The Thought Emporium
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2020–2026
12:24 · 765K views · May 13, 2020
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.
Pointed to as a striking example of DIY biology and self-experimentation with gene therapy.
10 comments from Hacker News
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]
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.
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.