idea that you can “hack” the body like a computer moved into the mainstream. If the body is a machine, there is code. If there is code, there is a hack to be made. “Bodyhacking is doing all the shit your mom said you needed to do—don’t look at screens after dark and eat a sandwich,” says Licina. With “bodyhacking” falling out of use, these are the kinds of biological interventions that (primarily) men working in tech, swimming in a culture of self-optimization, have come to call biohacking. Think intermittent fasting and drinking Soylent. Biohacking gives people—techies especially—the permission to tinker when the medical establishment fails their needs or falls short of their desires. That’s how health and wellness founders capitalized on the biohacking movement. “They swooped in,” says Licina, “I watched everyone slide into consumerist bullshit.”
16 October 2025
