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translations-by-aiimee · 4 years ago

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The Husky and His White Cat Shizun - Chapter 18

Original Title: 二哈和他的白猫师尊

Genres: Drama, Romance, Tragedy, Xianxia, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 18 - This Venerable One has Begged You Before

Tianwen has a deadly killing move. The name was very simple, just one word: "Wind". Once activated, no piece of armor in the surrounding area could withstand it.

Mo Ran was naturally acquainted with the power of "Wind". He also knew Chu Wanning's strength so there was no need to worry. He glanced at the pale man whose robe was dyed red with blood. He threw away the rest of his talismans to buy Chu Wanning some time, then flew away to the edge of the fight. He grabbed Shi Mei with one hand, Madam Chen with the other, and took two unconscious people, hiding a far distance away.

Chu Wanning endured the severe pain and reluctantly moved his other. Suddenly, Tianwen burst out with a dazzling golden light, and Chu Wanning violently jerked it back.

The Master of Ceremonies Ghost went berserk. It jumped up and rushed towards Chu Wanning with a distorted face.

Chu Wanning's robe waved like a flame in a violent wind, billowing and flying. His eyebrows were furious, half of his shoulders soaked in blood. He quickly raised his hand, Tianwen's golden light became more and more intense then it took off by Chu Wanning's flying spin.

The willow vine stretched for several tens of feet and whirled into a golden spiral. Like a whirlpool, it engulfed the surrounding ghosts, dead bodies, golden children, and the roaring and twisting Master of Ceremonies Ghost into the center of "Wind". The fierce image that was created by Tianwen was then shattered in an instant!!!

"Wind" smashed and destroyed. Not even the surrounding grass and trees, being ripped up from the ground, were spared.

The huge storm centered around Chu Wanning let out a dazzling golden light. The sky grew dark, covered by flying sand and rocks. Whether it was a coffin or the dead, they were like grass fluttering in the wind.

She was sucked in and was cut up by the rapidly spinning Tianwen.

Sliced into tens of thousands pieces of debris. . .

When everything calmed down, there was no grass around Chu Wanning, a desolate and empty wasteland.

Other than him standing alone in his bright, auspicious clothes that resembled a blooming red lotus and a begonia blossom, there was only a ground covered in crushed white bones, and the horrible hissing of Tianwen's golden light.

From this point of view, Chu Wanning did the world a favour pumping out so many disciples.

Based on his performance today, if he wanted to, even if every disciple on Life-Death Peak were defeated, it wasn't impossible for him to keep fighting. . .

The golden light faded away.

Tianwen turned into flickering dots like stars, blending into Chu Wanning's palm.

He breathed a deep breath and frowned. Enduring the sharp pain in his shoulder, he slowly walked towards his disciples in the distance.

"How's Shi Mei?"

Coming to their side, Chu Wanning pushed through and asked.

The ink burned down to look at the unconscious beauty in his arms. He still wasn't awake, his breathing was weak, and his cheeks felt cold to the touch. This scene was too familiar, it was a nightmare that Mo Ran couldn't get rid of.

As Shi Mei was lying in his arms like this, as time went on, he wasn't breathing anymore. . .

Chu Wanning placed his hands on Madam Chen's and Shi Mei's necks. He mumbled out: "Hmm? How could the poisoning be so deep?"

Mo Ran's head snapped up: "Poison? Didn't you say they were okay? Didn't you say that they were just being compelled?"

Chu Wanning frowned: "The Master of Ceremonies Ghost relied on the fragrance powder to compel them. That was a kind of poison. I thought it was only superficial, but I didn't expect the poison to be this severe."

". . ."

"Send them back to Chen's house first." Chu Wanning said, "It's not difficult to expel the poison. It's fine as long as they don't die."

His voice was cold and unwavering. Although Chu Wanning normally spoke like this, at this moment, it really made people feel like he was uncaring and downplaying things.

Mo Ran was brought back to that year of heavy snow. He was knelt in the snow and in his arms was Shi Mei whose life was slipping away. With tears on his face, he hoarsely begged Chu Wanning to turn his head, look at his disciple, and pleaded for him to raise his hand to save his disciple's life.

But what did Chu Wanning say back then?

It was also in such a light and calm tone of voice.

Just like that, rejecting Mo Ran the one time he knelt down and begged.

In the heavy snow, the person in his arms gradually became as cold as the snow falling on his shoulders and eyelashes.

That day, Chu Wanning killed two disciples with his own hands.

One was Shi Mingjing, who he could have saved but didn't.

One was Mo Weiyu, kneeling in the snow mourning the death of his heart.

There was a sudden panic in his heart, a brutality, a snake-like flow of resentment, rage and viciousness.

There was a moment when he suddenly wanted to rise up and strangle Chu Wanning. Wanted to shed his kind and pleasant disguise, revealing the hideousness of a malevolent ghost. Like a fierce ghost from a previous life, it viciously tore into him, questioning him and demanding his life.

He claimed the lives of the two helpless disciples in that snowfield.

But when his eyes flicked up, they suddenly fell on Chu Wanning's blood-covered shoulder.

The beast's anger was suddenly cut off.

He didn't say another word, just stared at Chu Wanning's face with poorly-masked hateful eyes. Chu Wanning didn't notice. After a while, he lowered his head again and stared at Shi Mei's haggard face.

His mind gradually went blank.

If something happened to Shi Mei this time, then. . .

"Cough cough cough!!"

The person in his arms abruptly coughed. Mo Ran was stunned and his heart trembled. . . Shi Mei slowly opened his eyes, and his voice was extremely hoarse and weak.

"A-. . . Ran. . .?"

"Yes! It's me!" In his ecstasy, the haze disappeared. Mo Ran's eyes widened. The palms of his hands were pressed against Shi Mei's cool cheeks, and his shining eyes trembled. "Shi Mei, how do you feel? Does anything hurt? "

Shi Mei smiled lightly, his eyebrows still. He turned his head, and looked around: ". . . How are we here. . . How did I faint. . . Ah! Shizun. . . cough cough, this disciple is incompetent. . . this disciple. . ."

"Don't talk," Chu Wanning said.

He gave Shi Mei a pill: "Since you're awake, take this poison dispersing pill. Don't swallow it right away."

Shi Mei took the medicine then was suddenly taken aback, his colourless face appearing even more transparent: "Shizun, how did you get hurt? You're covered in blood. . ."

Chu Wanning still had that faint, calm, irritating voice: "It's nothing."

He got up and glanced at Mo Ran.

"You, find a way to bring both of them back to the Chen's residence."

When Shi Mei woke up, the gloom that was deep in his heart suddenly vanished. He nodded quickly: "Okay!"

"I'll go first. I have something to ask the Chen family."

Chu Wanning said and turned to leave. Facing the vast darkness of the night, the fields covered in decay, he finally couldn't supress a twitch in his eyebrow, revealing a painful expression.

The entire shoulder was pierced by five fingers, the tendons and veins were torn apart, and the Master of Ceremonies Ghost's claws even pierced the bones deep in his flesh and blood. No matter how he pretended to endure it calmly, no matter how he tried to stave the bleeding, he was still be a human being.

It still hurt. . .

But so what if it hurts.

He walked forward one foot after another, the hem of the wedding dress flying around.

For so many years, people respected and feared him, but no one has dared stand by his side. No one cares about him. He has long been used to it.

Yuheng of the Night Sky, the Beidou Immortal.

No one liked him. No one cared whether he lived or died, whether he was sick or suffering.

He seemed to be born without the need for the support of others, no need to rely on anyone, no need for company.

So there was no need to shout out in pain, and crying was even more unnecessary. Just go and dress the wounds, cut off all the festering flesh around the tear and apply ointment on it.

It didn't matter if no one cared about him.

Anyway, that's how he came to be alone. He's survived all these years. He can take care of himself.

When he came to the door of the Chen residence, before he entered the courtyard, he heard an ear-piercing scream.

Chu Wanning didn't care about aggravating his wound and immediately rushed in - only to see the old lady Chen with a disheveled hair, her eyes closed, but chasing her son and husband all over the house, only ignoring the young daughter of the Chen family. She stood beside her in panic, huddled tightly, shaking.

Seeing Chu Wanning enter, Mr. Chen and his eldest son screamed and rushed towards him: "Dao Master! Dao Master, help!"

Chu Wanning held them back. He glanced at Madam Chen's closed eyes, and said angrily: "Didn't I tell you to watch her and keep her from falling asleep?!"

"I can't help it! My wife is unwell. She usually goes to bed early. After you left, she was still holding out at first, then she fell asleep, and then she started to go crazy! She started screaming. . . yelling. . ."

Mr. Chen shivered and ducked behind Chu Wanning. He didn't notice that he was actually wearing an auspicious outfit, nor did he notice the hideous wound on Chu Wanning's shoulder.

Chu Wanning frowned and said: "What was she yelling?"

Before Mr. Chen spoke, the mad woman rushed over with her teeth bared, screaming mournfully. It was actually the voice of a young woman—

"Spineless liar! Pathetically fickle! I want you to pay with your lives! I want you all to die!"

Chu Wanning: ". . . This evil spirit stoops low." He turned back and sternly shouted at Mr. Chen, "Does this voice sound familiar?"

Mr. Chen’s mouth was trembling. He rolled his eyes and swallowed nervously: “I don’t know, I don't recognize it, I don’t know! Please help! Please help!

Just then, Madam Chen rushed over. Chu Wanning raised his uninjured arm, pointing at the sky above Madam Chen, and a lightning bolt slammed down, trapping Madam Chen within a barrier.

Chu Wanning turned his head with an icy gaze: "You really don't know?"

Mr. Chen repeated: "I really don't know! I really don't know!"

Chu Wanning didn't say anything else. He whipped out Tianwen and bound old lady Chen in the barrier.

He should have tied up the rest of the family outside, it would be more convenient and easier to gauge the situation, but Chu Wanning had his own rules of conduct. It wasn't easy using Tianwen to interrogate abnormal individuals. So he abandoned the soft approach and instead questioned the ghost in Madam Chen's body.

Interrogating ghosts wasn't the same as interrogating people.

When Tianwen interrogated people, they couldn't fight it and would speak.

When Tianwen interrogated ghosts, it would form a boundary where only Chu Wanning and the ghost would exist. Ghosts would regain their original appearance in the boundary and pass on their message to Chu Wanning.

A flame ignited on Tianwen. It snaked along the vine, burning from his end straight to old lady Chen.

The old lady let out a scream, and suddenly began to twitch. The original scarlet flame on the willow vine instantly turned into a blue ghost fire and burned back to Chu Wanning's side.

Chu Wanning closed his eyes. The fire burned up the willow vine onto his palm, but the ghost fire couldn't hurt him. It just burned all the way along his arm, down his chest, and then went out.

". . ."

The Chen family looked at the scene in horror. They didn't know what Chu Wanning was doing.

Chu Wanning's eyelashes trembled lightly, his eyes still closed, but a white light gradually appeared in front of his eyes. Immediately afterwards, he saw a small, white, jade-like foot step out of the light, and a girl about seventeen or eighteen years old appeared in his field of vision.

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#2ha novel #2ha translation #2ha #the husky and his white cat shizun translation #the husky and his white cat shizun #english translation #chinese bl #chinese novel #danmei novel #danmei #yaoi #yaoi novel #bl novel #mo ran #chu wanning #ranwan

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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I would rather watch something lighter, but my grandmother keeps returning to news of the gilets jaunes protest. The protesters are on every television channel, in their neon yellow vests, squaring off against the police in Paris and blocking highways in the regions. They have set up tires along the little road by the gas station attached to the Auchan department store, behind the home that my father and stepmother share in Châtellerault. Their protest is distinct from the strikes that havehad high schoolers walking out of their lycées. The minors are angry about—among other things—changes to the monumental BAC exam that they fear will favor their well-off peers. By the time I arrive in France, the protest is on its fourth or fifth day. Footage has just emerged of teenagers on their knees, hands behind their necks, surrounded by police. The kneeling teenagers are in Mantes-La-Jolie, a poorerbanlieue of Paris that is very Black and Arab. The Minister of Education insists that the children were placed in this position to be kept safe while the police searched them for evidence relating to an act of vandalism committed nearby.

The image is unsettling and instantly becomes iconic. For the government, it is a PR nightmare. In the car on the way to the rehabilitation facility where my grandfather is recovering from surgery, we listen to people call in to a radio show. A man in his 70s expresses dismay at the excess of force. He’s old enough to recall France’s flirtations with fascism. Another feels certain that kids in the wealthy Parisian Sixth Arrondissement would never be subjected to the treatment reserved for the banlieue. He’s not wrong. A woman calls in and says the children are savages. The host tries convincing her to hang up, I think, before her racism graduates from innuendos. Someone cuts to commercial. My grandmother keeps her eyes on the road.

I never thought I’d be following the gilets jaunes protests from France this weekend, but my grandfather is unwell. He fell while opening the door of the fridge, but the doctors say his femoral neck was already broken by the time he lost his balance. It’s the kind of thing one can expect from living with a Paget diagnosis, a rot of the bone tissue that sharply curves the body of its hosts. When I called my grandmother on the phone the previous weekend, she said the surgeon inserted a nail into his hip and closed him up in an hour. He’d awakened but she warned me that he struggled to recognize faces, struggled to speak, struggled to hear, struggled to see, struggled to eat. His 89th year here has not been very kind to him. Anyway, she’d looked for a black coat in town (no luck). I nodded as though she could hear it and bought a ticket home.

Age is a cruel thing. In his youth, my grandfather was a real paysan—a blacksmith and a farmer, born and raised in the countryside. Unlike me, he derived immense pleasure from manual labor. He worked late in life, climbing on ladders and fixing stuff himself so he wouldn’t have to give another man an extra penny, until Parkinson’s made his hands shake too much and the medication clouded his mind. I remember being drawn to the steady strike of the iron emanating from his shop on the edge of the farm. I’d wait for a pause to ask him what he was making. “A gate,” he’d sometimes say. Other times, a horseshoe or scissors to break stone. Then, we’d have nothing more to say to each other so I’d go back to my thing, and he to his. He was stern with children—with his own son, with me, and with his next two granddaughters—but he was better with adults. I can still see him at family reunions in the ’90s, his spirits brightened with wine, singing gaily for the party to the accompaniment of his accordion. My crotchety grandfather, life of the party. People are complicated.

We arrive at the treatment and physical rehabilitation center in Loudun, the second closest town to the village after Richelieu. My grandfather seems lost and tired, at times embarrassed. He is in the silk pajamas that my grandmother has brought him so that he doesn’t have to wear the hospital gowns. I’d never seen my grandfather in pajamas before this week. When I slept over as a kid, he was always up and working by the time I got up. I’d also never placed my hand on his shoulder tenderly or caressed his hand to stop him from reaching for his hallucinations until now either. We stay for two hours until he falls asleep.

My father, stepmother, and I are all glad that this fall has opened my grandmother’s eyes to the fact that she needs a home aide to help care for her husband, if he comes home. Where I live now, in Washington D.C., such a suggestion would create financial anxiety, but this is not America so money never really comes up. No one frets over how much the stay will cost, or whether the doctors are injecting him with generic medication. Whatever the end of the road is for our family, it will not be pages of billing and harassing calls from debt collectors. My grandfather is 100 percent disabled, so my grandmother knows that when she does ask for help, the state will give it to her. Simple as that. In this way, things are better here. My father is often astonished when I tell him what things Americans must handle without support from the government. Yet France is restless. In some towns, it is burning.

The gilets jaunes crowd is diverse in age and race and gender and politics, but it is more white and middle-aged than you think. The news anchors have a hard time identifying the heads of the movement or its political leanings. The demonstration began with an online petition, signed by over 900,000 people, denouncing the hikes in the fuel taxes set to become effective in January 2019 and urging people to protest the higher prices. On Saturday, December 2, over 50,000 protesters descended upon Paris. Their signs evoke the revolts of May 1968 and the French Revolution of 1789. Some call the President “King Macron” and call for his immediate resignation. They are workers, small business owners, unemployed people, young radicals from the left and the right. It is hard to say exactly what everyone wants. The movement is not uniform, nor is it a traditional movement where a slate of leaders set demands and take the uprising from there. I suspect the demands that have made it into the government’s hands don’t reflect the views of all the movement’s adherents. How can they, when one poll shows that 40 percent of the gilets jaunes voted for neofascist Marine Le Pen in the presidential election, 20 percent voted for leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and only 5 percent voted for Emmanuel Macron? It’s complicated.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #french politics #protest #yellow vests

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whumppile · 7 years ago

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Hey! I know you are busy but here is another Peter and Tony one! Where Tony is checking up on Peter's suit status during one of his patrol nights, making sure it is still functioning properly when he notices that Peter's vitals are a little off but he knows he's just sitting at the moment so doesn't make sense and then he looks through his vitals history and sees something off; i.e. Peter has an diagnosed heart problem which could very well kill him if he overdoes it and Tony goes into dad!mode

Hey, sorry this took sooo long and that it kind of got away from me. So, I dont know if this is really what you wanted but I hope you like it anyway! Thanks for the prompt! I’ll also post this on my ff.net and ao3 accounts as “Matters of the heart.”

Tony knew that everyone teased him about being overprotectiveof Peter, and he didn’t want to be one of those helicopter parents, especially sincehe wasn’t even Peters actual parent, but he couldn’t help it. The kid was likea magnet for trouble, and no matter how many rules and safety nets Tony laidout, Peter still went happily marching into danger, every time.

Tony did his best to protect him, but some things can’t bekept away with trackers, webs, and curfews.

“Peter, are you feeling okay?”

The teenager looked up from his sandwich, legs swinging ashe sat on the edge of the building, where he and Tony were perched for apost-mission snack.

“Yeah, why?”

Tony frowned at the lines and numbers scrolling across hisvision in his Iron-Man suit. Karen had notified him that something was offabout Peters vitals, but couldn’t pinpoint what, exactly, was wrong.

“Did you get hit at all?”

Peter put his sandwich down and frowned. “No, I stayed awayfrom them and just threw my webs; they never even touched me. What’s wrong?”

Tony wasn’t sure, that was the problem. Thankfully, it didn’tseem to be urgent and Peter really did seem fine, but the heart rate scrollingacross his vision was wonky and uneven.

“It’s probably just a glitch in the suit, but Karen thinksyour vitals are off, so finish that and we’ll go see Bruce.”

Peter groaned and rolled his eyes, as Tony sent theinformation to the compound to be ready for when they arrived. He knew why thekid was annoyed to be going, but heart abnormalities were not something tobrush off.

“It’s just to be safe, Peter.”

Tony really wished it had just been a glitch in the suit. But,when Bruce saw the suit readings he frowned, swiping through the data on thescreen next to the hospital bed he had Peter sitting on.

“What is it?” Tony really didn’t want to hear the answer,because he could tell by the look on his friend’s face, that something waswrong.

Peter looked between the two men, getting more nervous asBruce pulled Tony a little bit away to talk to him. Not that, that would work,since he had enhanced senses anyway.

“Peter, put your headphones in.” Of course, Tony would remember.

The teenager did as he was told but watched the two through thewindow, as they went to the next room to talk.

Bruce closed the door behind them, and did his best tostall, only making Tony more nervous.

“It could be nothing, I mean, we don’t really know muchabout how Peters abilities affect his-“

“Bruce, stop, just spit it out.”

The doctor sighed and wrung his hands in front of him,anxiously.

“His heartrate is irregular, it’s called an arrhythmia, andusually I wouldn’t really be worried because he seems fine but his bloodpressure is too high, even though he’s just sitting there. I want to do somemore tests and figure out exactly what’s causing this.”

Tony looked behind him, through the window to where Peterwas watching them, with those wide eyes. He turned back to Bruce. “Is thisserious? Do we need to call his aunt?”

The doctor hesitated, but nodded, shoulders sagging. He’dalways hated delivering bad news.

Tony didn’t want to tell her, because May Parker was just asoverprotective as he was, and he didn’t want her to feel as sick and worried ashe did. He wanted so badly to believe that Peter would be fine, and the testswould come back clean, but that kid had always attracted trouble wherever hewent, and he could almost feel the bad news coming.

She came quickly, though he told her there was nothing knownyet, and the tests hadn’t even begun, and they sat with Peter through everyscan, X-ray, MRI, EKG, and whatever else Bruce subjected him to. And then theysat there, in front of Bruce’s desk, holding their breaths, waiting for thenews.

“He has what’s called dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, it’swhen the left ventricle is enlarged and weakened, and since that’s the heartsmain pumping chamber, it lessens the hearts ability to pump blood. He probably didn’teven know anything was wrong, it often doesn’t present any symptoms at all, andalthough he seems okay now, it can be very serious.”

Tony felt like throwing up. Peter’s best super power hadalways been his heart, and now there was something wrong with it.

May had a hand over her mouth, muffling her voice slightlyas she spoke. “What does that mean? Is he going to be okay? What do we do tofix this?”

Tony was already picturing Peters face in his mind, and howit would fall when he told him he couldn’t be Spider-Man anymore. But thenBruce spoke, tone noticeably brighter than before.

“This sort of diagnosis, in any other fifteen-year-old,would mean big lifestyle changes, but Peter’s body can take far more than otherkids can. I don’t know how his enhanced healing is going to effect this, butPeter will be fine.”

May let out a sigh of relief, but Tony shook his head. “Hisheart doesn’t work properly, you can’t actually be suggesting we just leavethis alone. He can’t continue to be Spider-Man with something like this.”

His mind was already racing with awful images of Peterhaving a heart attack in the middle of a mission, but Bruce just adjusted hisglasses, unfazed.

“We aren’t going to just forget about this, Tony, I will beprescribing him a few medications to keep his blood pressure in control andother symptoms that might come up. And I’ll be keeping a close eye on him tosee how this progresses, but he isn’t actually unwell, he can keep doing whathe’s doing, and be perfectly fine.”

Tony knew that Bruce was the expert, but he couldn’t wraphis head around the idea of just letting Peter run into danger, with a heartthat didn’t work properly.

“You said this could be serious? Shouldn’t he be taking iteasy?”

Bruce gave him a sympathetic smile, and on anyone else itwould have been condescending, but on Bruce it just looked gentle. “Almosteverything is easy for Peter. He’s young, fit, and active, and he has super strengthand enhanced healing. He can catch a car with his bare hands and not even breaka sweat, so, as long as he feels okay and doesn’t take any damage to his chest,he can do everything that he was before. People with these sorts of heartconditions still lead active lives, in fact its encouraged that they do. We’llkeep an eye on his heart and his health, but he will be fine.”

May looked relieved, wiping at her eyes before standing andshaking the doctors hand. “Thank you, so much. I’m going to go see Peter.”

Tony wanted to believe that the teenager would be okay, but hecouldn’t let it go, he couldn’t do nothing. So, despite his aversion to beingthe helicopter parent, he would be.

…………

Peter slipped his suit on, returned after Tony tweaked a fewthings, and smiled as Karen greeted him.

“Hello, Peter.”

The teenager slipped out his window, ready to get back tohis nightly patrols, after spending a week doing tests and medication trialswith Dr Banner. He felt fine, and thankfully May and Tony were beginning to believethat he was.

“Hey, Karen. It’s really good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back. How are you feeling? Any symptoms toreport?”

Pete sighed, rolling his eyes as he swung to anotherbuilding. “I’m fine. I should have known Tony would do something like this.”

Karen continued, pleasant voice doing nothing to make thequestions less annoying. “Have you taken your medication today?”

Peter was so sick of being asked that. “Yes. Can you stopasking these stupid questions and just tell me if there’s anything in the citythat I can help with? I’ll take another bicycle theft at this point.”

Karen hummed, stalling a little as the suit scanned itsowner. “Your blood pressure, and heart rate are in acceptable range, so, yes Ican do that.”

Peter frowned, running across the top of a building, andlooking out over the edge, at the people below. “Would you have not done it, ifmy heart rate was too high?”

She answered right away, making Peter groan in irritation. “Yes,Mr Stark has added new protocols to assist with keeping you safe, and monitoringyour heart. If you had presented any unusual symptoms, he would be called and Iwould prevent you from ‘diving headfirst into danger’ as he put it.”

“He doesn’t have to worry so much; Dr Banner said I’m fine.”

She still hadn’t told him if there was anything he could behelping with, so he sat on the edge of the building instead, watching the tinyfigures below.

Karen’s voice was softer, as if she understood and wanted tomake him feel better.

“I know, but he cares about you, and he can’t help butworry.”

That made Peter smile. “Thanks, Karen.”

He knew Tony worried of course, and he hated when peopleworried over him, but it was actually nice to know they cared. And, he may havehated all the rules and extra precautions but he really did try to be careful.The diagnosis had scared him too, and he didn’t want to stress out his hearttoo much, so, beating up bad guys and swinging around the city was easy, but maybehe’d leave catching cars, to people without heart problems.

Unfortunately, things don’t always work out the way you plan,and trouble would always find Peter, no matter what he did to stop it.

They really needed to sort out some kind of security systemfor earth, because aliens just kept popping up like mushrooms. Tony hadn’t wantedPeter to come, but they needed him, and he’d promised to stay back and firewebs from a distance. And, Peter had really wanted to keep that promise, butthe alien was fast, and its super strength made it hard for anyone to stop it.

So, he’d fired webs and tried to trap it, which worked,until it knocked every Avenger back into the street and loomed over Tony.

The Iron Man suit was banged up and scratched, and Peterknew that Tony wasn’t going to get to his feet in time to stop the meaty fistcoming towards him.

The teenager flung out a web, and swung out in front of hismentor, kicking the ugly ass alien in the chest to send it smashing into awall.

“Spider-Man, get out of here! You could get hurt!”

Peter took his metal hand and pulled him up from the ground,before firing another web and giving Tony a salute.

“You’re welcome!”

He went back to running across roof tops, and swingingaround the fight, keeping his distance, but what they hadn’t yet seen from thegross, half burnt, too tall, raisin looking alien, was that it could fly.

Peter heard a round of surprised exclamations, through hiscom, including his own, as the thing looked apparently angry at being kickedinto a wall by a baby spider. It stretched out its back, the ridges in itsspine elongating until it had formed bony, wrinkly wings, and launched itselfinto the air. Right after Peter.

What was stupid about it, was that Peter had actually beenfollowing the rules this time, with a little lapse in rule following in orderto save Tony, but he had gone right back to the side-lines when told to! He wasbeing good! Yet, the alien still came towards him, as Tony tried to stop itbefore it touched his kid.

Peter saw it coming, and he tried to swing out of the way, butthe beast was so fast he barely had a second before it was on him. He couldhear the team calling his name, desperately trying to get there in time, butall they could do was watch as it’s fist soared towards Peter’s chest.

Tony watched it, watched the eyes on Peter’s suit widen infear, and thought ‘god, no, why him’.

Alarms and warnings began screaming inside Tony’s suit,monitors going crazy as Peter fell, as if nothing but deadweight.

Tony flew down, catching Peter and soaring off to thecompound, as the alien screamed in pain, arrows, bullets, and a shield, hittinginto it until it’s body disintegrated, leaving nothing but a pile of ash and asmudge on a building.

Tony couldn’t breathe, because Peter couldn’t. Friday’svoice was panicked, as she recited his injuries and suggested treatments. “Heis having trouble breathing, his heart rate is too high, and his blood pressureis too low. He needs medical treatment immediately.”

Peter was gasping, desperately trying to drag air into hisdamaged chest, and Tony flew as quickly as he could, finally crashing through acompound window and landing in the med-bay, cradling the teenager against himas he gently pulled their masks off.

He had never seen the teenager so scared. His mouth was openand gasping, as his hands pawed at his chest, trying to stop the pain.

Bruce ran in, immediately coming over to the patient as Tonylowered him to the bed. The Doctor started pulling Peter’s suit off, yanking itdown to expose the teenager’s chest, and profusely apologising as Peterwhimpered.

Tony stepped out of his Iron-Man suit and grabbed a stethoscope,whispering to the teenager as he pressed the head to his chest. Bruce had beenteaching him everything there was to know about Peter’s heart condition, sothat he could help if needed.

“Shh, Peter, it’s going to be okay. Just try to lay stilland breathe.” He didn’t know if it was going to be okay, but he didn’t knowwhat else to say as Peter whimpered in pain, squirming under their hands, onthe bed.

What he heard did not make him feel any better. Peter’sheart was beating far too fast, and he had a murmur, a big one. Bruce hadexplained to him that a murmur was when blood was pumped through the valve, butflowed back into the heart chambers when the valve didn’t close off as itshould.

Tony froze, wishing he had imagined it. But Peter was cryingsoftly under him, eyes barely open as he tried to breathe, and Tony couldn’t denyit. He pulled the stethoscope away and turned to his friend.

“He’s…there’s a murmur.”

Bruce looked up from where he was fixing an oxygen mask ontoPeters face, and took the stethoscope form Tony’s hands so that he could checkhimself. He had the same look on his face as Tony did; shock, concern, anddread.

“The valve is collapsing.” Peter let out a strangled gasp asBruce ran to the doorway and called for help. Tony could barely keep standingas nurses and doctors rushed in, crowding around Peter and yelling things.

Tony heard surgery being mentioned, as well as emergencytransplants, and repairs, and his face crumpled, tears falling. And then heheard Peter’s voice, weak and out of breath, shaking with fear.

“Tony!”

The sea of medical personnel parted, allowing Tony throughto take the hand that Peter was holding out towards him. There were tearsstreaking down Peter’s temples into his hair, as he gasped out words behind theoxygen mask.

“Please don’t leave me!”

Tony squeezed his hand, and ran a hand through the kid’shair, brushing it back from his face as he forced a reassuring smile.

“I won’t, I promise. I’m staying right here, Pete.”

Peter looked up at him, those huge eyes afraid as hisfingers gripped Tony’s like a life line, the muscles across his chest contractingas he struggled to breathe. His mouth opened desperately as his breaths grewmore rapid and shallow, until they were nothing but tiny gasps.

“Pete?”

And then his eyes closed, and his fingers grew lax.

Tony squeezed his hand, but got no response, heart hammeringin his chest so hard he thought it might drown out his panicked words.

“Peter! No, come back, kid, come back!”

Arms wrapped around him, pulling him back from the bed, ashe screamed, Peter’s hand pulled from his to fall and hang from the bed.

Steve’s voice met his ears, close and full of grief. “Tony,let them take him. Let them help.”

He was being pulled away, and the nurses and doctors swarmedover the teenager, so that Tony couldn’t see him anymore.

He struggled in Steve’s hold, trying to get back to his kid.“No, I can’t leave! I promised him, I promised I would stay. Please, he needsme.”

But Steve’s arms didn’t relent, and he sagged to the flooras the gravity of the situation sank in. Peter was dying, and there was nothinghe could do to stop it.

……………

After four hours of surgery, and five days in bed in the medwing, Peter was alive and well, and recovering on the couch.

He was weak, and still sore, with a new scar down his chest,that scared Tony every time he saw it, but he was alive, and that’s whatmattered.

May had her arm wound him as they sat on the couch, under abundle of blankets, watching movies. Steve was sitting on the other side ofPeter, smiling when the kid nudged his arm. “Oh, watch this, this is the bestpart!”

Natasha and Clint swapped a bowl of popcorn and chipsbetween them, as Sam quietly explained to Bucky everything that was happeningin the movie. It should have been a nice night, but Tony couldn’t let go of thepanic every time he saw the heart monitor peeking out from under Peter’sclothes, or the dark circles under his eyes.

The kid was healing quickly, as always, but he still seemedso fragile, and Tony couldn’t trust that he was okay.

“Are you sure everything’s working properly? Because I readabout the complications and-“

Bruce patted his shoulder, as they stood in the next room,watching over their family. “Everything is working perfectly; the surgery wentreally well and he’s getting stronger every day.”

Tony rubbed a hand over his forehead, trying to get rid ofthe sick feeling he got everytime he remembered the way Peter had looked inthat hospital bed, after the operation. He’d been so small under the wires,tube in his mouth, and pale eyelids closed. May had cried as soon as she’d seenhim.

“I can’t go through that again, he can’t. I can’t let himkeep fighting and going out on missions, it’s too dangerous. He can’t beSpider-Man.”

Bruce sighed and pointed to where Peter was laughing on thecouch, as Clint tossed popcorn into the teenager’s mouth from across the room, occasionallytossing some into Natasha and Bucky’s hair just to make them throw a pillow hisway.

“Are you really going to take this away from him? And whatmakes you think you can? Do you remember when I stitched up a wound he got onhis shoulder, and told him he had three broken ribs, yet when you went to checkon him a mere hour later, you found him helping an old lady carry her groceriesto her car?”

Tony rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. “Yeah, heinsisted he needed to help her, and that it hadn’t hurt to carry them at all, andthen when she tried to pay him for his trouble, he declined and told her thatit was his pleasure to help.” Tony found that his frown had turned into a proudsmile by the end of his story, and Bruce nodded.

“He can’t help but be a hero, it’s who he is, and you can’tstop it. He wants to help people, and no matter what you do to try to keep himfrom it, he will always find a way. It’s what makes him so special, and why youcan’t help but love him.”

Tony watched Peter giggle at the Avengers antics, Natasha andBucky pinning Clint to the ground and tipping the bowl of popcorn over his headas Steve scolded them for making a mess, Sam complaining that they were wastingfood.

The mechanic nodded, knowing Bruce was right.

“Yeah, and why no one else can either.”

Tony Stark had never been good at loving things; he alwaysmanaged to push them away or ruin them, and he couldn’t bear to lose Peter. So,he became a helicopter parent, and did all he could to protect him.

He didn’t want to give the suit back, because it was barely anythingmore than a red and blue invitation for the kid to get into trouble, but thesmile on Peter’s face was worth it.

That smile turned into a frown of confusion as the kid ranhis hands over the suits chest.

“It feels different, it’s stiff and thicker. What’s it madeof?”

Tony smiled proudly, crossing his arms and raising hiseyebrows. “Steve and T’Challa are friends now, and he got some vibraniummaterial to keep you safe.

Peter’s eyes went wide as he looked at the suit, beforelooking up at Tony with a confused expression.

“I thought after that whole mess, you wouldn’t want me doingthis anymore?”

Tony shrugged, about to pretend like he was the cool,relaxed guy that didn’t worry about anything at all, before rolling his eyesand relenting. “Bruce talked me out of banning you from it forever, but anywaythat stuff is super strong, lightweight, and bullet proof, so it’ll keep yourheart safe when you’re out saving people.”

Peter smiled, excited out of his mind. “Fuck yeah!”

“Peter!”

The teenager spread a hand in front of him innocently. “What?It’ll keep me safe and stop you from worrying. That’s cool.”

Tony smiled too. “Fuck yeah, it is.”

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shanedakotamuir · 5 years ago

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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature

iStockphoto/Getty Images

9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.

Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”

Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.

These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s 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 person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s 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 — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.

1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m 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, I’ll 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.” He’s 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. It’s 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 Dorsey’s 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 doesn’t 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 biohacker’s arsenal. There’s 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 body’s 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: “I’ve 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 it’s 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.

2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?

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 you’ve determined (or think you’ve 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 don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘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 he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s 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 that’s 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. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)

Getty Images/iStockphoto

An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded.

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.

3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?

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 it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s 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 there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”

Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s 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. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”

If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.

4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?

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 can’t 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 there’s 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 it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.

And while we’re 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 aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.

Many of the studies weren’t 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 wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.

5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?

Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re 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, they’re just not worth the risk.

If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.

This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s 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 Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re 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 “don’t 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 friend’s 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 Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t 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. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.

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“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. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”

6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?

Existing regulations weren’t 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 wasn’t the FDA’s 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 California’s 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 it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s 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. They’ve 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 he’s 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, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.

7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?

Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll 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 Grey’s 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? It’s 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.

He’s 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, he’s 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 that’s 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 wasn’t 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.”

He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t 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 couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t 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.”

8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?

Not everyone who’s 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 she’s 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.”

Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.”

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 you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.

9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?

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

But the fact is we’ve 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, we’re 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 what’s 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 I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”

That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re 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 that’s 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” don’t 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, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.

Here’s 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 don’t 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. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”

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Listen to Reset

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s 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 he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.

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gracieyvonnehunter · 5 years ago

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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature