#zayner

Su!c!de Sadie x The Roadwalker, Zayner Nanook! For Valentines Day! 🖤💋🔪✨(requested by @narabea06 ) A little messy since I’m trying to learn a new app 😅

• dragged myself out of bed on 4 hours of sleep

• crazy lady screamed at me bc I gave her the wrong drink (I called out ‘caramel frap’ and she assumed it was her espresso)

• ow, I think I sprained my thumb??

• “Hi, dad, the buses aren’t working, can I have dinner at yours?”

• mental breakdown sponsored by mental illness and suicidal ideations

• *listens to 1D to counteract my anxiety disorder*

• WDYM ZAYN WANTS TO REUINTE HELP?!?!

Zayner, who has a PhD from the University of Chicago, worked for NASA researching the terraforming of Mars, and is the inventor of a musical instrument called the Chromocord that creates sound when light reacts with bacteria, was and is one of the world’s leading “biohackers.” He defines the term to mean “constantly pushing the boundaries of science outside traditional environments,” which he certainly did in this case, taking a radical approach to combating longstanding intestinal troubles. In layman’s terms, his plan was to nuke his natural bacteria with antibiotics, and replace them with bacteria from the feces of others.  

“I wanted to see if, by transplanting different bacteria in my body, they would change the way my gastrointestinal system was functioning,” is how he explains it now. “Because, at the time, it wasn't functioning very well.”

On that May, 2016 podcast, neither science reporter Liz Lopatto nor Arielle Duhaime-Ross, who wrote the story for The Verge, had much that was positive to say about either Josiah or his experiment. In fact, in an eerie preview of the anger of self-proclaimed “experts” that would become ubiquitous among pundits after the arrival of Covid-19, they sounded downright furious.

“Extremely dangerous, possibly stupid,” said Lopatto, of Josiah’s gambit.

“In his mind, it made sense to tell people about it, and inspire them to take their health into their own hands,” said Duhaime-Ross. “The risk of copycats is really real with this.”

“This is one of the things that does bug me about biohackers,” agreed a put-out Lopatto. “I don’t want people playing with pathogens in their bedrooms. Like, I’m not interested in that, personally, as a person who lives in this society.”

A less judgmental New York Times later produced a short film about the episode called Gut Hack:

Whether it’s Zayner gulping down a massive antibiotic cocktail in a WU-TANG FOREVER t-shirt, or repeatedly grimacing as he swallows home-crafted feces capsules in a hotel room, the short documentary is a parade of scenes make your eyeballs pop out in shock and amazement, cartoon-style. Zayner, by any measure, is an extraordinarily interesting character. He has a mind almost perfectly engineered against obedience: brilliant, fearless, and not accepting every assumption but checking the validity of each. He alternately bristles at or ignores judgment, seeming to draw inspiration from it in either case. At the end of Gut Hack, we see him standing on a subway platform, shaking his head as he listens to the two Verge journalists denounce him. We hear their audio:

“Not putting your life in danger unnecessarily is pretty basic,” they complain, adding that his experiment was “not even a blip in the scientific radar.”

“There’s a fine line,” Zayner later sighs to the Times, “between being crazy and knowledgeable.” He goes on to talk about growing up poor, and different, in the Midwest. “When you grow up on a farm, you have all this freedom,” he says. “We don’t have any neighbors or anyone to interact with, so we’re used to just doing what we want. And when you get to this environment were people don’t do that, you’re immediately pegged as, you know, a weirdo.”

Some weeks after, he’s shown feeling better, but he wants more than a placebo result. The film ends with him receiving the results of genetic sequencing tests that appear to show his “gut hack” experiment worked. He bursts into tears. The Times reporter asks, “Do you feel vindicated?”

He seems surprised by the question. No, he says, it’s not about that. “It’s one of those things,” he says, “where you’re so moved and impressed by how science works.”

Zayner went on to claim his battle with irritable bowel syndrome had been won, only to be replaced by a new malady. “My physical signs of IBS were gone,” he said recently. “But so was my privacy. This is when the deplatforming began.”

Around the same time Gut Hack was being made, Zayner founded ODIN, which he describes as “a company that sells science and genetic engineering supplies to people so that they can do science experiments in their homes.”

ODIN’s product line, which includes CRISPR gene-editing kits, seems designed to give ordinary people the tools to experience science as Zayner does, almost more as artistic expression than means to any end. He describes his Chromacord, for instance, as “something more purely inspirational, just outside the average notion of what science even is. In a manner of speaking, it was simply magic.” Or, as he said in another interview, “People having access to this technology allows them to do crazy and cool shit.”

Unfortunately, after the notoriety he gained from Gut Hack, bringing the “magic” of genetic engineering to the layperson suddenly proved a little beyond what science-journalism scolds or the faceless executives at tech platforms felt comfortable allowing.

Amazon and Facebook began delisting his products, and Patreon, PayPal, and Square all shut him down in short order. Sometimes he was told why, sometimes he wasn’t. He was forced to move on, and doesn’t want to jinx his relationship with his current payment processor by mentioning their name.

In between, the State of California brought a case against him on the somewhat preposterous charge of practicing medicine without a license. He won, but California state authorities were so peeved that they passed a law appearing to target his company alone, declaring that firms must append their wares with labels announcing “not for self-administration,” if they’re in the business of selling home “gene-therapy kits.”

In a piece called “Don’t Change Your DNA At Home,” the MIT Technology Review noted with amusement that, even if one includes ODIN, “We’re not sure any such kit exists.” The sponsor of the law, Republican State Senator Ling Ling Chang, appeared to think ODIN’s products were a lot more Frankensteinian and terrifying than they are.

“It was really weird,” Josiah says now. “It’d be like, I don’t know, labeling a computer: ‘You shouldn’t eat this computer.’ I mean, obviously.” Regarding ODIN’s home experimentation kits, he adds, “How would you use it on humans? I don’t even understand. I guess somebody crazy enough could just take some of the DNA that we sell and try to inject it into their body, but it wouldn’t even work in humans because it was meant for other organisms.”

Zayner didn’t comply with the law, and instead just moved to Austin, Texas (“Land of the free, home of the brave,” he laughs) and set up shop there. Then Covid-19 arrived, and Zayner’s biohacking got him in trouble again.

In May, 2020, he read a scientific paper that claimed a DNA-based vaccine against Covid-19 had been successfully developed and tested on macaques.

“I was like, ‘Why isn’t anybody working on this or trying this?’ Why don’t I go and order up the same DNA vaccine, have the company produce it for me and actually test it and see if it works on humans?” he said. “It worked on monkeys.”

Zayner followed through on his idea, contracting with a company to make the vaccine described in the paper. Then he and two other scientists/bio-hackers live-streamed the process of injecting themselves with it. He claims they all had antibody responses, but even at the time — his experiment was covered by Bloomberg — he said, “I’m very suspicious of my own data.” Here is how he describes the results, and his thinking, in a recent essay:

I’m hesitant to say it worked because vaccines are complicated and we’d need further testing to confirm our results. But, even if it didn't work, the fact that someone could have designed a vaccine, and contracted a company to manufacture that vaccine in June 2020 for under $5k is fucking profound — and that is what, at the time of releasing our video, I felt people needed to know.