3 HN users recommended this explainer3 months2020–2026score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Pointed to as a striking example of DIY biology and self-experimentation with gene therapy.
The Thought Emporium's update on the home-brewed gene therapy he took to cure his lactose intolerance. It reports how the effect held up over two years and what future versions might look like.
“His YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, is amazing.” (HN, 2021)
His YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, is amazing. He just moved into a new lab and I really appreciate what he’s working on and how he communicates it. The robot painting fluorescent proteins is neat and recently he dropped a video demonstrating his adventures making synthetic opal. Apparently the edit made him totally lactose tolerant for over a year and now he has very mild lactose intolerance. He says he hasn’t redosed because he wants to improve the plasmid (I think that’s the right term, BUGFIX probably isn’t right) before he takes another run at it. Here’s his update video from last year on that endeavor. [this video]
Have been a patron for some time, and discovered his channel with his lactose gene therapy video - to which he recently posted an update: [this video] . Great addition to scientific youtube.
With a germ you can kill a few million people - [link] [link] [link] [link] If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above: [this video] [link]
We have this today to an extent, here’s someone who tested a DIY gene editing cure for lactose intolerance on themselves [this video] (Spoiler: it worked, very well in fact!)
Self-experiment with DIY lactose intolerance cure.
Here’s someone who orders parts from the internet to design a custom virus that genetically modifies his own cells to cure his lactose intolerance [this video] Pretty cool for sure and a great use of the technology. The reason more of us don’t do this is because we lack the knowledge of biology to understand what we’re doing That will soon change.
In general, if you want to bio-hack your own body, you're allowed, nobody will stop you. e.g. [this video] (even going past the first treatment he did on himself, to the updated version that's not yet human-rated, it's the creator going "please don't" rather than anything enforced). The health and safety concerns about stuff like this are mostly about other people getting hurt.
Example of self-experimentation with gene therapy.
There was a guy on YouTube who genetically engineered himself to gain lactose tolerance. ( [link] ) It lasted for around a year and a half ( [this video] ) before the effect mostly wore off. He took it orally, so it only affected his intestinal lining, and I presume it didn't effect enough stem cells to get a permanent effect, but it would still be usable as something taken annually, which is still far less often than any medication.
There’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high - [0] [this video]
Example of YouTubers doing home genetic engineering.
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