4 February 2018, Austin, Texas, final day of the annual BDYXAX summit (Human Augmentation, Transhumanism, and Biohacking conference). A canonical rendezvous for biohacking believers and advocates of “post-humanism.” On stage steps a cadre of Ascendance Biomedical executives, a small biotech start-up. Among them is Aaron Traywick, a 28-year-old biohacker and company co-founder. Dressed in a dark suit, he theatrically drops his trousers and props his leg on the table. Looking at the camera streaming the proceedings live on YouTube, he announces he is about to test on himself an extremely experimental, never-before-tried gene-mutation therapy to treat the herpes virus he has suffered from for the past five years. Saying this, he produces a syringe and plunges it into his thigh. A few months earlier another company employee had performed an identical demonstration—again broadcast live on YouTube—injecting himself with an experimental HIV therapy.
The theatrical demonstrations by Ascendance Biomedical were so over-the-top and grotesque that they were deemed dangerous even by other “pioneers” of the biohacking scene. Josiah Zayner, founder of the biohacking company The Odin, who had tested a gene therapy for increasing muscle mass on himself, had denounced Ascendance’s practices as unfounded and hazardous to health.
But how reliable, scientifically sound and laboratory-substantiated such biotechnological experiments are is the least of it; these public performances aim to cure nothing beyond the protagonists’ selfish megalomania. The statements of Traywick and his like that their goal is “to push science one step forward” and “to liberate people by giving them treatments faster than any pharmaceutical company” are nothing more than childish excuses masking the narcissistic desire to touch the fantasy of the superman.
Sunday, April 29. In the end, we will never know whether the “cure” Traywick tested had any effect, since he was found dead in a pool on the outskirts of Washington. And so the story of the “most controversial biohacker,” as he had been called, came to its abrupt end, and not even technological metaphysics could save him from his own egos.