Editors Note: The Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundations annual high school essay writing contest was inspired this year by the Philadelphia Museum of Arts latest exhibit, Designs for Different Futures, which features ways to address the values, needs and desires of society in a changing world. The winner, Mary Cipperman, won a $5,000 scholarship, another $5,000 to support an internship with the PMAs curatorial team and naming rights on a piece of artwork purchased by the Raju Foundation (which also supports The Citizen) and donated to the museum. Mary chose the gift pictured above, called Raising Robotic Natives.

What would happen if humans could sense ultraviolet light? What if we could run twice as fast or see twice as far? What if we never aged? Technology has shaped human beings since Mesopotamian times; however, in the past two decades, we have begun to elevate the human condition beyond our current sensory and cognitive functionalities. This movement has a name: Max More, founder of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and leading futurist, first defined transhumanism as a class of philosophies that seek the continuationof intelligent life beyond its current human form and human limitations. He described not one invention but rather a framework for applying and developing transformative technologies, such as genetic engineering, cybernetics, brain emulation, and artificial intelligence. While transhumanism could threaten our identity and welfare, it potentially affords improved productivity and survival for the future of humanity.

The idea of enhancing human beings is not new, nor is its bioethical concerns. Steroid hormones as well as neurological stimulants such as caffeine alter the human body and heighten performance. Likewise, amphetamine gained pharmacological praise as early as the 1920s. Such neurological enhancers beg the question of misuse. Doctors and ethicists alike question whether we should apply drugs that could improve mood or lessen fatigue to individuals with perfectly normal hormone levels. After all, such usage would leave behind individuals with disorders and elevate others beyond normal human abilities. Steroid hormones, for example, allow athletes to enhance their workouts and performance, but we consider this practice unethical in certain formal competitions. Still, if dietary supplements have similar effects on the human body, how do we draw a distinction between these two practices?

Unfortunately, these concerns bear even greater consequences as the magnitude of our technological development grows. Consider the difference between erythropoietin-stimulating agents and genetic engineering. Both can increase hormone levels, but the latter can alter the allelic frequencies of subsequent generations. This distinctionof inheritability, lack of precedent, and magnitude of impactmarks a new subset of enhancing technologies; those that alter human nature.

In light of these radical developments, bioethicists have begun to question how transhuman technologies could affect the boundaries and wellbeing of humanity. Permanent alterations, such as gene editing, could facilitate exploitation. Governments or higher institutions could use these technologies to increase submissiveness or institute eugenic programs. Certain individuals could choose not to alter their genes. These circumstances would increase polarizations of power and undermine equality and freedom.

As we look forward, we can postulate that engineers and scientists will design not only our future, but ourselves.

Genetic engineering raises another, deeper, concern with transhumanism as well: whether we should consider human nature to be malleable and changeable, as transhumanists suggest. The 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights suggests that the genome, as the heritage of humanity, belongs not to individuals, but to our species collectively. This might indicate that genetic engineering of any kind infringes on human rights. Furthermore, cognitive technologies like brain emulation have the potential to separate consciousness from physicality. This, and other uses for AI, demonstrate that intelligent life can exist beyond human beingswhether in the form of robots or enhanced posthumans. This change is occurring now: four years ago, the Open Worm Project at Oxford modeled over three-hundred neurons of a C. elegans with computer software. The scientists then uploaded the worms brain onto a robot that emulated the movement of the original organism. If these, and other intelligences, were to gain consciousness, we would need to determine whether these constitute living beings. Further, we must be willing and able to control them.

Despite these concerns, transhumanism has enormous potential. Cochlear ear implants and bionic eyes, for example, have already enhanced human capabilities for decades. Altering the human body via cyborgization may not be inherently wrong; otherwise hearing aids would be unethical. Transhumanists merely intend to extend the magnitude of these alterations in order to overcome all death, disability, and disease. We could potentially decrease decisional fatigue and improve memory. Others even argue that pursuing these advances is not just ethical, but morally obligatory. Psilocybin, for example, has the potential for moral enhancement. If we could make human beings more empathetic, our viewpoints towards climate change and nuclear warfare could save us as a species. Thus, many bioethicists do not object to the concept of enhancement itself, but rather to its unintended consequences or safety concerns.

While transhumanism raises the concerns of exploitation and safety, it has transformed lives already and promises even greater advances for the future. Transhumanism describes not one invention or development but rather a radical alteration of the interaction between humans and their environments. To embrace it too readily would be to accept a complete and potentially dangerous redefinition of both technology and humanity. Yet, to reject it would be to relinquish a plethora of multidisciplinary opportunities. The future certainly promises a new cultural, social, and political framework for defining the very essence of humanity. It holds machines that create art and recognize faces, as well as human beings designed with metallic limbs and silicon brains. As we look forward, we can postulate that engineers and scientists will design not only our future, but ourselves.

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Raju Foundation Essay Contest Winner On the Ethics of Genetic Engineering - The Philadelphia Citizen

On a recent Sunday at the Queen Anne Lutheran Church basement, parishioners sat transfixed as the Rev. Dr. Ted Peters discussed an unusual topic for an afternoon assembly: "Can technology enhance the image of God?"

Peters' discussion focused on a relatively new philosophical movement. Its followers believe humans will transcend their physical and mental limitations with wearable and implantable devices.

The movement, called transhumanism, claims that in the future, humans will be smarter and stronger and may even overcome aging and death through developments in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI).

"What does it mean to be truly human?" Peters asked in a voice that boomed throughout the church basement, in a city that boasts one of the world's largest tech hubs. The visiting reverend urged the 30 congregants in attendance to consider the question during a time when "being human sounds optional to some people."

"It's sad; it makes me feel a lot of grief," a congregant said, shaking her head in disappointment.

Organized religions have long served as an outlet for humans to explore existential questions about their place in the universe, the nature of consciousness and free will. But as AI blurs the lines between the digital and physical worlds, fundamental beliefs about the essence of humanity are now called into question.

While public discourse around advanced technologies has mostly focused on changes in the workforce and surveillance, religious followers say the deeper implications of AI could be soul-shifting.

It doesn't surprise James Wellman, a University of Washington professor and chair of the Comparative Religion Program, that people of faith are interested in AI. Religious observers place their faith in an invisible agent known as God, whom they perceive as benevolent and helpful in their lives. The use of technology evokes a similar phenomenon, such as Apple's voice assistant Siri, who listens and responds to them.

"That sounds an awful lot like what people do when they think about religion," Wellman said.

CONFRONTING AI AND FAITH

When Dr. Daniel Peterson became the pastor of the Queen Anne Lutheran Church three years ago, he hoped to explore issues meaningful both to his congregants and to secular people.

Peterson's fascination with AI, as a lifelong science-fiction fan, belies skepticism in the ubiquity of technology: He's opted out of Amazon's voice assistant Alexa in his house and said he gets nervous about cameras on cellphones and computers.

He became interested in looking at AI from a "spiritual dimension" after writing an article last year about the depiction of technologies such as droids in "Star Wars" films. In Peterson's eyes, artificially intelligent machines in the films are equipped with a sense of mission that enables them to think and act like humans without needing to be preprogrammed.

His examination of AI yielded more questions than answers: "What kind of bias or brokenness are we importing in the artificial intelligence we're designing?" Peterson pondered. If AI developed consciousness, "what sort of philosophical and theological concerns does that raise?"

Peterson invited his church and surrounding community to explore these questions and more in the three-part forum called "Will AI Destroy Us?," which kicked off with a conversation held by Carissa Schoenick from the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, followed by Peters' discussion on transhumanism, and concluded with Peterson's talk on his own research around AI in science-fiction films.

Held from late September to early October, the series sought to fill what Peterson called a silence among faith leaders about the rise of AI. Peterson and other religious observers are now eager to take part in a new creation story of sorts: Local initiatives held in places of worship and educational institutions are positioning Seattle as a testing ground for the intersection of AI and religion.

The discussion on transhumanism drew members of the community unaffiliated with the church, including David Brenner, the board chair of Seattle-based organization AI and Faith. The consortium membership spans across belief systems and academic institutions in an effort to bring major religions into the discussion around the ethics of AI, and how to create machines that evoke "human flourishing and avoids unnecessary, destructive problems," Brenner said in an interview at the church. As Brenner spoke, a few congregants remained in the basement to fervently chat about the symposium.

"The questions that are being presented by AI are fundamental life questions that have now become business [ones]," said Brenner, a retired lawyer. Values including human dignity, privacy, free will, equality and freedom are called into question through the development of machines.

"Should robots ever have rights, or is it like giving your refrigerator rights even if they can function just like us?" Brenner said.

AI, RELIGION AND THE WORLD

Religious leaders around the world are starting to weigh in. Last April, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission_the public-policy section of the Southern Baptist Convention published a set of guidelines on AI adoption that affirms the dominion of humans and encourages the minimization of human biases in technology. It discourages the creation of machines that take over jobs, relegating humans to "a life of leisure" devoid of work, wrote the authors.

In a speech to a Vatican conference in September, Pope Francis echoed the guidelines' sentiment by urging tech companies and diplomats to deploy AI in an ethical manner that ensures machines don't replace human workers. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to ... a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said, according to The Associated Press.

On the other hand, some faith perspectives have cropped up in recent years that hold AI at the center of their value systems. Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski formed Way of the Future church in 2017 with the aim of creating a peaceful transition into an imminent world where machines surpass human capabilities. The church's website argues that human rights should be extended to machines, and that we should clear the path for technology to "take charge" as it grows in intelligence.

"We believe it may be important for machines to see who is friendly to their cause and who is not," the website warns.

But Yasmin Ali, a practicing Muslim and AI and Faith member, has seen AI used as a tool for good and bad. While Ali believes technology can make people's lives easier, she has also seen news reports and heard stories from her community about such tools being used to profile members of marginalized communities. China, for instance, has used facial-recognition technology to surveil Uighur Muslim minorities in the western region, according to a recent New York Times investigation.

"I think we need to get more diversity with the developers who provide AI, so they can get diverse thoughts and ideas into the software," Ali said. The Bellevue-based company she founded called Skillspire strives to do just that by training diverse workers in tech courses such as coding and cybersecurity.

"We have to make sure that those values of being human goes into what we're building," Ali said. "It's like teaching kids you have to be polite, disciplined."

Back at Queen Anne Lutheran, congregants expressed hope that the conversation would get the group closer to understanding and making peace with changes in society, just as churches have done for hundreds of years.

Bainbridge Island resident Monika Aring believes the rise of AI calls for an ongoing inquiry at faith-based places of worship on the role of such technologies. She shared the dismay she felt when her friend, a pastor of another congregation, said the church has largely become irrelevant.

"It mustn't be. This is the time for us to have these conversations," she said. "I think we need some kind of moral compass," one that ensures humans and the Earth continue to thrive amid the advancement of AI.

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Faith groups reckon with AI and what it means to be truly human - Worcester Telegram

Zoltan Gyurko Istvan

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) November 19, 2019

Born in California, Istvan is a former journalist for National Geographic and has recently penned articles for The New York Times opinion section. In 2013, Istvan published his novel The Transhumanist Wager, which became a #1 Philosophy and Science Fiction bestseller on Amazon. The book has been compared more than 1,000 times to Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged. Istvans most recent book of political essays titled Upgrading America was a #1 bestseller in Politics on Amazon.

Istvan has become known around the world for spearheading the multi-million person transhumanism movement, which aims to upgrade the human body with science and technology. The #1 goal of transhumanism is to overcome biological death. While still outside the political mainstream, the worlds largest companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are key innovators in the transhumanist movement.

Istvan has consulted for the U.S. Navy and given speeches at conferences around the world, including for institutions such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Istvan has traveled to over 100 countries and is a former director of a major wildlife organization, WildAid. He has a degree from Columbia University in Philosophy and Religion. A successful entrepreneur with multiple businesses, Istvan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his physician wife and two young daughters.

Istvans 20-point political platform, available on his campaign website http://www.zoltan2020.com, advances ideas that so far have been absent in the Republican primaries. Although his years as a businessman have made him fiscally conservative, Istvan supports a Universal Basic Income that is based off monetizing government resources, called a Federal Land Dividend. He proposes ending the war on drugs, making public preschool and college both free and mandatory, and licensing parents to make sure they are ready to raise children. He supports artificial wombs as a third option in the pro-life vs pro-choice debate, and would like to cut the military budget in order to create a science industrial complex in America. He aims to fight climate change with geo-engineering and end the IRS with a straightforward national sales tax. He favors nearly-open borders, tort reform, deregulation, banning private prisons, and using AI-operated drones and robots to stop mass shootings in public places and schools.

Istvan is also worried that China is beating America on the technological front in areas such as artificial intelligence, genetic editing, and neural prosthetic development. As president, he promises to get America innovating again, because once the Chinese take a lead in innovation, the United States may never get it back.

Pratik Chougule, Istvans campaign manager, says that Istvan is running as a new type of Republican politician. He expects Istvans bold ideas about the countrys future will resonate with a wide cross-section of Americans.

Istvans campaign slogan is: Upgrading America.

For more information, contact campaign manager Pratik Chougule at: pc@zoltan2020.com

To schedule an interview or talk to Mr. Istvan, email: info@zoltanistvan.com or call: 415-802-4891http://www.zoltan2020.comTwitter: @zoltan_istvan

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Zoltan Istvan, a Leader in Science and Technology, Will Run for US President and Challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican Primaries - PR Web

The first email was forwarded back and forth internally for a while due to a general sense of skepticism and a lack of clear interest:

From: S E

Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:12 PM

Subject: Bichip Mark of the beast

Hail Satan

Hope you are all fine

I am writing to you since our Human Microchip company is having a big international event here in Copenhagen, November 26th. We are unveiling the cutting edge technology of human microchip implant with long distance read and internet data, for the first time in the history that is also known as the mark of the beast in the bible of Jesus and we have been facing opposition from churches and even been in the news for that:

‘Transhumans’ reveal why they want everyone to implant chips under their skin

Anyway, here is the link to the event is bichip.com/event

I wonder if you guys would like to help us promote the event which is actually free to attend? there are about 400 seats left yet and we can provide free VIP tickets to the temple members (Including free Flight and Accommodation)

Best

Simon

Bichip, Denmark

+4531751127

Professional emails lacking in basic details are, unfortunately, the norm. I receive emails from career journalists at major media outlets sometimes saying nothing more than that they would like to interview me. I get invitations to conferences that merely state that they seek my participation, leaving it to me to ask if they are asking me to speak, seeking sponsorship, or what, exactly? The fact that this email merely asked if we would help promote the event did not make it particularly suspect. The fact that there was apparently no cap set on flights and accommodations, however, was suspect, but could easily be seen as another common failure to specify. If one were to reply, one might then learn that a plus one is acceptable, but no more. It also is not unheard of for a start-up with delusions of grandeur to overspend on something like a conference. Still, they seemed to be offering too much while asking for too little.

Interestingly, the reference to the Mark of the Beast hardly caught my attention at all. Despite the email apparently referring the the biochip as the literal Mark of the Beast, I assumed it a matter of clumsy wording indicating the viewpoint that protestors were taking against the technology, certainly not the viewpoint of the manufacturers themselves. Still, I was not interested. I would not care to get the implant, nor am I horrified by the prospect of others carrying such implants in the future. The technology is not new, it is not terribly interesting, and the alleged controversy seemed a bit outdated in the social media age. In a world wherein nearly everybody willingly submits their most private information to Google and Facebook, and those companies work toward supplying face-recognition technology to public environments for the purposes of instant-tailored marketing, what does it matter if those using e-currency carry it always on their phone, a card in their pocket, or in a chip under their skin?

At some point, I was discussing current issues regarding social media and its regulation with our Ordination Director, Greg Stevens, when I remembered the BiChip email and forwarded it to him. Greg did a cursory investigation and replied to me:

As you know, Im an enthusiastic supporter of transhumanism as an overall direction and love the idea of biotech. Im looking forward to the day we have both the biotech and the AI to provide us with what I call full phenotypic freedom the ability to augment ourselves to be whatever types of creatures we want, and to interface with computer and each other in whatever way we want.

But, based on the material that I saw out there, BiChip is nothing more than a cute initial proof-of-concept in the early stages. Any details of BiChip as a company or its dealings aside, I like that promotion of the BiChip is something that can get the conversation started so that we can confront things like: what does it need to have to be useful? what are the risks and how do we build in protections against those risks from the beginning (instead of stumbling into abuses later and having to fix things after-the-fact).

I would not get the BiChip as its been described. Its simply not useful. I dont make purchases using e-currency in day-to-day life. The only reason something like ApplePay from my iPhone or Apple Watch is useful is that the software can access whatever bank account or credit card I set it up for.

Ive never seen actual whitepapers for BiChip. I saw marketing material, and marketing material is always vague. But based on what I read, BiChip was inherently crippled in that it only operated in ecurrency and was limited in what it could communicate with.

There is no revolution in this tech. The only thing exciting about it is that it was marketed as a product that might get people talking about what biotech may be able to do in the future.

This, of course, led to more in-person discussions and disagreements between Greg and I (I am far more the privacy advocate while he is more for cultivating a cultural adjustment to privacys natural diminishment through technology). Neither of us were against the concept of implants necessarily, though of course they would have to be implanted of ones own free will, without undue coercive influence. For my part, I thought that the very topic of implants might make people begin to look more clearly at the privacy they abdicate daily, finally considering regulation regarding proper usage and retention. We again began to wonder what BiChip was all about, what their event was meant to entail, and how they imagined that we would promote the event.

Over a month had passed from the original email, so I reached out to see if they were still interested in discussing details:

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 at 07.24,

Dear Simon

We are very interested in the event.

My own position is that Data Privacy is going to necessarily be an ongoing dialogue that will always change as technology advances. I do not think we need to declare privacy dead, but I also do not think that the convenience of a microchip implant poses a deeper threat to privacy than RFID, smartphones, and social media. The question is one of responsible retention and usage of data, not a matter of withholding technologies.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event.

Thank you

Lucien Greaves

Spokesperson, Cofounder

The Satanic Temple

The reply came the same day:

Hi Lucien and friends

The offer is still valid and we can provide free vip tickets and free flights and hotel to Denmark for the attendees. However we prefer to have important members/board members as the priority but we can book up to 100 of these tickets.

Regarding the way you help out the event, you can come with any idea. I personally consider myself a member of the temple as i officially joined some years ago and maybe the time and money we are spending on this technology is directly a promotion for the satanist movement I guess it is time that the temple considers Bichip as a partner and help us fight together.

I recommend a direct call to Bichip president (Finn) on 004531751127 or to me 0013232180018 to speed up the process .

Best

Simon

Of course, this did not make any sense to me. An offer to fly some hundred members of The Satanic Temple (TST) to Denmark was grossly improbable even for a delusionally enthusiastic start-up. Further, the email again failed to be explicit in what Bichip would expect from me personally or TST as an organization. I lost interest entirely, but Gregs interest was piqued. Attempting a further investigation into what the whole thing was really about, Greg attempted to contact the numbers provided only to find that they were inoperative numbers. Clearly, none of this was on the level, but it was difficult to understand what exactly the scam was.

On November 08 I received a Direct Message through Twitter, which I never replied to:

I simply forgot about the whole matter.

Then, on November 16, I was tagged in a reply to a bizarre tweet by the same account that had reached out to try and confirm my presence at the international gathering.

This dialogue, I came to discover, was in reference to an article that had just been posted by biohackinfo.com claiming that authorities had raided the Bichip offices for unspecified reasons and that the event I had been invited to was therefore cancelled.

Of course, by now it was clear that the event was never intended to happen to begin with, but it was still unclear what this whole scam was meant to achieve. According to the Biohackinfo article:

Two days ago on November 14, Danish police raided the Copenhagen offices of tech company BiChip. This was three days after we broke the story about BiChips bizarre Chief Technical Officer Simon Sallienjavi, who is also the leader of a growing satanic cult that fuses devil worshiping with biohacking and transhumanism.

With all its operations shut down, BiChip has announced that all its offices are closed until December 29, and they have cancelled their much hyped November 26 event that was to be hosted at the Black Diamond building in Copenhagen. At the event, BiChip was set to unveil what it claims is a revolutionary human microchip implant that is both distance-readable and internet-connectable. Christian groups in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe were planning on protesting this event in part due to Sallienjavis notoriety in Denmark for converting Christians to satanism.

All of this was written without a single citation or hyperlink to any credible source that could confirm any of the claims made. No news articles about the police raid, no hyperlinks outside of those to other articles on the Biohackinfo page itself supporting the claims of Christian uproar, nor anything of any credible nature related to the very existence of Sallienjavi himself. The article went on to make even more extreme claims for which there are no reference anywhere outside of the Biohackinfo site:

Despite Sallienjavis eccentricities, despite his satanic cult, despite the bizarre claims he repeatedly makes in public about being the anti-Christ figure prophesied in the Bible, despite his questionable and borderline criminal activities one of which includes the disappearance of a former cult member named Anna Smolar; Sallienjavi has high level security clearance in many bureaus of the Danish government including Denmarks security services. Sallienjavi also oversees a Danish government-funded multinational called BEZH, which is the parent company of most of his numerous startups, including BiChip.

This was not a conspiracy theory. This was a conspiracy fantasy. The characters do not even exist in the real world. Searches for the story of missing cult member Anna Smolar yield nothing, and Sallienjavi is a fictional character. A significant population of people were credulous enough to believe the PizzaGate conspiracy theory which alleged that a small pizzeria in Washington, DC harbored underground tunnels where political elites engaged in human trafficking, but even that gullible audience (probably) needed at least the pizzeria in question to exist in reality before accepting claims of their covert activities.

The abrupt cancellation of the November 26 event, is going to be met with much anguish and grief from some of the people who were unexpectedly invited like American satanists from both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The latter in particular, could not wait to attend, and according to our source inside BiChip, Lucien Greaves, the founder of the Satanic Temple, which BiChip has been donating to for years, practically begged Sallienjavi to let him attend the event.

Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event, Greaves had pleaded in an email to Sallienjavi.

Although Sallienjavi wants to absorb both the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan into his growing cult, he has little to no respect for the Temple and merely regards them as useful idiots and thralls. Sallienjavi however has respect for the Church of Satan, and BiChip had even invited Peter H. Gilmore, the current high priest of the church, to speak at the November 26 event as a secret special guest speaker. BiChip paid Gilmore with 10 bitcoin in advance, a book deal, and $15000 for his flight to Denmark. Gilmore also has an invite to the opening of Sallienjavis cults church.

The most nonsensical part about this, from my perspective, was that the Biohackinfo Twitter account reached out to me directly to taunt me with this article, thus bringing this whole farce to my attention. The claim that BiChip had heavily donated to The Satanic Temple was accompanied by a hyperlink to an image of a document with the TST letterhead at top. The text of the document stated, in embarrassingly poor English, that thanks were in order for the large donations to our church, imploring the donors, Finn and Flemming, to reach out into your network of trans humanists and pull others into the donation circle. The signature read, Kind regards, On behalf of Jacob McKelvy, T.H.

The letter, of course, is a fake, and that is why Biohackinfos enthusiasm in pointing this all out to me was perplexing. Why on earth would anybody create a story so absurd and then immediately send it to somebody who can immediately debunk it? Turns out, Jacob McKelvy is the name of some slob who pretended to be a Satanist for a while only to make a display of converting to Christianity in hopes of marketing himself to Evangelicals. He never had anything to do with TST. It is as though some fool merely Googled Satanist name and went with whatever sounded good at the time. Was Biohackinfo the gullible victim of somebody elses bizarre misinformation campaign? This seems unlikely, as in another article on the Biohackinfo site about the same fictitious Sallienjavi cult, the author writes again of my pleading to attend the international conference stating, This desperate plea by Greaves the self-professed progressive, is despite the fact that in his communication with Sallienjavi, Sallienjavi had made crazy statements to the tune of privacy is dead or privacy should be done away with. In fact, my only communication with the hoax conference (above) expressed my opposition to that perspective, a fact that Biohackinfo revealed to be fully aware of when confronted. When I replied to Biohackinfo, via public tweet, that I was confused by the extreme incompetence in their conspiracy-creation, the Twitter account responded saying, Dont lie followed by an image of my email reply to the hoax conference. And this was not an image of forwarded text from the email. It was clearly an image from the email account itself, indicating that Biohackinfo was in fact the same person behind the conference outreach email to begin with. I am hard-pressed to think of any other time I have seen something so elaborate also be so poorly-thought. This seemed to be the work of somebody who was not terribly bright, who was also quite convinced of their superior intelligence, acting in ways being mistaken for clever toward people who were being mistaken for severely mentally impaired.

Anyway, the fact that Biohackinfo was openly lying about the content of my email reply indicated that they were hardly gullible innocents being misled by another source. However, in a fit of tweets that again indicated the source to be at least partially fooled by the lies they were propagating, Biohackinfo soon began to post screenshots illustrating that they were uploading their files to Wikileaks, apparently believing that this would be of genuine concern to me

The Twitter account also began taunting the Church of Satan (which is actually little more than a Twitter account itself) with screenshots alleging to be a text correspondence with their Magus, Peter Gilmore. Gilmore, according to Biohackinfo, had accepted a speakers fee to deliver a keynote at the conference.

For their part, the Church of Satan denied that the correspondence was legitimate, and it certainly does not approach any reasonable vision of authenticity. For one thing, the correspondence suggests that monies were actually paid, which certainly never happened. Yet, here was Biohackinfo insistently sending these screenshots to the CoS Twitter, revelling in their whistleblower victory. The whole thing grew more confusing by the moment. If somebody is going to make up false accusations, why accuse somebody of something that is not even illegal, nor is it even clearly, in any way, immoral? When I asked Biohackinfo how Gilmore could have been faulted for accepting a speaking gig at the conference, if in reality he had (which he clearly did not), they replied that the effort to produce the literal so called mark of the beast was wrong.

I know that both Peter Gilmore and myself have imposter accounts manifest on a regular basis from Nigerian scammers looking to collect membership fees in our names. Is it possible that Biohackinfo was both trying to constuct an idiotic conspiracy theory about the Mark of the Beast while simultaneously being duped by an imposter Gilmore account? But what about the $15,000? Well, we dont know where the conversation went before or after that, but it looks as though the money was said to be in the mail, and the would-be scammer talking to the hoaxter may well have been skeptical, but what did they have to lose?

Interestingly, the Biohackinfo site is ostensibly a site advocating for Transhumanist agendas the technological augmentation and improvement of human biology but chip implants are a fairly mundane Transhumanist technology, and certainly not one any Transhumanist would be expected to refer to in superstitious fear-mongering language. Is it possible that Biohackinfo is a paranoid, ridiculously inept, religiously superstitious attempt to infiltrate and discredit the Transhumanist movement?

On October 22nd, 2019, the official website of the US Transhumanist Party published an article naming Biohackinfo in the creation of slanderous allegations against them:

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) unequivocally condemns the false, invented, and malicious allegations contained in two recent articles one by the pseudonymous authors Glyph and CyphR on the yellow-journalism Biohackinfo website, and another by the pseudonymous Nick Sobriquet, published in the Trigger Warning magazine edited by Rachel Haywire. These articles are part of a deliberate, coordinated attack on the transhumanist movement and the many decent, distinguished, accomplished, and benevolent people working within it. These articles also contain numerous outright lies and other half-truths and cherry-picked facts distorted beyond recognition.

The article reveals that the people behind Biohackinfo ran in the recent USTP Electronic Primary, speculating that it was their loss in that election that prompted them to sow chaos and exact vengeance. The Biohackinfo candidate, Rachel Haywire, apparently did not accept her second-place defeat gracefully, prompting the site to fabricate a story in which the USTP was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and intertwined in a massive web of nefarious special interests. Given that the simpletons of Biohackinfo could even make a credible run for the Transhumanist Party candidacy, my guess is that they are not very well connected with any established political players, nefarious or otherwise.

The next day, I received a Direct Message on Twitter from the legendary Sallienjavi himself:

I looked through the feed of the account. No mention of BiChip. Poor English. Various posts about President Trump that can not seem to decide whether the character of Sallienjavi is for him or against him. A few Tweets to indicate Satanism, not to mention he follows 666 accounts and has 666 embedded in his user name. Obviously, Metro.co.uk were duped by a press release when they interviewed Simon, who they then stated only uses his first name and doesnt appear on camera. The account was created in 2012. What kind of deranged fool would maintain this account for this long? Whose bitter antagonism could sustain such prolonged motivation for so long? There were no interactions on any of the posts of this alleged CEO. His followers appear to be nothing but bots and instant follow-backs. Why were these Biohackinfo clowns now messaging me from this account asking me to ignore them? My guess is that they were upset by the way I easily poked holes in their ludicrous story. At one point, the night before, they seemed to be trying to offer an olive branch so as to entice me to desist in my mockery of their infantile scheme:

Shortly thereafter, I received, also via Twitter DM, an unrelated piece of lunacy

And with that, I felt, normalcy had returned. This was a return to pure paranoia the likes of which I regularly receive without flagrant willful and grossly inept attempts at deception.

This Biohackinfo episode is easily the most elaborate and complicated display of absolute ineptitude that I have ever witnessed. I can only assume that they actually think their ploy is clever and that it will somehow prove convincing to a wider audience. They just may even be delusional enough to truly believe that their manufactured revelations will cause as they put it a geopolitical shitstorm, though to what end I can only still just speculate. One would pity them for their troubled idiocy if it were not so visibly stained with antagonistic malice. They created marketing materials for a fictitious product. They created a company and a villainous CEO. They managed to get media to pick up a press release. They manufactured a hoax conference. They put a massive amount of work into a complicated plot that was simultaneously so absurdly poorly-thought.

There is clearly more to this story for anybody who cares to look. That somebody is not presently me, but please let me know what you come up with

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The Most Elaborate Display of Ineptitude I Have Ever Witnessed: The BiChip Hoax - Patheos

Even if you havent heard the term biohacking before, youve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe youve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking salt juice each morning. Maybe youve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe youve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in dopamine fasting.

Maybe you, like me, have a colleague whos had a chip implanted in their hand.

These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle thats growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.

Biohacking also known as DIY biology is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger persons blood into your veins in the hope that itll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and its called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)

The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.

Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to hack biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe or legal they are.

As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection its worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.

Depending on whom you ask, youll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, Im mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, Ill also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).

Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology. Hes very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. Its all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.

One word Asprey likes to use a lot is control, and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about optimizing and upgrading their minds and bodies.

Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorseys routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesnt eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.

Supplements are another popular tool in the biohackers arsenal. Theres a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or smart drugs.

Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your bodys mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you or so the thinking goes.

Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.

A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.

For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: Ive grown to relish and rely on the technology, he recently wrote in the New York Times. The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and its nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.

Istvan also noted that for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers. Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.

On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.

These goals have a way of escalating. Once youve determined (or think youve determined) that there are concrete hacks you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.

That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings, he told me.

Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. I dont want to be just healthy; thats average. I want to perform; thats daring to be above average. Instead of How do I achieve health? its How do I kick more ass?

Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But hes also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, hes irritated by federal officials purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims thats part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.

(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that I do ridiculous stuff also. Im sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.)

The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at hacklabs, improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.

Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.

Plenty of age-old techniques meditation, fasting can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.

What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that its a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we dont need to accept our bodies shortcomings we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we dont necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicines gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.

As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, Hey, people have always been dying, but I think theres going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.

Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology whos been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, all of modern medicine is hacking, but that people often call certain folks hackers as a way of delegitimizing them. Its a way of categorizing the other like, Those biohackers over there do that weird thing. This is actually a bigger societal question: Whos qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?

If its taken to extremes, the Whos qualified to do anything? mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers dont generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just dont think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.

Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.

But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.

After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We cant say that yet.

Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although theres a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals and much of it is promising the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because its done so ahead of the science, it falls into the proceed with caution category. Critics have noted that for those whove struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.

And while were on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a pound a day weight loss is to buy his expensive, science-based Bulletproof products. She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:

What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that arent relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.

Many of the studies werent done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldnt be generalizable to the rest of us.

Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, thats very understandable. If youre sick and in constant pain, or if youre old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?

Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, theyre just not worth the risk.

If youve watched HBOs Silicon Valley, then youre already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, thats when an older person pays for a young persons blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that itll fight aging.

This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet its gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.

As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims havent been proven.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: Simply put, were concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.

Another biohack that definitely falls in the dont try this at home category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friends poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.

But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.

Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and people are going to get hurt. Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.

Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayners worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldnt buy Zayners kits, not just because they dont work half the time (shes a professional and even she couldnt get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists arent yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. Its a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.

At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases, Jorgensen says. They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, This is a fantasy. ... That is incredibly painful.

She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. Its bad for the DIY bio community, she said, because it makes people feel that as a general rule were irresponsible.

Existing regulations werent built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.

After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had ceased patient treatments. The site now says, We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.

This wasnt the FDAs first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.

In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by Californias Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.

The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because itll just drive the practice underground. They say its better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.

According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. Theyve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.

At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security, she said. And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.

Carlson told me hes noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down, he said. As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.

Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives, including in private laboratories in basements and garages.

Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. This technology is available and implementable anywhere, theres no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean? Carlson said.

Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, theyll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.

De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging or, as he calls them, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to make 90 the new 50 by 2030.

Wondering whether de Greys goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. Living to 1,000? Its definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it, he told me.

Hes optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, hes seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.

Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the small molecule approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the low-hanging fruit. He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.

The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out thats not very useful for treating humans we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.

But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. It wasnt a total cure they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.

Hes also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimers for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves but those probably wont help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: Its not a drug. You cant package and sell it, he said. Pharma cant monetize it.

Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldnt get it approved, he said. By the definition weve set up, aging isnt a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.

Not everyone whos interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.

My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology, Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs shes helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.

Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.

Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small steaks of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called Disembodied Cuisine.

More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.

And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If youre thoroughly grossed out by this, dont worry: The food wont actually be eaten this bioart project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.

When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, its easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what were coming to as a species.

But the fact is weve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, were all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.

The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia a fear of whats new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)

As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, test tube babies seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?

When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.

If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human, he said. And Im not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, its odd to say humans are static its not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.

Thats true. Nowadays, we live longer. Were taller. Were more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but thats nonetheless resulting in genetic change.

Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers upgrades dont get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?

Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldnt be expensive to produce. Theres no reason why that stuff cant be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society, he said. Insulin doesnt cost much to produce, but as a society weve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. Thats horrifying, but its not a function of the technology itself.

Heres another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology even if they dont want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay merely human.

The flip side of all this is the perfect race or eugenics specter, Jorgensen acknowledged. This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. Wed better think about it and use it wisely.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, youll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and to put it simply getting better at doing good.

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker whos famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how hes thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.

Subscribe to Reset now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Read the original post:
What is biohacking? The new science of optimizing your brain and body. - Vox.com

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While her sister Kylie Jenner is making a $600 million business deal, Kourtney Kardashian is getting in fights with randoms on Twitter.

A recent episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians shows Kourtney and Kim planning a joint birthday party for their daughters, Penelope and North respectively. The party was Candy Land themed, and yet Kourtney was seen saying that she wanted to keep the candy and junk food at a minimum despite the theme. Salads were even part of the little girls' party menus, and people on Twitter were up in arms over this seeming injustice to party planning.

Rather than ignore the criticism from strangers online, Kourtney chose a number of tweets to respond to directly.

One person tweeted "@kourtneykardashis the most annoying Kardashian, fr who acts that way about a child's birthday party? NO SWEETS at a party? Is it even a Candyland party without candy?Hmm She's just ugh. Hoping she quits the show "

Kourtney responded to the criticism, giving petty people a delightful new burn to use with "sugar plum."

"Thanks for being so invested in this sugar plum. I didnt say No sweets, we had organic cotton candy, and much more. There are healthier candy options. I appreciate your concern about my future as well, may God bless your sweet soul. #KUWTK"

Kourtney explained that she wanted to teach her children "moderation," but fans didn't believe that excuse either, with one saying "Salads at a party is not moderation thats asinine ."

However, Kourtney claims that Penelope is a healthy eater by choice and that salads weren't the only option.

"My daughter happens to love salads and it was her birthday party, which we also had BBQ food, cakes, and ice cream truck and way too much candy. But you focus on one word that I said, ok?"

There were plenty of people who had Kourtney's back through the whole ordeal, and she also thanked them for their kind words.

"Why do people care that @kourtneykardash doesnt want to give her kids candy? What a hill to die on.."

"We live In a strange world where people are criticizing@kourtneykardash because she wants to feed her children real healthy nutritious food and healthier versions of treats. This seems so backwards to me."

"So because we all die we have to be gluttonous? They're her kids and she wants them to be healthy. Excercise a healthy life which will benefit them in multiple facets of life."

This whole discussion seems to have stressed Kourtney out, so it might be for the best that she takes a break from KUWTK and stops fighting with people on Twitter.

Excerpt from:

Kourtney Kardashian Is Responding To Criticism From Fans On Twitter Over Daughter's Birthday Party - Yahoo Entertainment

A number of local resources exist for individuals and families attempting to cope with mental illness in all its forms.

Local chapters of the National Alliance of Mental Illness serving Logan and Champaign counties are committed to providing caring, comforting support for patients and loved ones alike who are navigating mental illness, and all the related challenges that come with a largely misunderstood, often invisible condition.

NAMI is a place where where families can go and feel empathy and understanding about stigmatized disorders of the brain, emphasizes Pete Floyd, president of the local NAMI/LC chapter.

Several local classes and support groups are ongoing in Bellefontaine and Urbana, including a family-to-family education program a free, 12-week course for family members of persons with mental illness.

Family-to-family courses are once per week for a total of 12 sessions, and is a program designed to improve coping and problem-solving abilities for the people closest to a person grappling with mental illness, according to information circulated by NAMI.

Likewise, family-to-family support groups meet on fourth Thursday of each month.

Group participants are empowered and feel less isolated through NAMI educational programming and support, advocates say.

A NAMI Basics, family support group is a program for families with children grappling with mental illness.

Weekly support groups for individuals with depressed mood and anxiety are conducted each Wednesday from 10 to 11:30 a.m., and 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., respectively, at Recovery Zones in Logan and Champaign counties, 440 St. Paris St., Bellefontaine; and 827 Scioto St., Urbana.

Through active engagement in NAMI classes and support groups, participants quickly realize they are not dysfunctional, but rather families facing serious health issues that require patience, understanding and self-care, most importantly, Floyd said.

NAMI stresses the need for advocacy for individuals with mental health as a means for assuring appropriate services and treatments; expanded research that can ultimately lead to a cure for major brain disorders; and eliminating discrimination and negative stigmas often associated with illnesses of the brain.

Established in 1979, NAMI is organized as a self-help organization dedicated to providing support, education and advocacy to anyone affected by persistent biologically-based brain disorders, according to administrative materials.

With proper treatment, upwards of 90 percent of individuals experience a significant reduction in symptoms and improved quality of life, NAMI representatives report.

Mental health advocacy, education and support can be the difference between someone following through with thoughts of suicide, or deciding to seek help, statistics indicate.

About nine out of every 10 people that commit suicide have some underlying mental illness, NAMI advocates relate. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, but it is preventable.

One-in-five adults in the U.S. lives with some form of a mental health condition, and approximately one out of every 25 adults copes with a serious mental illness.

Mental health patients will typically begin to experience symptoms in their teens or early 20s. About half of all lifetime mental health conditions start by age 14, and some three-quarters of those diagnosed with a mental illness begin to experience symptoms by the time theyre 24.

NAMI programming is available to mental health patients and their families at any age.

The NAMI basics family support group is geared towards children and families with mental health concerns.

Similarly, weekly educational and programming and support groups offer regular reinforcement against debilitating symptoms of mental illness.

For more information on the NAMI basics family support group contact, Angela Schoepflin, childrens program administrator, (614) 224-2700.

To request materials and to join a family-to-family education program, contact Bill Heitman, (937) 631-9598.

For more information on family-to-family support groups, contact Floyd, (9337) 750-1702.

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Advocacy, education, support keys to effective treatment of mental illness - Bellefontaine Examiner

SPRING HILL Working as a computer programmer in July 1969 inside what is now the Johnson Space Center, Jerry Bultmans office was sandwiched between the astronauts building and the auditorium.

It was the perfect vantage point to catch a glimpse of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins exiting quarantine in preparation for a pre-flight press conference.

Bultman knew his job, along with that of those around him, was to give NASA the mechanical and technical expertise it needed to support the Apollo 11 crew members on their historic journey to the moon. And the magnitude of the situation was not lost on him.

We were trying to get ahead of the Russians, Bultman told a group of wide-eyed students during a presentation Nov. 1 at Spring Hill High School. We wanted to put the United States up front and in first, and thats what we did.

But even a computer programmer can get starry-eyed, so when he saw the astronauts, he grabbed a small notepad and scurried into the auditorium to listen to the press conference. Afterwards, as the astronauts were walking down the aisle toward him, Bultman asked them if they would sign the notepad.

That piece of Americana stayed in Bultmans possession for decades as a lasting reminder of the moon-landing achievement. He since has donated it to the INFINITY Science Center museum next to the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

Bultmans message to the students was to aggressively follow their dreams and to not be discouraged when the inevitable obstacles of life appear.

Shoot for the stars, he said. If it knocks you to your knees, pick yourself up and keep going. Hard work will pay off.

Its a powerful message the Spring Hill students never would have had the opportunity to hear if not for a chance encounter a few years ago on hunting grounds in Ottawa.

Bultman is a 76-year-old New Orleans native, but in his retirement he has enjoyed traveling to pursue his hobby of deer and turkey hunting. He jumped at the opportunity to hunt on land in Kansas.

Brett Gearhart, a teacher who works with gifted students at Spring Hill High School, also happened to be hunting on that same property a few years ago, and the pair soon developed a friendship.

Gearhart asked if Bultman would come and speak to his gifted students, and he accepted. The high school students were joined in the auditorium by gifted students from Spring Hill and Woodland Spring middle schools.

Gearhart said Bultman has really become a great role model for him, and he wanted his students to also benefit from hearing Bultmans life experiences.

They learned that certain role models had a big impact on Bultmans life, including two great math teachers he had while he was growing up and a professor who recruited him to teach a computer programming lab at Mississippi State University.

I got to learn everything about computers, Bultman said. The light bulb went off, and I realized thats what I wanted to do.

His educational path wasnt perfect, though, as he also told the students how he struggled with advanced physics.

Bultman said the key for him was to stay focused and work hard. He also said it truly pays off to help others and be kind to those around you.

Through life, being a good person makes things easier, he said. All of us are who we are because of the decisions that we make. Always take the high road.

After the presentation, the students crowded around the stage and looked through a variety of pieces of memorabilia Bultman had on display, including awards from NASA.

They also flipped through a photo album and asked Bultman questions about some unique pictures, including one he snapped with his Brownie camera of his fuzzy television screen in July 1969 as Armstrong stepped onto the moons surface.

Bultman said he cherishes all of the memories, and hes enjoying retirement now after 41 years in the space industry, much of which he spent working for Lockheed Martin.

My high road has paid off, he said with a smile.

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'Shoot for the stars' | Education | republic-online.com - Miami County Republic

GEORGETOWN, Texas A former bus driver with Georgetown's school district has been arrested for allegedly soliciting a minor online, according to Georgetown Independent School District.

In a letter sent to parents on the night of Nov. 18, the school district said that the Georgetown Police Departmentnotified the district that the driver identified as Richard Wayne Malley of Georgetown in an affidavit obtained by KVUE was being investigated for online solicitation of a minor. The district said the driver was immediately placed on administrative leave and was arrested.

The school district said that Georgetown police believe the driver and the minor did not know each other before they began speaking online.

"Please know that the safety of your child is our top priority," the district said in the letter. "Georgetown ISD employees go through a thorough background check with DPSand the FBI. This individual had no reported history that would have prevented his employment with our district. We are deeply saddened by this news. The allegations against the individual are reprehensible."

The district said staffers are working to directly contact the parents of students who rode the driver's bus. Parents with questions may contact the district at 512-943-1890.

According to the probable cause affidavit for Malley, the victim's mother looked through her 14-year-old son's phone and found that he had received sexually explicit messages. Upon further investigation, she learned her son had an online account on a website designed for gay and bisexual men to find sexual partners. The son had received multiple messages from what the mother believed were adult men. One message from an unknown sender discussed the sender's desire to meet the boy in person, according to the document. When the mother questioned her son, she learned he had met the sender in person. She then filed a police report and turned the victim's cellphone over as evidence.

Police discovered by looking at the phone's messages and images that the victim and sender who used a Voice Over Internet Protocol number, allowing him to message the victim's phone from a computer had exchanged sexually explicit messages, including a photo of the victim's genitals. They also discussed meeting in person, police said. Police conducted a search for the sender's number and learned it returned to Malley. Police also learned that Malley was a Georgetown ISD bus driver who transported students with special needs.

During an interview with the victim, police said they learned that he had met with Malley on two occasions. During one of those occasions, the victim said Maley touched him over his clothes. Malley also allegedly asked him to send him a photo of his genitals.

Police searched the website where Malley allegedly made contact with the victim, looking up the screenname that the victim provided for him, and found that the profile picture associated with that screen name was of Malley.

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Former Georgetown ISD bus driver arrested for online solicitation of minor, district says - KVUE.com

More than half of Burbank Unified high school students say theyre often or almost always stressed, while just over a third of district staff feel similarly, according to a health and wellness poll.

John Paramo, Burbank Unifieds assistant superintendent of educational services, presented a report during a recent board meeting detailing information regarding an online survey.

The district hired Hanover Research, based on Arlington, Va., to contact students and staff from January to March with an expressed intent of finding out if and how they were using the districts health and wellness resources and how to improve upon what already exists.

A total of 2,023 students from Burbank, Burroughs and Monterey high schools responded, while 702 staff members, from those who work in preschools to high schools, also participated.

In terms of stress and anxiety, the online survey asked students, In general, how would you rate your typical level of stress or anxiety?

About 23% of Burbank Unified high school students responded they were almost always stressed or anxious, while 30% said they were often stressed, to total 53% of students. The next biggest group of students was those who identified as sometimes stressed at 28%.

What are we telling our students in our schools? asked board vice president Armond Aghakhianian. Are we telling them this is your key to a better career or are we giving them options?

Paramo, who took part in the districts senior day activities on Nov. 7, in which community members took part in a one-day experience of what its like to be a high school senior, said hes witnessed the amount of stress students endure to try and enroll in universities like UCLA and USC.

The pressure for kids to want to be in those schools means that theyre going to take a lot of [advanced placement] classes and theyre going to be involved in a million activities, Paramo said. Its no wonder that theyre anxious and stressed.

Roughly 10% of faculty and staff said they were almost always stressed, while 25% were often stressed. The largest group, 42%, said they were sometimes stressed.

While there are many factors, some triggers stood out as either large or moderate sources of anxiety for students.

Homework was No. 1, as 42% of students said it was a large source of anxiety and 27% thought it was moderate, to total 69%.

Preparing for college was second with percentages of 38% students saying it was a large source of anxiety and 29% saying it was moderate, for a total 67%, while preparing for a career was third with percentages of 35% indicating it was a large source of anxiety and 31% saying it was moderate, for a sum of 66%.

We have to really start addressing the sources and not just resources, board member Steve Ferguson said of the stress factors.

Homework and all those things are sources of anxiety, no doubt, but it also comes when students sign up for more classes than theyre ready for, he said.

There were also a few significant differences between the schools.

Burroughs students listed mental health as a moderate or a large source of stress at 48%, while Burbank students were at 39%.

Monterey High students said family relationships were a moderate or a large source of stress at 68%, which was at least 30 percentage points higher than students at Burroughs or Burbank.

Staff pointed to teaching responsibilities as a large source of stress at 31%, with 30% stating that teaching duties were a moderate source of stress to total 61%.

Staff feeling overworked was a large source of stress at 30% and moderate at 25% for a 55% sum, while budget concerns totaled 25% as a large source of stress and 27% a moderate source of anxiety for a sum of 52%.

Despite the stress, most students said they would likely not utilize district mental or socioemotional help, such as wellness centers or school psychologists.

About 31% of students said it was extremely unlikely and 33% said it was unlikely they would seek out district services, while only 14% said they were likely or extremely likely to use district help. A total of 67% of students said they have never used any school wellness services.

Hanover Research issued a few recommendations, leading with an increase in communication to staff and students about district services.

Company officials also thought the district should continue to provide ongoing education around mental health, wellness and socioemotional well-being to develop a common language and understanding in these areas, while finding ways to ease the stress created by homework.

According to the survey, 72% of students say they would personally benefit from anxiety or stressed-related counseling.

Paramo said he thought many students would seek help if it didnt interfere with school hours and that students may look outside the district for assistance.

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Majority of Burbank Unified high-schoolers, third of teachers feel stressed out - Los Angeles Times