Biohacking Thread

I don't know if this is the right place to put this, but I am going to argue λ is correct since hacking proteins is very much like code, and you often use code, and the problem is very informatics oriented. This is not a culture thread, so let's stay off the ethics issue. So in this thread I want people to talk about their biohacking experiences, share software / papers / learning. Stuff like: -sequencing software -diy plans for electrophoresis gear -diy centerfuges -gene interpretation / modification ideas and any other stuff. Non genetic biohacking is fine too. It's still programming, just the programming nature did before we were born.

I like the topic of this thread, but /diy/ may be a better choice for it since the coding aspect is only part of it. The only exception would be if you want to discuss programming languages for biological computers, but that's no longer biohacking proper. /sec/ and /tech/ are separate from this board because although hacking and IT are related to programming, they're not the same thing.

>>1597 DIY is more of a hardware oriented board. You are going to get people wanting to build stuff, but not playing with the genes.

>>1598 Playing with genes is a key element of building some biotechnological devices. However, you still need to develop software for DIY biotech. This is one of those subjects that crosses the boundaries between several different areas of study, making it hard to classify. I've said in the past that there should be a /sci/ board here. That would allow us to take a more generalized look at the topic without the need to confine it to the programming or device-building aspects. If you really want to do this properly, you should put in a request on /q/ for a /sci/ board. Many lainons would probably support this. Until then, maybe the mods will let this thread slide and move it over to /sci/ when or if it's made. The math thread here isn't strictly programming, but it's relevant to programming, so it's allowed to stay up. My interest in the topic mainly revolves around custom protein/peptide engineering and other forms of organic nanotechnology, which falls more on the DIY end of things. This can be used for many purposes, but the ones I'm most focused on are the construction of nanofoundries, organ modification and creating artificial organs. Most of that sort of stuff is unrelated to programming.

>>1599 Any luck doing such things on your own or are you stuck to an academic lab?

>>1600 Sadly, I haven't yet managed to do any of this either with colleagues or independently. Maybe this thread will provide the information needed to complete one of these projects.

It is a hard sell to keep this in /λ/ Unless the topics are geared towards programming more, like: -Bioinformatics -Genetic programming/Algorithms Discussing libraries, programs, and databases used in research would probably make sense too. Such as Orange, Bioperl, biopython, EMBOSS, Bioconductor Here is a list of databases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biological_databases And one of the largest databases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ If you really think about this subject, it would actually fit in /λ/, and /diy/, and /tech/. Not to mention some extent /drg/. It is a very broad field that can't fit into just one board. Well, maybe a /sci/ board *ahem*

>>1602 As long as we're stuck on /λ/, I'm looking to use computational protein design to help with the projects described in >>1599. Protein engineering is such a massive field that you could spend your whole life studying just one or two aspects of it. Computational protein design can speed up that process considerably, but there are so many different ways of building that software and so many software packages for it out there that it's hard to know where to start. Computational resources are also at a premium because of the complexity of the physics involved. I'm not sure whether I should go with software that already exists or attempt to write my own.

>>1603 As far as I know you're out of luck if you want to go from protein sequence to structure generally. The best bet is to use homology to proteins with known structure. Or if you have enough variation in it, then coevolution of pairs of amino acids to predict whether they interact. Physics modelling is restricted to smaller proteins, interactions with small molecular, or fine tuning the structure. Not exactly my field, so I might be missing something. What sort of protein would are you looking to make? Proteins are hard work. If you want to make some specific nano-scale structure then DNA origami is a lot simpler to design and experiment with.

>>1604 >smaller proteins, interactions with small molecular, or fine tuning the structure This is exactly what I want to do. If you use physics-based modeling you have to take quantum mechanics into account, and that means a more computationally intensive program which consequently isn't suitable for use with large proteins. The Wikipedia article on protein design says that programs based on molecular mechanics and heuristics also exist. I'd like to try the heuristic method because of its simplicity. What I really want to do is create a more modular, accessible form of protein/peptide design, so instead of scanning through Lain only knows how many residues to try to find the sequence you need to change, you can pick out protein modules that do what you want, link them together, and test the resulting protein easily. >What sort of protein would are you looking to make? I have two major potential research directions in mind to test this approach with: new, novel biocatalysts to dramatically cut down on time spent performing chemical synthesis, and artificial muscle for biorobotics. >DNA origami I guess the approach I'm looking for would be termed peptide origami, as opposed to protein origami since it's focused on smaller chains of amino acids. RNA origami also fits in this thread. The reason I want to focus on peptides/proteins instead of DNA or RNA is due to their greater versatility as a result of having 20 canonical amino acids to work with instead of just 4 bases.

How easy/hard would it be for a lainanon to modify the DNA of, for example, a tomato plant or some bacteria?

>>1606 you could modify the tomato using agrobacterium tubefacies. Generally you infect the plant with modified agrobacterium, then use infected plant cells to regenerate whole plant( plant cells are totipotent which means whole plant can be regenerated from single cell ) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13102818.2015.1056753 Very hard to do at home. Bacteria are somewhat easier, because we have tech for modyfing them, still a bitch to do at home.

>>1606 Depends on what you mean by modify If you mean simulation of Genetic Modification it is possible, although from what I understand you would probably need a decent computer and GPU. Also, you would need to do quite a bit of research if you are new to genetics. If you mean an actual living modified organism, I would say next to 0, unless you are working in a lab. And even then you usually can't just choose what organisms you want to work with. Of course I should also point out that the act of select breeding is used to achieve some form of beneficial modification. Humans have already been doing this for centuries. So, if you want to modify the tomato plant you could start growing them yourself and attempt that. That of course is a much slower process and is not guaranteed.

Bio-hacking leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think about it. It used to sound so cool, but whenever I look it up or see a documentary on it, it makes me come back to reality. Now when I hear Bio-hacking I think of guys in their basements taking questionable elixirs and people who think they are Transhumans because they have a magnet under their skin. I hope I'm not in my 50's by the time Bio-hacking looks like what I used to think it would be.

>>1609 What did you imagine biohacking would look like? This sounds like somebody in the 1970s or 1980s saying that the internet would be nothing but guys in their basements jacking off to depraved porn. Technology is what you make of it.

>>1606 OP here. Bacteria is very easy. I've already added glowing proteins to E. Coli with the benefit of a 4 day class and little other background. Lab equipment is the main barrier. We are talking several kilobux of equipment, so doable on a neet budget if your living accommodations allow for it. I can go into the shopping list if you are interested. > This is exactly what I want to do. If you use physics-based modeling you have to take quantum mechanics into account, and that means a more computationally intensive program which consequently isn't suitable for use with large proteins. The Wikipedia article on protein design says that programs based on molecular mechanics and heuristics also exist. I'd like to try the heuristic method because of its simplicity. What I really want to do is create a more modular, accessible form of protein/peptide design, so instead of scanning through Lain only knows how many residues to try to find the sequence you need to change, you can pick out protein modules that do what you want, link them together, and test the resulting protein easily. I'm interested in protein design. Any resources to get me started? I want to write some software in the space, but I don't know the state of the art. > just 4 bases. didn't church write a paper about finding a way to get more base pairs? I might be thinking of something else. > 20 canonical amino acids Now I know synthetic amino acids are at least theorized to be possible. > If you mean simulation of Genetic Modification it is possible, although from what I understand you would probably need a decent computer and GPU. Also, you would need to do quite a bit of research if you are new to genetics. I've never simulated it. From what I've heard simulated genetic modification beyond the basic "this is the DNA you have changed" bit is kind of useless at the moment. I.E we don't have a good way to visualize the final change to the organism, even at the most basic level.

>>1611 >Lab equipment is the main barrier. We are talking several kilobux of equipment, so doable on a neet budget if your living accommodations allow for it. We need to talk about designing less expensive lab equipment that can be bought for only a few hundred or built at home. >I'm interested in protein design. Any resources to get me started? I want to write some software in the space, but I don't know the state of the art. Lel, neither do I, really. I've downloaded a lot of papers about nanobiotechnology, but I don't know which of them would actually help you since the field of protein design is so vast, and I know practically nothing about the software side of this. I've been posting in the cellular automata thread at >>2594 and there's a good bit of discussion in there about using CAs to model biological processes, meaning you might be able to use them to write bioinformatics software, but that's all I know for now. >didn't church write a paper about finding a way to get more base pairs? You're thinking of xenonucleic acid, or possibly peptide nucleic acid. Adding new bases to DNA makes XNA, while dispensing with the existing bases and making an analogous structure out of peptides is PNA. Adding new amino acids to the canonical 20 has also been explored.

>>1602 does recreational bioinformatics hacking around even exist? what do you do? i thought that was just a job thing, it seems really dull to just fuarrrk around with R and have no goal in mind or any idea of what you're even looking for

>>1613 >does recreational bioinformatics hacking around even exist? DIY biohacking is getting somewhat more popular, but it still hasn't been standardized, marketed and made into a recreational activity at the level of something like Arduino, except for certain methods such as growing bacteria and yeast with the desired genetic properties. Genetic engineering is only one facet of biohacking. Plasmids have been available for DNA hacking for a while, and this approach is used in many DIY biohacking kits. We also have at least a couple people here who are interested in protein engineering, which has much less in the way of DIY methods worked out for it. Plasmids can be used to produce a desired protein, but as of right now there's no way that I'm aware of to use modular methods to assemble a protein directly. I've attempted to dig up some resources for people to use, but my experience is pretty limited, so take what I say with a grain of salt until proven useful. Here's a site with information on the current state of DIY biohacking, containing a listing of important items and chemical reagents you may need to perform experiments: https://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page This is a blog post talking about what it takes to do bioinformatics: https://www.biostars.org/p/184551/ It basically says that most of what you learn will be on your own, due to the field being relatively new. Here's a whole bunch of Debian bioinformatics software: https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio There's also BioLinux. It's the current standard in bioinformatics. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=biolinux http://environmentalomics.org/bio-linux-download/ Here's a game designed to figure out the folds of various proteins, which has been used to find the correct folds by pure gaming intuition where biochemistry computer programs would have taken much longer: http://fold.it/ And finally there's the R project, mentioned by >>1613: https://www.r-project.org The developers of R bill it as an environment for statistical computing. This is what many are looking for, but I'm sure quite a few of us would rather have something written in a common computer language. Several other threads here have information which may be relevant to this as well, such as the threads about genetic programming and machine learning as well as the aforementioned cellular automata thread, all of which have some overlap with each other. You may also want to look at this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_microarray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_microarray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_microarray Microarrays are tools used to divine the chemical kinetics, physical interactions and other salient features of whichever type of biomolecule they're named after. There are other similar methods, including immunoassays and biochips. These are physical tools and not computational ones, meaning they don't fall under the limits of the /λ/ board. However, we can make them obey the rules of the board by creating simulated versions of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-it-yourself_biology The Wikipedia article on the topic should probably be posted, as it contains a basic rundown of the various components of the biohacking community. Besides genetic engineering and bioinformatics, you also have people who want to use biohacking to produce food, biofuels, and medicine that they can't afford due to big pharma/HMO fuarrrkery, as well as "grinders" who want to augment or replace their organs. It's a big community and there's room for many topics of research. http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file%3Fid=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002086%26type=printable This is a paper about 3D printing lab equipment, including the manufacture of low-cost PCR machines and centrifuges as seen in the following links: https://openpcr.org http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:151406 Here's an article about making your own DIY bioreactor for under $100. https://makezine.com/2016/07/18/arduino-powered-bioreactors-make-home-experimentation-affordable/ And here's some advice about setting up a lab. https://makezine.com/2017/04/11/how-to-set-up-your-own-lab/ You could probably set up a decent general biolab for less than $500. Depending on what you want to do, the cost may be higher or lower. Obviously for this board, bioinformatics programs are the way to go both because it's the only part of biohacking that actually falls under the board topic and because you can save a lot of money and time if you do most of your work in a simulated environment. As far as I know, there isn't really a bioinformatics program that has the same DIY vibe as the stuff listed in this post. You might need a separate program for each different area of biohacking. Foldit allows protein design and small molecule design, but only in the puzzle format, which isn't what everyone is looking for.

>>1612 >>Lab equipment is the main barrier. We are talking several kilobux of equipment, so doable on a neet budget if your living accommodations allow for it. >We need to talk about designing less expensive lab equipment that can be bought for only a few hundred or built at home. Equipment isn't so bad, it's a one off cost, and you can find some discarded from labs or hack one together yourself (http://openpcr.org/). At least for genetics and protein work, the main cost is DNA synthesis and buying enzymes. For example, for a PCR it's a few hundred $ for a vial of polymerase that only lasts for several reactions, and you have to order synthesised DNA oligos from somewhere (several $ each usually, but it adds up). If you want to make a new protein its ~$1k for the corresponding DNA fragment. For hobbyist biohacking to take off you'd need: - Cheap DNA synthesis and sequencing. The price of both has fallen a fair bit recently so I don't think we are too far off. - Open-source bacterial strains for producing common enzymes.

>>1616 >PCR There are numerous variants of PCR. Some of them are probably more viable for home use than others. Find the right PCR variation and all your DNA synthesis problems will be solved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_PCR >Open-source bacterial strains for producing common enzymes. This is what I'd like to solve by assembling proteins without recourse to the associated DNA or RNA.

>>1617 >There are numerous variants of PCR. Some of them are probably more viable for home use than others. Find the right PCR variation and all your DNA synthesis problems will be solved. That's not true. Those are all extensions / modifications to PCR, but they still rely on the same underlying principle. You need a polymerase and DNA fragments (primers) specific to the region you want to amplify, which need to be synthesised separately. PCR doesn't solve all your DNA synthesis problems, because it can only amplify existing fragments... >This is what I'd like to solve by assembling proteins without recourse to the associated DNA or RNA. Synthesising proteins from scratch is far, far more expensive than DNA and has poor yields / purity / length. Evolution has already given us a nanomachine that can do this with ridiculous efficiency and accuracy.

>>1618 >PCR doesn't solve all your DNA synthesis problems, because it can only amplify existing fragments... I was referring to the expense of obtaining the base materials, not the act of altering DNA to your liking. It's admittedly a stretch to say that it solves all your synthesis problems, but it does cut down on your overall costs. >Synthesising proteins from scratch is far, far more expensive than DNA and has poor yields / purity / length. Then new methods are needed, because there are times when it's less efficient to use DNA or other related avenues than it is to perform chemical synthesis of biomolecules. One example of this would be exceptionally short peptides of only a few residues in length. Setting up a biolab designed to handle strains of bacteria just to produce a peptide of 10 or less residues may not be the best use of resources. There's also the fact that if you want to produce proteins or peptides that use amino acids other than the canonical ones, you'd need to design entirely new bacteria built with XNA/PNA to do this biosynthetically, which is a huge time investment. This falls more under the purview of peptide synthesis than protein production, but existing peptide synthesis methods leave much to be desired in terms of accessibility, and some new methods of performing peptide synthesis may be applicable to larger proteins as well.

>>1611 >added GFP to E.Coli tell me more

>>1619 https://www.apsnet.org/EDCENTER/K-12/TEACHERSGUIDE/PLANTBIOTECHNOLOGY/Pages/Activity4.aspx Here's a lab overview. This wasn't the procedure I used, but you get the picture. Basically you break the bacteria's cell wall via thermo cycling, then you place it in an environment with GFP bearing plasmids. Some of the plasmids cross the broken cell walls, then you put the bacteria into a warm, food rich environment. Some will die, but others will live and propagate with the plasmid intact. One trick people use to make sure they are only encouraging the GFP bearing bacteria to live is to bind the GFP to antibiotic resisting gene. Then you grow the culture with antibiotics included. Only the GFP bearing bacteria survive.

http://www.mate.tue.nl/mate/pdfs/5602.pdf This is a paper on native chemical ligation. It's a process used to assemble proteins via chemical synthesis. Up until recently engineering proteins from scratch was quite expensive and inefficient as >>1618 says, but native chemical ligation has made the synthesis of proteins of some 200 amino acids in length somewhat more practical starting from peptides of 30-50 amino acids each. Research into this is ongoing. http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/865.18/replication/Higgs.pdf This paper is one of the most interesting to me for these purposes. It's a paper about chemical evolution, which is a fairly new method that involves setting up chemical reactions that behave in the same way as biological evolution. The reaction goes in cycles, and at the end of each cycle you have a new set of reaction products that have been "selected for" by the reaction conditions. The products can react with each other to yield further evolution. It's basically a primordial soup, and it's being considered as a way of explaining how life originally evolved from abiotic substances. This could be applied to make an inexpensive method of synthesizing peptides that could be assembled via ligation into proteins. I've seen little to no work done on this application so far. It's something I'd like to investigate.

I don't know biology from soykaf, but if you tell me I can make myself glow in the dark, I'll blow a few K on it.

We should recommend some books on biochemistry, biology and genetics in addition to websites and articles. There was a good listing of them on 4chan's /sci/ wiki. http://4chan-science.wikia.com/wiki/Chemistry_Textbook_Recommendations http://4chan-science.wikia.com/wiki/Biology_Textbook_Recommendations

>>1625 I haven't read all of these, but they came off the reading list of a very nice class I took recently: Molecular Biology of the Gene, Watson et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell, Alberts et al. Biochemistry, Tymoczko DNA Science, Micklos & Freyer Regenesis, Church & Regis Biology is Technology, Carlson The Double Helix, Watson Seven Daughters of Eve, Sykes Sex, Power, Suicide, (Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life), Lane I would say that general chemistry isn't quite what you need for bio hacking per se, as most people's high school chemistry is *more or less* ok for it. Really, I guess you should have taken organic chemistry in college but I never took it and I'm doing just fine so far. DNA chemistry is kind of it's own domain, and I haven't had to solve a pen and paper chemistry problem yet. Now lab techniques, that's a different ball game, I'd love to see a book on that. I'm going to be starting work on a bioinformatics tool soon, so I'll be posting about once I get something seemly together on M$hub.

>>1626 >all of these This looks to be a great book list. >I would say that general chemistry isn't quite what you need for bio hacking per se, as most people's high school chemistry is *more or less* ok for it. That depends on what kind of biohacker you want to be. If you're looking to use biohacking techniques to make products that already exist, high school chem is probably enough. But if you want to create something new, you need that higher-level knowledge. >Really, I guess you should have taken organic chemistry in college but I never took it and I'm doing just fine so far. DNA chemistry is kind of it's own domain, and I haven't had to solve a pen and paper chemistry problem yet. We're going to have to establish a codified list of knowledge requirements for each aspect of biohacking. >Now lab techniques, that's a different ball game, I'd love to see a book on that. I don't know any books about lab techniques for biohackers, or even really about biohacking in general. There may be none out there that could be considered comprehensive primers or references because the field is so new. We might just have to create these techniques from scratch right here in the thread. >I'm going to be starting work on a bioinformatics tool soon What kind of tool is it going to be?

>>1627 All I can say for now is it will be a DNA data storage application.

>>1628 Are you planning to build a hard drive that stores data on DNA to go with your program?

>>1629 The program is to encode the data to go into the DNA, but that's all I'm saying.

>>1630 It sounds interesting, and I'm sure a lot of people here will want to be kept updated on it because DNA has been shown to be a very versatile biomaterial. DNA can be used not only for data storage but for processing. Besides DNA computing, I've also heard of protein and peptide computing, which might be something to look into here.

>>1631 Local lab approved my request for the project. I am great to get started coding.

>>1632 Great stuff. It's going to be exciting to see how it goes. We need more projects like that.

Guess the mods decided /Δ/ is the closest thing Lainchan has to /sci/. I think it'd be more aesthetic if the board title on the top bar was changed to Δ. This was probably the right decision since /Δ/ has no prohibition on discussing programming aspects of DIY projects, and now we can discuss the chemistry and biology of biohacking with no restrictions.

>>1637 I guess that's fine, it's a super niche subject anyway. I'm guessing most lainons read mega for updates. Since I have a lab I can just buy time at, with professional equipment, I'm less concerned with the DIY aspects of it than the computational aspects. Of course there are angles where those two facets meet. Currently I am surveying the existing open source bioinformatics software for projects close to my own.

>>1650 I'm looking at evolving chemical reactions and wondering if there's any software out there for those. Since you seem to have enough experience with this to be able to start this kind of project almost as soon as the thread gets going, you should give us an overview of the situation with bioinformatics software.

I wish I could teach myself biochemistry so I could get into this.

>>1709 Congratulations, your wish has come true. You can now learn biochemistry!

>>1710 >>1710 How do you do that?

>>1711 the power of chaos theory

>>1709 You can learn anything you want to. Look through some of the material in this thread, or try Khan Academy or some other YouTube videos on biochem. Maybe we should put together a biochemistry "cheat sheet" of sorts geared towards biohacking, or appropriate one that's already out there.

>>1716 How much of a chemistry background do I need? If Im specifically interested in biochemistry what are the nodes I need to hit to be able to study it

>>1717 aspiring biochemist here (starting PhD program this fall) I'd recommend being familiar with: organic chemistry, some computer science, genetics, cell biology, physical chemistry is handy for understanding some stuff

>>1718 sorry for pestering you but are you familiar with this at all? Could I just use this or do i have to supplement with an organic chemistry in addition ? I'm coming at this primarily from CS and am trying to regain ground for bioinformatics and i supposed biohacking purposes

>>1718 These are all good to know, but it depends on what you want to do. I'm one of the guys who wants to focus on proteins and peptides, so genetics and cell biology can largely be skipped for my purposes, but I'm confident enough in my ochem, physical chem and CS knowledge. If it's a lifeform you're looking to engineer, you'll need more genetics and cell biology and less of the other stuff.

>>1719 Not him, but read Leninger's Principles of Biochemistry instead. It's the industry standard biochemistry textbook, and offers a (mostly) logical progression through the topics covered. The 4th and (especially) 5th editions are good, and easy enough to find online. Without the proper background, however, it can be difficult to work through. A solid understanding of genetics would help, as well as of organic chemistry, but neither is explicitly required.

>>1720 I wish there was a good online resource for learning organic chemistry. I saw that class ruin so many in college, it must be challenging.

>>1719 >>1722 I'm >>1718, Leninger's Principles of Biochemistry is the exact text I used in my undergraduate, I'd also recommend it. >>1723 It's been a long time, but I think this website (https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/blog/) was useful back when I was first learning organic as a secondary resource to accompany textbook / classes.

>>1723 I've never used them, so I can't speak from experience, but MIT does offer organic chemistry lectures (along with supplemental material) for free through their OpenCourseWare program. I used Khan academy a bit when taking the course, but only remember it being useful in specific cases. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#chemistry Also, for >>1724, do you know what field you'll be doing research in?

>>1724 For those who need it, Lehninger's 6th edition is attached. >>1723 If the need arises, just ask ochem questions on /r/ (technically the right board for it, plus the more /sci/ threads that are quality that arise, the better our chances).

>>1727 Not really. The majority of my undergraduate research was in a protein-structure focused lab (mostly x-ray crystallography with associated biochemical / genetic verification techniques). That was a good bit of fun, but I'm also hoping to try messing with something computational since I've enjoyed programming for a decent while now. So at the moment it seems like some mix of computational biology and biochemistry with a focus on protein structure and function. But I feel like I've only scratched the surface with so many things it's hard to "know" what I really want to dig into. As for particular organism/target/etc. I don't really have any strong preferences. Neurological systems (particularly receptor binding / reupdate / secretion / etc) seem interesting but I don't know much about them. Ribozyme work, SELEX-type techniques, and RNA-Protein complexes also seem really neat. /ramble

>>1754 >reupdate >reuptake I don't even know how I managed to fuarrk that up nb

You guys give medical advice, right? Biohacking should be the best thread here to ask. About two months ago I had surgery for a ruptured peroneal retinacuum tendon. Sugery went fine. I'm supposed to get the cast around my ankle taken off in like two days. I don't want to pay a $150 copay just to have some sleepy bitch saw off my cast. Is there any risk in just soaking my cast in a bathtub and taking it off myself? What's the worst that could happen? Furthermore, what kinds of tests would a nurse do at a clinic to "make sure my ankle is okay"? It can't be rocket science. I'm honestly confident that I could do those tests better myself. Thanks in advance, I figured Lainons would be open-minded and smart enough to give me advice.

>>1783 Just go to the fvcking hospital.

>>1783 Out of all the things you could possibly ask imageboard posters for help with, medical advice has to be the worst. You're liable to get the medical equivalent of delete system32. I've seen some news stories where people tried to give themselves various forms of surgery, mostly cosmetic surgery like nose jobs and liposuction. It's not recommended. Still, cutting off a cast isn't exactly surgery. Any medical doctors here want to help with this?

>>1783 Protip: soaking your cast will probably just make you miserable. It's not impossible to get a cast off by yourself with a box cutter and some curved shears, but it takes time, brute force, and you're likely to cut yourself. I don't know what the test would be for a damaged tendon.

>>1786 Yes, exactly, don't take care of yourself; the professional's will do that for you, you are part of a system you must work within the confines of that system.

>>1783 The following is for informational purposes only: Use a hacksaw, be very careful the closer you get to the skin, your best off asking a friend or family to help chop it off for you, good luck!

If we're going to make a primer about biochemistry for biohacking, I was thinking we should put together a primer for bioinformatics as well. As far as I know, the three main approaches are neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and more recently cellular automata, and all of these have some overlap with each other, but they're optimized for different tasks. It'd be nice if we could develop a lightweight machine learning program for general biohacking, but biohacking is a pretty broad field for something like that. Sadly I'm not an expert in machine learning. I know a little bit about it, and I'd like to learn more and contribute to such a program.

>>1862 Yes, I'm aware that this sounds more focused on machine learning than bioinformatics proper, but I'm largely unaware of any other approach besides machine learning being used for this.

>>1783 I asked a medical professional, they said they "can't advise anything" and you should probably just go to the doctors, but a hacksaw and a friend would probably do the job.

>>1596 This article I found seems pretty interesting! Applicable to eventual use for biotech.

>>1596 Lainons! OP here - I presented my work on molecular encryption at Defcon this year via DNA editing of E. Coli. Github drop of my code will be incoming in the next couple of days. In the meantime you can check my slides at: https://github.com/MrSynAckSter/Presentations Honest it was a very modest presentation, but my research ongoes.

>>1746 Thank you based lainon!

Extremely useful website for this is : https://www.selfhacked.com/ If you have major depression propensity I'd recommend checking out the inflammation theory that he develops at length on plenty of different articles Keywords for depression hacks article on the website: TNF, NAD+, SIRT1, Cytokines, IL-1b, Hi-maize https://www.selfhacked.com/blog/depression-genetics-gut-microbes-inflammation/

>>1746 Thx

>>1746 Thanks

From the number of thanks directed at the biochem textbook, i take it that many lainon dont know about library genesis the ultimate academic textbook repo http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

genetically engineered foxgirls when

>>2889 The morning after.

okay, I am trying to make a protein maker+folder machine, Will share the results when I make a pcb for it.

So... how long until some sociopathic teenager/religious nut engineers an unstoppable CRISPR virus in his garage?

>>2930 a long time, since it's actually hard to predict what virii will be "unstoppable" based on genetic code alone

>>2930 IIRC in 2011 or 2012 the scientific community b& a few guys who made 100% lethal flu for unironically scientific purposes, CRISP could only make it easier... I would give it 50 years though. I think a scientist trying to make plants better and accidentally making them sterile or poisonous is more likely to happen.

>>2933 >50 years Aren't CRISPR kits like $120? You need other equipment too, but still, that really lowers the entry bar for anyone looking to fuarrrk soykaf up.

>>2937 You need to synthesize DNA for the changes you want. It is pretty cheap; but companies automatically scan for the genomes of known deadly viruses.

>>2938 >You need to synthesize DNA for the changes you want. It is pretty cheap; but companies automatically scan for the genomes of known deadly viruses. Twenty years ago this sentence wouldn't have been seen outside of a scifi novel. Amazing how far the tech has come.

>>2951 Indeed. Same with: - genetically modifying whole organisms. - making stem cells from any other cell type (and being able to derive a whole organism from them). - sequencing thousands of genomes. - the sheer amount of engineering you can do with bacteria to get them to produce various proteins and chemicals.

A friend of mine is currently building his own home lab. A few tips he gave me -> Look on ebay for old lab equipment, he's found everything (incubator, thermal cycler, centrifuge, etc) except a sequencer for like a quarter of the cost, You can make most enzyme mixes ($$$) yourself if you know basic biochem, you'll probably just get lower yields than what NEB/Thermo sells, the main roadblock is sequencing and getting DNA oligos - if you're doing synthetic bio you'll need tons of oligos and most companies won't sell to individuals bc of bioterrorism risks and the like, you'll also need to do a ton of sequencing to confirm insertions, deletions, or substitutions and getting access to cheap sequencing is difficult unless you're affiliated with a university. I'm not sure how he gets oligos but he has a few clever tricks to confirm specific products that don't require sequencing but it's still not good enough for when you're only changing one or two bases. That all being said, I think that a very neat project might be biosynthesis of some compound (psilocybin, tryptamines, etc).

Can I modify my genes to become smarter? Any caveats like brain cancer or lack of effect due to biological maturity?

>>3600 >Can I modify my genes to become smarter? Yes. Just find at least 10M $ for research. Any caveats like brain cancer or lack of effect due to biological maturity? Yes.

>>3601 And if I don't want to be spoonfed(um, except this time), and I am ready to invest several years of my life into education and do it myself? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY this guy made himself lactose tolerant, wouldn't same magic apply to brain?

>>3601 stop talking out of your ass if you don't have anything to contribute

>>3602 >And if I don't want to be spoonfed(um, except this time), and I am ready to invest several years of my life into education and do it myself? I mean it is possible, but without funding really hard and unlikely to accomplish. >this guy made himself lactose tolerant, wouldn't same magic apply to brain? Brain and intelligence are much more complicated than well known lactose intolerance caused by a single faulty gene. Governments and military, including Chinese spend really big money on this kind of research. And I don't think you can do such a gene therapy for brain, without testing this on animals first. It'll be hard, but sure you can work on this. >>3603 >stop talking out of your ass if you don't have anything to contribute My intention wasn't to be unfriendly, just realistic.

>>3604 >realistic DNA modification can be done with fraction of the price you mentioned. Simple rabies glycoprotein and few RNA which you can order online can change your brain. Shut up.

this seems like a modern form of tantra. the hindus have had this practice of exploring the body as a machine at least since shaktism. personally I use ashtanga yoga to keep me flexible and human, and use various tantra practices and ideas I learn outside or discover inside like chakras or mudras or energies like prana or kundalini to explore and reprogram. maybe this is a personal biohacking?

>>3602 Hmm well, "being smarter" and developing tolerance to lactose are two completely different processes from a biological standpoint. For example, being lactose tolerant/intolerant depends on the presence or abscence of a single enzyme (lactase). The same happens for certain diseases which happens because of a single defective gene (such as cystic fibrosis or hemophilia). Thus, it should be possible to revert these conditions by providing the correct gene in the relevant tissues. But obviously it's not that simple. But "being smarter"? No one really knows how many genes, pathways and biological structures determine whether you're smart or not.

>>3604 >>3608 So it's going to take much more time than "several years". Looks more like lifetime passion (unless I manage to sneak into these gov projects). Can't I just swap all my genes with genes of other person? Have anybody done this?

>>3606 >DNA modification can be done with fraction of the price you mentioned. Simple rabies glycoprotein and few RNA which you can order online can change your brain. Well, yes modifying genes can be relatively cheap, but doing so without proper research can give you cancer or just kill you. The probability that changing a gene will have a negative effect on you is greater than the probability you'll achieve what you want. Intelligence is determined by many environmental and genetic factors - certain genes affect the way brain forms during epigenesis, other genes affect the way neurons and helper cells like astrocytes, dendrocytes, etc. work. It's not often the matter of just one gene, but the whole machinery made by expression of many genes - editing one can positively change one process, but fuarrrk up another. One gene can code many things, but also two or more genes can code just one thing. There are also non-genetic factors - like learning, structure of neural networks developed during growing up and learning. You can't really edit just one gene and expect everything to be fine. Intelligence isn't simple - decomposition of lactose is something a simple procaryote can do, whereas intelligence evolved later and is an effect of many cells, processes and molecules working together. >Shut up. Being offensive isn't going to help you in any way.

>>3609 >Can't I just swap all my genes with genes of other person? Have anybody done this? Sorry for saying that, but you don't seem to have really basic biological knowledge. Even if you changed every gene of your body, a cell is still full of working proteins, enzymes and other molecules. There is something called Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) - almost every cell of your body has surface proteins telling the immune system if the cell is friendly or not (if it belongs to the body or is alien). Even if you replaced literally all your genes with genes of someone else, the immune system would probably kill all the modified cells, because of incompatible proteins on cells. That's the thing that people after organ transplant have - they have to do special treatment to avoid rejecting transplanted organs. I'm not trying to discourage you, I just would like you to know it won't be easy. I am going to work on an ambitious biological project myself.

>>1596 Hey, everybody! I just want to open by letting you all know that everyone who studies living things, is basically a caveman trying to reverse-engineer the artifacts from Roadside Picnic. We've been doing agriculture for 12,000 years and we still don't even know how seed germination works. Don't give up, but also don't expect to see anything particularly new and fantastical come about in your lifetime. Right now, I'm working on growing some aerobic bacteria from rice-water. I'm building a bubbler to simultaneously oxygenate the water and also remove any anti-septic chemicals which were added during treatment.

>>1607 Please keep your experimental monoecious tomato plants inside away from pollinators, so they can't fuarrrk other tomato plants. I know, it's rare, but it does still happen. Pollinators can't prevent dangerous mutations, but we can. >>2932 Is it also hard to tell what virii will be unstoppable?

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/ra/c6ra04169h#!divAbstract https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016816569390101R https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5609339/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27095291 https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bca/2018/3457196/ I have been working on creating reproductions of these experiments in my local community lab. Been using Origene's CRISPR kits to modify strains of Aspergillus Niger to imrpove leaching yields. Hopefully I can make it fast enough to be profitable at a large volume scale at high concentrations of metals in the leaching solution.

>>3846 >Metal and metalloid biorecovery using fungi Cool, does it include rare-earth elements? Tell us more, if you'll make progress.

this isnt biohacking really but have people played Foldit? https://fold.it/portal/ its a game where people can try and solve real protein structures by folding them

>>3925 >this isnt biohacking really but have people played Foldit? I played it, but it is nonfree software and it is funded by DARPA and private companies, meaning by playing this game you work for gratis, likely developing biological weapons for the burger government. So I don't play it anymore. You'll discover something, and they'll patent it and make profit, this is highly unethical.

I "invented" an easy way of mutating some species of plant using UV light. The plant has really high vegetative growth abilities and new organism grows from relatively low number of cells, which will synchronize mutations, if treated with UV light at early development stage. I bought an UV LED and I'm going start fuarrrking the plant's genome soon. Hope to get some interesting/useful mutations.

>>4025 Nice. Does it sexually reproduce easily so you mix and match mutations?

>>4025 make sure to have a gun nearby, Lain

>>4028 >Does it sexually reproduce easily so you mix and match mutations? Fortunately, yes. Have to find a way to power that LED though, because I know soykaf about electronics and don't want to fry it. The other problem is exposure time - I don't want to fry the plant either.

>>4029 >make sure to have a gun nearby, Lain Making myosin and actin would probably take me at least several thousand years, so I'm safe, unless the plants won't make a poison.

>>4031 Nature finds a way. Besides, it is good practice to have a gun handy at all times. What if your plant starts producing a valuable drug and some goons break in to steal it? These should be your first thoughts when designing such experiments.

I am interested in getting into the realm of Biohacking. There are many things I know have already been done (e.g. Self-Trepidation, RFID implants, &cet), but I am wondering how much farther we've gotten (if at all) within the past few years. For example, is it yet possible to (from the position of a DIY) create a device that connects via IV to (at the push of a button) deliver a nootropic? How about things to aide in intelegence? I plan to make a cybersuit out of garbage. I've been planning to do this since December, though money (and the current COVID-19 crisis) have hindered my plans. However, in my boredom I have to wonder if a cybersuit is really a goal or if I should get more creative and do body modification (or a hybrid of). Once I saw a man with a useless body mod. He was a customer of mine who said he implanted bumps in his arm. They served no purpose except aesthetic. I want to avoid such things, and have a purpose. Does anyone have their own Biohacks they would be willing to share? Pic related, the JARVIS 7, the world's first Artificial Heart

>>4361 s/Self-Trepidation/Self-Trepanation

There is no way you did trepanation on yourself. It takes surgical precision and a diamond tipped drill and the forehead bleeds a lot so you easily would have passed out or simply not able to see what you're doing.

>>4363 >It takes surgical precision and a diamond tipped drill Not true, trepanations were easily being done in prehistoric age using stone tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#Prehistoric_evidence

>>4364 They didn't do it themselves someone else did it to them. One slip up and you're dead or brain damaged.

>>4363 >>4365 First off, OP didn't claim to have done it. Secondly, self-trepanation is known to have occured; see Bart Hughes and Amanda Feilding.

>>4363 I didn't say I did anything on myself, I was listing examples of biohacing.

Since my thread got merged to this dead one, bumping

>>1596 Perhaps this post should go on /vis/, but I think it fits much better in this thread, as we will not be discussing the show itself, but rather what they are showing in it, whether it is feasible with current science, and how we could do it. With that being said, I know it's >Netflix but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHBOUvgBI8 Their new series coming out next month, "Biohackers" genuinely seems interesting. Hopefully it gets the general public more interested in synthetic biology and biohacking.

The only serious use would be adding cat ears to humans. That would lead to a tough decision about whether to keep your human ears or remove them.

>>4841 Remove. Having 4 ears would probably be disorienting. Although I don't really see how you could make the cat ears functional if they are on the top of your head like is commonly depicted. There's not much room for an ear canal between your scalp and your skull. If you want cat ears you'd probably have to just suck it up and put them on the side of your head where your normal ears are.

just let him post it here, god hate it when people cry about being on or off topic like dicksord moderators

>>4845 Your brain is very flexible, I am sure it would be fine

>>4845 >I don't really see how you could make the cat ears functional if they are on the top of your head like is commonly depicted. It's possible, but it would mean that you'd have to replace the human ears.

>>4851 Third row is closest to how a cats ears actually work, if you look closely.

>>4851 Just having them be flesh appendages is probably enough, you would be creating them purely for aesthetic purposes as if you wanted enhanced hearing it would be far easier and more effective to just work on the ears the human brain and head is already built to work with.

>>4362 Thanks for the nightmare fuel. Holy soykaf. I'm interested in the state of implants. Reading up on it, it seems like it's still very much in its infancy. The idea of having magnets in my fingertips is pretty sweet, but apparently they look their strength over time. Also the idea of having some type of authentication mechanism ala U2F as an implant would be pretty sweet. I've also wondered how implants might be affected by, say, an MRI. That could be... messy. Or maybe I've just watched too much Black Mirror.

I like the idea of biosynthesizing using modified yeast but sadly I probably lack skillset and finances required to do so. I also would probably attempt to hybridize some plants if I had knowhow.

>>4903 What would you try to synthesize using the yeast? It is sorta sad. It's hard to get many sorts of lab materials unless you're at a company or a university, but there are often workarounds.

>>4882 why does this stuff need to be inside you? just wear it like some jewellery or embedded in clothing.

>>4904 Things like spider silk to copy what one company is doing but isn't commercially available yet as far as I know. They produce the spider silk to be used as a textile and they call it microsilk. This was from my environmental and health concern over petrol based textiles such as spandex, nylon, and polyester. Also biosynthesizing milk would be useful not having to buy milk ever again which is something already being worked on by some companies which is because cows take up so much land and just aren't sustainable. Yeast is used instead of bacteria because modifying bacteria has all sorts of potential dangers of the bacteria escaping the controlled environment and only workaround to this I've heard is modifying bacteria to be required to survive on a chemical that doesn't exist in nature which I can't recall what it was. I wasn't planning on it but worth also mentioning psylobin has also been attempted to be biosynthesized with yeast which I assume is for mass production for use in a future market since it would be less resource intensive than growing mushrooms large scale and extracting the psylobin. Similarly I've heard of modified bacteria biosynthesizing cannabinoids likely for the same purpose but possibly also environmental and cost reasons to cut back on crop water use. More on the far unlikely side of what I would like to do is I would like to make bacteria that can break down toxins in the body for use in chronic kidney disease and accute poisonings.

>>1601 What do you plan on accomplishing with this? I remember for one of my bio classes we did a plasmid transfer with bacteria. The plasmid made the bacteria glow from a sugar under blacklight and immune to ampicillin. I think the idea is cool but keep some good precautions to kill the buggers.

>>4853 Most artists are lazy fuarkars. Finding one who isn't is refreshing.

>>1601 You still here? Do you have any organism in mind to start with?

Is there any way to speed up the nerve impulses of someone without ruining their body? Say reducing the refractory period

ive never actually touched biohacking and while i'd be interested in trying it out i'd prefer to not accidentally give myself cancer or something

>>1596 I'm just excited for unregulated mass splicing of the human population. The blissful morphological flux of radical persistent transformation.

>>6658 start small: biology is complicated, the human genome is even more complicated, and right now we don't have all the answers to consider ourselves masters over this domain of science.

>>6723 right, but what constitutes "small"? i have no equipment, no knowledge, etc

>>6723 Buy some cell biology, genetics, genomics and evolution books?

>>6725 yes >>6724 start with books radiate peas and select ones with desirable traits, save up money to get microscopes and other lab equipment so you can eventually get to splicing the plasmids inside e-coli and its relatives, eventually move on to more advanced stuff like affecting peas. we aren't at the exciting parts yet, we can't effectively mutate the human genome.

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/39/14253 How would one go about putting this in a chimpanzee?

>>6801 I think the cheapest way would be moving to Africa and trying to impregnate a chimp.

>>6801 short answer: germline engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_germline_engineering

>>6873 For this guy > drunk right now you certainly are. The transhumanist myth is a comforting lie for those afraid of change (of life and death, of transformation). Have you considered doing self-experimentation because it's fun and you enjoy it, instead of vain attempts to stagnate? You are a ship of theseus, stop trying to avoid change and embrace it: enjoy life, accept death, and do as much crazy soykaf in between as you please, because they are all part of this larger experience of consciousness. >>1596 For this thread: Has anyone else been interested in studying the causes of biological morphology? What causes a goat to take that form? What causes a human to take this form?

>>6875 Not that lainon but >enjoy life Sure thing but I still have the cosmos to visit, can't do that with this bag of meat. >accept death Cringe mortal being cope. Why would I accept a fate of a faulty machine that has no purpose outside of passing genes? Death is a weakness. >Has anyone else been interested in studying the causes of biological morphology? I don't know details but it's basically sequential gene expression and cell division, nothing special actually. Picrelated - same base model tuned there and there. Even insects have almost the same genes describing their body plan, evolution reuses same soykaf over and over again.

>>6873 why the fuarrrk did you ban me? i have the bot blocked so i didn't get any reason. i was just asking you questions because im ignorant and was annoyed by your suggestion to derail a thread just because some users posted in it

>>6875 interesting that you think transhumanism is for those who are "afraid of change". I would describe it as precisely the opposite extreme.

>>6898 Transhumanism IS a stagnation in most senses. Once mankind has stopped naturally developing, it becomes a trivial matter of improvement. That was actually a central theme in Ghost in the Shell. On the other hand, biohacking to reduce genetic error and cancer inducing problems is in fact relevant, despite potentially causing a stagnation of evolution. Producing clones of oneself and tampering with each offspring would be an ethically questionable act of biohacking, but clones do not account for all of the environmental factors that make "you." I am interested in the scientist who gene modified children in China, as he proved it was possible fuarrrk ethics amiright? which opens the door for people to try increasingly more insane experiments like breeding super humans or humans with glowing hair. Also as a question of feasibility, how hard would it be to write a virus that uses reverse transcriptase to cause your body to change so you produce phosphorescent proteins for your hair?

>>6901 >Once mankind has stopped naturally developing, it becomes a trivial matter of improvement. I can't really parse your sentence. Are you saying that when we have the ability to fabricate artificial bodies and brains, we won't face selection pressures from evolution? >Also as a question of feasibility, how hard would it be to write a virus that uses reverse transcriptase to cause your body to change so you produce phosphorescent proteins for your hair? Maybe part of the issue I'm having understanding you is that you're using "transhumanism" exclusively in the sense of mind-uploading? But at least to me, and in the sense of the term I'm familiar with, genetically modified phosphorescent hair is not only transhuman, but even stereotypically transhuman.

>>6901 >Once mankind has stopped naturally developing Never happened, we're still evolving. >On the other hand, biohacking to reduce genetic error and cancer inducing problems is in fact relevant, despite potentially causing a stagnation of evolution. Evolution happens mostly through neutral mutations and natural selection, not by negative mutations. Evolution is blind and I don't see why a sentient species would entrust its future in a blind and random process. >which opens the door for people to try increasingly more insane experiments like breeding super humans or humans with glowing hair. I have mixed feelings about that - evolution won't do better because it is creating many genetic disorders on a daily basis while designing could be much less defective than evolution. Yet, producing humans for a specific purpose is unethical and retarded rich parents might not know any better than evolution. There comes the problem of social inequalities and new racism and slavery. >Also as a question of feasibility, how hard would it be to write a virus that uses reverse transcriptase to cause your body to change so you produce phosphorescent proteins for your hair? Not necessarily a reverse transcriptase, you could use a different vector. Anyway, I think that wouldn't be that hard - you could maybe inject the vector through the head skin directly.

>>6903 >I can't really parse your sentence. Are you saying that when we have the ability to fabricate artificial bodies and brains, we won't face selection pressures from evolution? Yes, the problem is we come to a limit of technical ability in overcoming mankind's problems. The downside is that modularity will not be built into early variants of synthesized bodies (being mainly a proof of concept) and people will loose the ability to adapt for the future. This may even result in antinatalism if people loose the ability to reproduce. With the lack of offspring you would also loose the ability to adapt and change as a species over time.

>>6909 >Yes, the problem is we come to a limit of technical ability in overcoming mankind's problems. How? What is this limit you're referring to? >The downside is that modularity will not be built into early variants of synthesized bodies (being mainly a proof of concept) and people will loose the ability to adapt for the future. This is so speculative, but your tone makes you sound certain of what you're saying. What makes you think that the premise is sound here, or that the consequent will hold? >This may even result in antinatalism if people loose the ability to reproduce. It seems like everyone simultaneously becoming a sterile cyborg is rather unlikely. Elites may, possibly, but unless there is a disaster that kills off all normal humans, evolution should still have plenty of stock to work with in case the new posthuman "species" is a failure. But still, even if we all became immortal machines, why do you think that would stop the process of innovation? From what we've seen over the past 400 years of history, machinery actually catalyzes innovation rather than inhibiting it. There is actually more competition, and therefore more selective pressure. Like >>6905 said, natural selection is a blind process, whereas human intelligence is directed and rational. I would think human intelligence is the next stage of evolution, not its antithesis.

>>6912 >How? What is this limit you're referring to? If we consider the anthropological trainwreck that is modernization of technology, early adopted technologies do not often have the ability to be undone. One thing that makes me laugh is people who spend millions from their estate to be placed in cryogenic pods in hopes that at some point in the future someone will invent technology to thaw them and return them to life. The science is still experimental at this point. If we follow track records of companies, It would be easy to sell augmentation without having to account for future upgrades. The problem is that with biohacking you would likely have a hard time to reverse the changes made. Eventually, people may sacrifice so much of their humanity or may become chimeras and become unable to continue as a species. >This is so speculative, but your tone makes you sound certain of what you're saying. What makes you think that the premise is sound here, or that the consequent will hold? Based on existing technology, if you hack off limbs and replace them with prosthetics, you use the biological function of that limb. If people want to get synthetic bodies, they would likely sacrifice reproductive organs. Any evolutionary adaptation would be greatly diminished if not removed entirely. As a matter of infrastructure changes, early adapters are always forced to undo and redo vs late adapters who simply need to do. For this reason, the United states still relies on magnetic strip technology on card payments, which has been obsolete around the world for several years. Early adapters of transhumanism will not have the luxury of undoing changes made to their bodies. >There is actually more competition, and therefore more selective pressure. This may be true of future adapters, and certainly people who opted not to be integrated into the transhuman system, but for those in the system, you would be trying to replace old hardware with new hardware in the process of using it. A good way of putting it would be the difficulty of changing parts of an automobile while driving down the road. it bears incredible risk, and some components cannot be changed without compromising the whole system. It is highly unlikely that such redundancies would be thought of in experimental systems.

>>6913 >One thing that makes me laugh is people who spend millions from their estate to be placed in cryogenic pods in hopes that at some point in the future someone will invent technology to thaw them and return them to life. The science is still experimental at this point. a brief search came up with $200,000 being the upper-end for the pricing it has nowadays. certainly, if you're a moribund billionaire who's bent on survival, doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. what else do you have to lose? especially if you have rose-tinted ideas about how our descendants would like to treat us... >This may be true of future adapters, and certainly people who opted not to be integrated into the transhuman system my apologies if I totally am missing something here, but that was the point I was trying to make: transhumanism can't really be a threat to our ability to innovate, since, for one, even if it goes wrong it's unlikely to have a global effect on reproductive fitness (just that of the early adopters, like you say). you even seem to agree that once the kinks are worked out, transhumanism will tend to make us more innovative (so I'm not sure what we're honestly arguing about anymore) Your "changing autoparts while driving down the road" analogy helped me understand your thinking. That's a good mental image. But even if it's accurate, I still don't see how it causes any problems for the basic view that "transhumanism = more innovations/adaptations". However, I agree that we're in an "anthropological trainwreck": tech may be helping us to expand and convert negentropy faster than vanilla natural selection could--But whether it's making us happier is anti-climactic at best... given the potential it has we're being shafted 99.99% of our due. You can imagine some nightmare scenario where evolution "wins" against us and despite all of us becoming cyborg demi-gods, we still have a soykafty time and hate our lives, or maybe aren't even conscious at all anymore.

>>6914 >certainly, if you're a moribund billionaire who's bent on survival, doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. what else do you have to lose? especially if you have rose-tinted ideas about how our descendants would like to treat us... The legal status of people in cryostasis is still debated, as technically they haven't been declared dead in some cases, but they cannot come back to life with many of the chemicals in their blood that modern science cannot fix. Also there is an ongoing need for pod caretakers. IIRC in the early 2000s there was a case where one of the caretakers could not order parts on backorder or something and a lot of pods failed. >you even seem to agree that once the kinks are worked out, transhumanism will tend to make us more innovative (so I'm not sure what we're honestly arguing about anymore) You aren't wrong, but as an avid science fiction fan, I also could see a scenario like BLAME where the computer systems that humans integrated into reject the organic part. Most concepts of transhumanist biohacking still require a lot of hardware and software to process it. Built in brain-body electronic interfaces promise to give handicapped the ability to move (exoskeletons), but the hardware needs to be general enough that more than one person can use the technology. >Your "changing autoparts while driving down the road" analogy helped me understand your thinking. I hoped that would clear things up, as I read this thread it seems like my thoughts have been all over the place. >I still don't see how it causes any problems for the basic view that "transhumanism = more innovations/adaptations" The idea is that innovations must happen in real time, and every error could equal dead people. But that would also deal with the pace of advancement. If technology was tested on animals like monkeys and pigs as proof of concept, casualties would be minimal. >But whether it's making us happier is anti-climactic at best... The only thing that technology could really remove long term is physical pain. I wonder if a person would feel phantom pains for an entire body. But the theory is starting to get away from the technology. Another idea would be creating biological machines, or rather using biological components to enhance humans natural bodies with seamless integration instead of a human-electronic interface. Biological logic gates could be used to control artificial muscle, and artificially enhanced bone density or physical characteristics could supplement peoples existing bodies. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32537894/ https://newatlas.com/biological-logic-gates/20237/

>>6901 >>6905 Competition and blind selection of mutations is a very specific view of evolution. Humans especially (though this applies to other organisms) are aware of how they fit into their environment, and what combination of traits will be beneficial for their offspring. There is a reason why love exists, why humanity has flourished after population bottlenecks, and why we are the dominant species despite having a fraction of the selective pressure that mice or flies have. My hope is that there will not be a "transhumanist system", which will become easily subverted as a tool for strengthening the power of current elites. Rather a flourishing of different human types and modes of interaction with technology so as to better explore the space of possible life.

>>6917 >Competition and blind selection of mutations is a very specific view of evolution. I'm going to repeat myself - the synthetic theory of evolution proved that evolution happens mostly not by positive or negative mutations and natural selection but by neutral mutations and genetic drift. >Humans especially (though this applies to other organisms) are aware of how they fit into their environment, and what combination of traits will be beneficial for their offspring. No, we're not. Humans can't see neutral mutations and predict how these mutations can be beneficial after another 10 generations. >There is a reason why love exists Attachment to a partner can be seen all across the animal world, some birds live in couples their entire life with only one partner. Love is like any other emotion - a mechanism that makes you behave in a particular way in a given situation - attachment to your partner/family increases the chances of survival of your genes. This alone explains why love exists and why it isn't unique to humans. >why humanity has flourished after population bottlenecks I think that's because of our intelligence and luck - humans can adapt to the environment without natural selection because they think. >and why we are the dominant species despite having a fraction of the selective pressure that mice or flies have. We're a dominant species because neural networks and culture evolve faster than adaptations in the process of natural selection. Humans can build tools and that's the real reason, not because we can pick the best route of evolution because we can't. Modern genetics is a recent development - two centuries ago humans didn't know how basic inheritance and they couldn't predict how neutral mutations could influence them in the future. >Rather a flourishing of different human types and modes of interaction with technology so as to better explore the space of possible life. Human interactions with technology alone are transhumanism. Technology is an extension of our imperfect bodies and minds, it's already happening.

>>6917 >Humans especially (though this applies to other organisms) are aware of how they fit into their environment, and what combination of traits will be beneficial for their offspring. To a degree, yes, but most people are pretty bad at mate selection. We have things like fetishes/kinks, we often ignore long-term compatibility(which is very important for raising children), and many people choose to never have children at all.

>>6921 It's worth noting however that we're increasingly taking conscious control over our reproduction strategy: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies

>>6918 >I think that's because of our intelligence and luck - humans can adapt to the environment without natural selection because they think. you are close to understanding. humans think - and do! - and only thereafter do we evolve. other animals think too, in their own way, and evolve in their own direction. we understand not their thoughts so how can we know what path they take? the current theory of evolution is incomplete, as has been noted by embryologists since the mid 20th century. biology lacks a proper understanding of how genes influence whole organism anatomy and physiology. instead it is confined to biochemistry. this is why our best explanations of hereditary mutations are for disrupted function of single proteins, and not of shape or function or thought or behaviour of an organism. what can not be explained through protein biochemistry is relegated towards neutrality - or even more embarrassingly "junk dna". >>6921 the ones that are bad at mate selection devolve and are replaced over time. nobility isolates then crystallises then expands. this has been the cycle of human evolution.

>>6925 >you are close to understanding. humans think - and do! - and only thereafter do we evolve. other animals think too, in their own way, and evolve in their own direction. we understand not their thoughts so how can we know what path they take? not the other anon. just wanted to say I can't tell what either of you are arguing over here. obviously, intelligence affects behavior and mate selection. even runts get killed by their siblings, which seems a lot like eugenics (except that there is no conscious intention toward the outcome, just instinct).

>>6880 >>6898 I've never read or watched any futuristic or scifi media so these are my thoughts from talking with other lains and hearing their perspectives, as well as my ideals and philosophy. I enjoy these discussions because they sharpen and shape my thinking about these ideas, allowing my ideas to adapt much like I hope humanity will moving into the future. I poorly expressed my ideas initially and will try to do better now (I'm bad at human language, sorry). Some transhumanists place an emphasis on escape from the "fleshiness" and "faultiness" of our "meat bag" bodies. They see living organisms as "faulty machines" that need to be "replaced" and consequently (ironically) view humans and humanity as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. They want to become "gods" by embracing the "certainly of steel", desiring to be something robotic which is certain and unchanging. Because of their (in my opinion) unhealthy relationship with death, some would prefer to be little signals trapped inside a machine chasing the carrot on an infinite hedonistic treadmill. They're like someone reading a book, but they never want it to end, so they keep re-reading the last few chapters refusing to reach the end of the story - that seems to be their outlook on life, death, and mutation. A book is no fun if it never concludes, yet they seem to want a never ending story. Life is interesting in the exceptional (like exploring the cosmos), but it's also got a lot of beauty in the mundane. This particular emphasis of transhumanism seems to see roses as something to ignore rather than something to be enjoyed. Is living long bad? No. Is borging ourselves bad? No. But as I see it, becoming a uniform and rigid humanity like baked clay will defeat all the best parts of what makes humans so fun, and what makes the promise of transhumanism so exhilarating. Comparing, my viewpoint is that humanity should go full steam into splicing and borging to accelerate the evolutionary process not only to fix problems humanity faces now but to make humanity a super-adaptable super-mutating species that can change to suit any environment in the cosmos. Like what >>6917 seems to be suggesting, the idea of a humanity where the boundaries on physicality is pushed to it's absolute limits, to find a humanity that is at once itself and also something else - like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Humans with many hands! Humans with cheetah legs and toad tongues! Humans that can grow their entire bodies back from a head! Humans with internet brains! Humans with ML calculator subsystems, where a new math theorem is born each minute! Humans with pneumatic limbs! The ideal future is one where changing your morphology and transforming into the next you is seen as no different than changing the internals of your laptop or helping a snake shed it's skin. Where human identity is defined by something less superficial than how we look or act. I hope to see a humanity that is both the sculptor and the sculpture for themselves and others, who can solve any problem they face while continuing to be their ever-changing selves. BTW absolutely loving this thread, keep up the good hacking lains!

>>6925 >humans think - and do! - and only thereafter do we evolve. other animals think too, in their own way, and evolve in their own direction. we understand not their thoughts so how can we know what path they take? this is a cool idea why do humans have a monopoly on intelligence? btw are you that guy from the other thread that ranted about intelligent rocks or something?

>>6927 yes i liked the message from ghost in the shell about diversity in responses being necessary for resilience and unpredictability, and death and recombination for evolution and progress. life extension alone will make humanity brittle and weak. i dreamt last night about ants domesticating larger animals and using them for transport and hunting - i had to hide from their swarms. this is the future we should fear. >>6928 no i dont think i ranted about rocks but i do rant. i suspect cells have an intelligence and behave like a simple animal. something within their chemistry somehow resembles thoughts, and a nervous system combines and builds upon the primitive thoughts of many cells. >>6926 evolution is often portrayed as completely blind and random, and that all that has evolved is from changing frequencies of certain dna sequences due to selection or random processes. the presence of intelligence and self-reference throughout life would invalidate this, but there is a strong ideological pressure from modern positivism and scientism to avoid thinking in this way. i give you this example: lichens are a symbiosis between fungi and an algae or cyanobacteria (a bacteria that can photosynthesise). the blind evolutionary explanation is that these two types of cells lived in close proximity to one another and slowly adapted to one another because it was beneficial. the fungi gained a steady supply of energy, and the photosynthesising partner protection during harsh conditions. however. these two types of cells can live on their own, and look different doing so, and they can achieve symbiosis between different species of fungi and algae/cyanobacteria (and multiple species at once). in other words, they appear pre-adapted for forming lichens with species they have not encountered before. the explanation that more easily accounts for this, is that the two cells are aware of each other and of what they are doing, and they first decide to be symbiotic, and then evolution acts to help the genes adapt to the lifestyle they have already adopted. thought and behaviour first, then evolution. (note: you wouldnt expect evolution of symbiosis with one species to transfer so cleanly to that with another species, since genes and hence protein interactions would have drifted too much to keep the same biochemical pathways.) embryologists came to similar conclusion but looking at how anatomy evolve, and neuroscientists from how behaviours evolve.

>>6930 >the two cells are aware of each other and of what they are doing, and they first decide to be symbiotic whatever you mean by "aware" is obviously very unique, and not how most people use the term.

>>1596 Are there any resources on the factors that control genetic expression? I understand that little proteins suppress or encourage gene expression, but how?

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>>6930 i found the rock rambling thread https://lainchan.org/%CE%BB/res/21768.html i thought you sounded like one of the rock intelligence ramblers in that thread to be honest i like reading your posts tho, really cool ideas i havnt seen b4 also please tell us more about your ants dream

>>6932 by "aware" i mean that they perceive that they are a separate entity from their environment somewhat, can to a small degree predict how their actions will affect the environment in the future, and that this is likely associated with a conscious experience. >>6936 read "a genetic switch" by mark ptashne. it is a short book about how gene expression in bacteriophage is controlled. nice explanations of how the proteins bind to dna and interact and lead to polymerase recruitment. gene expression in plants and animals is kinda similar but much more complicated. more proteins are involved, and their dna has an extra level of control by being wrapped around nucleosomes which are then covered with protein modifications. these provide a memory that lets the cell associate gene expression with what happened to the cell, and hence gene expression becomes much more flexible and adaptable. i dont know any good resources for this since this field is a mess and very actively researched, so the best bet might be to try and read some recent chromatin modifications / stem cell gene regulation papers. >>6936 it is nice to see ones own feelings already expressed by someone else. very much agree with that organic mindset towards technology - a computer and software should serve as an extension of the mind through symbiosis. an artificial intelligence that would work for us will in time replace us as we degenerate. i worry that our current societies are too geriatric and controlling to allow for the continued evolution of humans through self-experimentation. like how china stamped out its early industrial revolution because it was too disruptive to the existing society. we need to find space outside them to pursue this... >also please tell us more about your ants dream rest of dream not so relevant apparently extant spanish have dancing classes outside during school and are not so concerned about ant swarms riding on half-meter long many-legged bugs. perhaps they have been coevolving for a long time and if not friends at least tolerate each other like the hippo and the crocodile.

>>6939 >by "aware" i mean that they perceive that they are a separate entity from their environment somewhat, can to a small degree predict how their actions will affect the environment in the future, and that this is likely associated with a conscious experience. okay. I don't have the knowledge/background needed to criticize this point any further. it still sounds really weird to say that bacteria can consciously decide to improve their evolutionary fitness, even if they do have some very low-level degree of consciousness (which is pretty arguable). E.g. an anecdote: I read your reply, typed the post above, and it only *then* it struct me that I am doing this and became conscious of it. Humans are barely conscious most of the time. So I really doubt that it makes sense to talk about bacteria making decisions except in some extremely generalized sense that includes graphing calculators

>>6944 sure not saying this is definitely how it is but think about alternative: universe exists for several billion years devoid of anything to perceive it. blind collisions of atoms lead to life and cells which go on extraordinary journeys to self organise into elaborate structures - all in perceptual darkness until much much later humans appear and finally something is there to perceive and appreciate all this. consciousness is the one thing we are sure of prior to any physical reality. it seems ridiculous to me to assume it plays no role in lifes development nor is deeply intertwined with physical reality. your anecdote is a slimy trick in the spirit of daniel dennett. if you pretend to be an automaton you will come to be treated as one - a tool to be used then discarded, by yourself even. or not a trick and you are merely in the possession of a stunted consciousness.

>>6946 >daniel dennett hey, don't call me names!! :P i'm not an arch-nihilist goblin creature like him >it seems ridiculous to me to assume it plays no role in lifes development nor is deeply intertwined with physical reality. to be honest umm I don't understand consciousness very well. For example, if consciousness is simply epiphenomena and has no causal interaction with other things, then how are we able to introspect and have the conversation we're having right now about it? But if consciousness is causal, then how does it interact if it isn't something physical? And if it's physical... then where in space and time is it lol? anyways, it's weird, but a conservative scientific explanation has its advantages. I don't think we need anything like "qualia" to explain abiogenesis and evolution. I've written my own genetic algorithm simulations; the whole process is extremely mechanical, even if the results seem somehow aware of what the right thing to do was. Fighting scientism is a big deal though, I agree. I'd just limit that battle to epistemology and ethics (the stuff scientism has no authority over).

>>6947 >(the stuff scientism has no authority over). I mean, the stuff that the scientific method itself has no authority over. Scientism of course claims to have authority over everything...

>>6947 >how consciousness can be causal imho that is the most important scientific question of our time. my feeling is that we do not understand time correctly, and perhaps at a small enough scale it splits or rolls up upon itself, and within these structures something could exist that can cause but not be moved or has enough self-referentiality to perceive itself within a single moment. true it could be enough to generate everything by optimisation algorithms alone... but this is a hypothesis so far. no one has yet managed to make a cell from scratch, and for the rest of evolution the numbers and timescales and adaptability involved feel wrong to me. but i do not (for now) have a clear example for why this must be the case so either others think similarly already and agree or they do not.

>>6951 >>how consciousness can be causal >imho that is the most important scientific question of our time Indeed. Maybe it's more of a metaphysical question than a scientific question... but for simple marketing purposes we'd opt to use the latter term.

>>6934 See histones and Epigenetics, This is where chemistry becomes similar to biology.

I see we have many biolains here. I need your advice, lainons: I made a terrible mistake of picking biology instead of biotechnology and now I'm quite disappointed because I get so many subjects unrelated to my interests. Should I drop biology and start studying biotechnology? I want to hack life, including human body. I want to extend my life and protect the organisms living on the planet.

>>7020 Cant you just specialize later on? I dont see what you get from biotechnology without knowing biologogy. The later on is just applied with technological means. I dont really know how this will affect you in either way to be honest, just throwing this out there.

>>7024 There are more interesting subjects on biotechnology: more chemistry, biochemistry, physics, computer programs, designing proteins and so on. On biology I get lots of environmental/zoology/botany soykaf I don't really need. And I didn't get to get the molecular specialization on biology because I got my pandemic depression and people cheated on their online exams, so I couldn't compete. By going for biotechnology I don't have to compete with cheaters to get my specialization because it's already specialized.

>>7020 my experience is that interdisciplinary courses are terrible. for example courses specifically called "biotechnology" "bioinformatics" "computational biology" result in a very superficial understanding that will be useless in about 10 years. (biochemistry is very useful but this is the exception because it is a specific field and not a mix.) protein design is useless we dont know how to design proteins, so you will only learn what not to do; protein biochemistry is 1000x more useful. math and statistics courses are the most useful non-biology courses (again avoid any "biostatistics" or "biomath"). computer programming is more fun to learn on your own or for a specific project - understanding the underlying math is more important. anything more than basic physics and chemistry only if you have a specific idea of what you want to use them for in the future. general biology courses will be far more useful to you than they seem. you will need them to be exposed to many different examples of biology in order to develop a proper intuition for how it works. my favourite were histology and anatomy - since you look at the actual organisms and how they are arranged and not just read about them and look at diagrams. also the most interesting developments in biotechnology come from outside it so from the weird parts of biology. eg. gfp from jellyfish, crispr from bacterial immunity. whatever it is that will let us finally understand and modify how the human body forms wont come from the biotech field. they are too busy complaining that biology doesnt behave according to engineering expectations to do any useful work.

>>7026 I think I'll go for biochemistry then. Biology on my university is quite vague - there are some general courses but also many alternative micro specializations, mostly botany and ecology. What I need is a single specialization, not 10 different. I think the entire thing was made for people who don't yet know what they want so they can try everything and decide, I'm different because I have known what I want for years. I hope I have enough autism to handle biochemistry, otherwise I'm finished. Thanks for your opinion.

>>7027 good luck with achieving your goals! oh last point - classes get boring pretty quickly. try to join a lab and get your hands dirty early on.

>>1610 That's a pretty accurate description of the internet, if you add portals to commerce and propaganda to the porn.

I feel like the field has stagnated and since the Oxford Nanopore MinION I haven't heard much news other than CRISPR, but I might be wrong and would love to see some interesting new content on the topic. This still exists at least: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/ This however seems to have failed to maintain their certs: https://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page One thing I'd want to learn more about is somatic cell gene therapy since it is considered legal due to not being inherited, I've been wondering whether it could find popularity as a replacement for steroid and hormone use.

I just had an Idea that plants could be modified to produce heat in mitochondria just like mammals do. This way plants could live in cold places and use the heat to melt ice. It would be good if the plant was hairy so it would stay warm enough to keep the water liquid. Rate my idea and you can use it in your work freely if you want because I'm not really a plant lover.

>>7204 kek. global warming supporter?

>>7205 Why do you care about such fake normal sheep drama? >kek isn't filtered Really makes me almond.

>>7205 Actually the opposite. GMO plants such as mine could grow in cold places like the poles, assimilate carbon and deposit it in the permafrost - permanently removing it from the carbon cycle. >>7206 >fake normal sheep drama Take an ecology book because you have missed something.

>>7204 It would be hard to accumulate enough energy during the summer to stay warm enough to make a difference. The way cold native plants handle winter is more clever. Some need the cold to crack their seeds. Some use the cold to convert their stored starches to sugars for the following growing season.

>>7210 >It would be hard to accumulate enough energy during the summer to stay warm enough to make a difference. I need to make calculations because I'm not sure about that - it's true that less light hits polar regions per second, yet during the polar summer, the sun is up for 24 hours a day.

>>7211 Don't forget to include in your calculations that the primary purpose of agriculture is that we steal of the plant's energy to feed ourselves. Any energy you use to keep the plant warm cuts into that. Also there are already plants growing in the permafrost, so to be impressive you have to do better than the existing plants. >during the polar summer, the sun is up for 24 hours a day Yeah, but it's not direct sunlight and lambert's cosine law is a bitch.

>>7206 because i hope for a future of jungles and high global rainfall rather than boring-ass deserts and ice caps. combination of generating heat with the lowered light reflectance from melting the ice caps is the right step in that direction.

>>7211 >Photon batteries >Charged by glowey sea critters and algea

Anyone got experience with the four thieves vinegar collective? They have plans you can download for a "Apothecary MicroLab", that will allow you to do medical chemistry in your home, but i'm not sure about it? https://fourthievesvinegar.org/

>>3846 Could this realistically be applied to radioactive materials? For example the fungus bio-accumulates radioactive elements from the area around it, then we remove the fungus for safe disposal?

>>8719 Things like sunflowers and mushrooms have already been used for radioactive cleanup. They absorb it then it's carried away when removed from soil.

>>8719 >>8728 Imagine someone making super-potent oil remedation bacteria then injecting it into underground oil pockets for the lulz >Entire oil based economy crippled >Transportation industry forced to move to future tech >A new look on urban planning

>>7204 >I just had an Idea that plants could be modified to produce heat in mitochondria just like mammals do. >Doesn't know about passive solar plant thermal regulation The problem of plants withstanding low temperatures was been solved organically through the sensible use of solar energy heating. People grow plants ALL YEAR ROUND in higher latitudes (snow on ground for months FREEZING cold) without presently-unknown-but-discovered-30years-from-now-harmful-Frankenstein-food-side-effects. t. plant & planet lover

>>7204 I have wonderful news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenic_plant https://www.damninteresting.com/warm-blooded-plants/ All you would need to do is selective breed them to increase this effect.

Our ancestors have been doing it for years, and it's very simple. It's called: selective breeding. You can do it with plants, animals, fish, anything really. Select the individuals that have the desired characteristics, and make them mate together, and repeat. No fancy science stuff, no expensive materials.

>>8768 Unfortunately can take years and many of us are impatient to get results. Plus that has it's limits. Only thing I could think of for breeding is Russian dandelions for increased latex yield like the Soviets researched and a current German tire company.

>>8774 SELECTIVE BREEDING CANNOT GIVE NEW TRAITS THAT DONT EXIST YET I want to create an IRL hentai tentacle monster, fight me

>>8776 my gf wants to fuarrrk an irl hentai tentacle monster and would probably marry me immediately if i got her one, lmk if you make one

>>8776 Either you selected wrong post or you dont understand dandelions produce latex at their roots. The not adding new traits is what I meant by limits of selective breeding.

>>8776 not true cells are adaptable and new traits get created in response to environmental changes and stressors. selective breeding then acts upon the probability of creating this trait, hard coding it over time. tentacle monsters already exist in the sea... find one, maybe need to make a bit bigger but the pacific giant octopus should be enough. also, wont she marry the tentacle monster instead?

>>8803 Well problem is without genetic modification you rely on random chance. In past plants were irradiated with nuclear radiation to increase mutation rates.

>>8805 there is more to cells than blind expression of a genetic program. they interpret it according to their needs in their environment. you still need mutations to select, but this can be a latent pool of variability ie a source of entropy, rather than a mutation directly causing the trait you want.

>>8803 >not making a retrovirus that turns the skin on your hands into tentacles All the features of a tentacle monster, with all the benefits of having human hands. Using a smartphone may be difficult.

I just want to know, as a normal person, how do I get my DNA code so I can put it into an encrypted hardrive in case it gets altered by the government

>>8838 DNA sequencing can be expensive... not to mention it can be altered by radiation and chemicals. if you just want to get a code and then have a hash of that sequence so you can determine if it changed, idk if that would really be feasable

>>8838 Each of your cells contain a copy of your DNA.

>>8842 true, keep a vial of blood on ice

>>2930 Statements that aged well

>>9027 wut. this happen?

>>8844 >true, keep a vial of blood on ice How to protect from radiation?

>>1609 Most real biohacking is just not even remotely viable for the average person, or really anyone who isn't a well funded researcher with a huge team.

Just saw a video about growing plants without light, thinking of giving it a go. Thought it might be considered biohacking. I tracked down the paper if anyone want wants to give it a read: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100021860&CJEVENT=a1d32a48430a11ed8308d54c0a180514

>>9028 They're referring to covid.

>>9330 >?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100021860&CJEVENT=a1d32a48430a11ed8308d54c0a180514 Bruh https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearurls/lckanjgmijmafbedllaakclkaicjfmnk

Hi Lainnons, looking for any resources on biohacking. I'm familiar with dangerous things and their implant chips and things but I'm looking for a more general repository of knowledge concerning the subject. any help's appreciated <3

So we have all seen Thought Emporium's DIY gene therapy right? If not, https://www.youtube.com/watch v=aoczYXJeMY4 What is some other cool project to do with DIY gene therapy.

>>1596 I'm not sure if this is the best thread to ask but I think it is related. What would the best route anyone here knows of in regard to tricking skin into healing through regeneration rather than repair? (As in your tissue heals near-identical replacement of what was there before rather than with scarring which is very different) I have read more papers than I can count on this subject and my understanding is still pedestrian but everything I read points to it being rather tricky but not only not impossible, but also not unprecedented. (Though, extremely limited and poorly understood precedent)

>>9571 From my understanding it seems a few factors are involved such as regenerating hair follicles first as well as supressing the sensing of tension on the wound. Here are some articles that breif on it. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/regenerating-hair-follicles-could-be-key-reducing-scar-tissue https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/04/drug-enables-healing-without-scarring.html Best you can do at home with ease is set up some sort of barrier around the healing area that will prevent it from stretching like some sort of circular ring adhered to your skin in a non wound tension position but i cant gaurantee it will work. Beyond that you can cover the wound with an activated carbon infused bandaid which are available on the market which im thinking at least some of them may have some electro conductive properties but ive never tested that. It's the most easy DIY way to copy research of fancy conductive biogels. You also could use a cheap tens device on low for added light electrical stimulation but id say check studies on electrical stimulation first to get an idea the settings you need. Now and then use a small amount of aloe gel extract. If it's older scars already closed you want to get rid of then an ointment made of natokinase should in theory break fibrin down. Serrapeptase also breaks down fibrin but also protein so that may be too much on the site to use regularly but im not sure on that.

>>9573 >From my understanding it seems a few factors are involved such as regenerating hair follicles first Strange, from my understanding I thought neogenesis of hair follicles was a byproduct of skin regenerating.

>>9583 I dont quite get it either. Obviously you need some skin or the hair has nothing to grow from so maybe these things arent contradictory.

>>9573 Also, do you think suction cups would make a decent " circular ring adhered to your skin in a non wound tension position"? Not much else comes to mind for that.

>>9644 You need some air. I was thinking more along lines of a ridgid O-ring or a mason jar band held in place with a strong but skin safe adhesive. This would stop forces from all directions. Next best would just being using zip stiches which are just a type of bandage that replicates stitches by pulling the wound together but it only does it on one direction which may be enough depending on location and direction of the wound or scar.

>>1621 It looks like you were provided with pre-made plasmids for this exercise. Do you know how to (or how difficult it would theoretically be) to make plasmids containing a (existing) protein of your choosing? I'm very interested, but I'd like to know how much further I could go without a dedicated lab.

apparently scar tissue is your body hardening itself, obviously it is a tricky issue to cover vital areas like your veins, but can anyone figure out a way, maybe via crispr, to utilise scar tissue? just watched a schizo on youtube that tried to "bleed out the demon" and he said that the scars from previous attempts actually stopped him bleeding out this time.

>>9659 Skin and muscle conditioning have been used by fighters since the begining of time. Your body hardens to protect you, but could see some problms with injectable skin thickener. It might be useful for niche medical disorders, but why would you want to turn into leather man? Might as well combine it with some kind of pigment trait so you can be a chameleon colored lizard man.

I can not wait till we have exotic surgerys to add stiffness to joints to prevent submissions or extra cartilage to reinforce the trachea silicone to the jaw maybe injection to slightly dull the nerves long that can take more o2 Glands to release more adrenaline or test >>9659 Two things scars don't really help amazing on the face because there deeper the skin normally and the flesh is is now mince meat under the skin which acts as a weakness It isn't really bio hacking but look at the surgerys nate diaz has gotten to make his face toughter to cut shaving down his bone for softers edges, and removing all the miss grown tissue from under his old scars replaced it with some fresh tissue from where I don't know plus some botox >>9667 Skin thickening need a reason to happen normally and is so beneficial pro boxers and bare knuckle boxers would soak there hand in gasoline to dry em out before training and use lots of lotion after training The thinking is if the skin keep jumping between the two points with trama on top of that to force growth

>>10312 > I can not wait till we have exotic surgerys to add stiffness to joints to prevent submissions or extra cartilage to reinforce the trachea silicone to the jaw maybe injection to slightly dull the nerves long that can take more o2 Glands to release more adrenaline or test Why would we ever have this

>>10368 These are already on the market to be honest on a related note https://dnascience.plos.org/2023/06/08/how-and-why-the-octopus-edits-its-rna/

Before the semi-recent raid, there was thread on biology. There was an anon who had long covid symptoms. I recently found out that Curcumin (from turmeric) has anti-inflammatory effect. Curcumin is also available as dietary supplement. If you are reading this thread, I would recommend you try it out. Omega 3 fish oils (avoid flaxseed oil) are also probably effective. Vitamin D is another substance that I highly recommend everyone to supplement. atm I'm reading about Carnosine which seems also promising substance.

>>10626 >Omega 3 fish oils (avoid flaxseed oil) What is wrong with flaxseed oils (an how should I save vegans instead?)

>>10626 I disagree with you about fish oils, because by the time they actually go in your mouth they're very highly oxidized.

I think it's kinda messed up how all our hair removal techniques are based on burning, slicing, or chemically burning our face, and have been looking into trying to induce differentiation or at least signals in the facial hair growth units which could cause it to bald, think it's still adolescent or another location, or otherwise stop growing non-velus hair (if I'm getting my terms right.) I think I made a little progress reading into, and I bet we'll have a way to do it in the next 50 years, particularly with all the research that's gone into trying to cure balding. I'm not researching it right now, as I've gotten frustrated and am spending my time on learning about experience and consciousness at least for a bit, but if anyone picks up the torch, I'd love to help. You can contact me at (remove ***s ) @*babe**ler:ma*trix.*org or end*externa*liti*es@p*oste*o.ne*t Also, pre-raid-/bio/ thread guy who gave me a copy of dancing to the tune of life- Thanks! I've been enjoying it.

>>10626 As the friend of a doctor I can assure you that supplementation is not the same as cure. If you have cancer, no amount of zinc supplementation is going to cure it. If your body already has enough vitamin D, adding more won't do anything but make your kidneys work more. Supplements are not medicine unless you have a deficiency, and having too much of them makes them a poison. All this supplementation stuff is snakeoil pseudoscience. It's the medical equivalent of zodiacs. Please be careful not to peddle it in the future.

>>10651 But some natural remedies do work. Like Passiflora and St. John's wort (be careful to not mix these with prescription drugs, though). Also, your (bad) diet can make you sick, too. Ideally you would get all your nutrients form real food but supplementing with e.g. vitamin D is probably a good idea to make sure you get enough of it (especially if you are a basement dweller).

>>10655 https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/st-johns-wort Whenever something is being sold to you as a cure-all for several unrelated problems, it's snakeoil. In the wort's case, there's evidence it's better than a placebo for antidepressant purposes, so there may be some compounds in it that work about as well as a mild antidepressant medication would that could be found and concentrated in the future. However, it doesn't do much beyond that and isn't a substitute for antidepressants (especially for chronic and severe depression). In general, pharma does research on plants because many _do_ have bioactive ingredients that can help with various ailments in large enough concentrations, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're safe or effective, especially in their crude form. And further, many of these home remedies are subject to "placebo", the belief that the medication works even if it doesn't do jack. Usually these home remedies are sold on the promise that they cure everything under the sun without any side effects, but as the classic phrase in pharma goes: "If it doesn't have side effects, it doesn't work". So it's interesting to look into, but please hold it with a fair dose of skepticism. It takes time and quite a few peer reviews to suss out active ingredients from bullsoykaf.

>>10651 big talk for a field that never cures diseases directly but rebrands their own supplements to regeneration as cures. no amount of medicine will remove a cancer; the final clean up has to always be done by your own immune system.

>>10678 Absolutely, that’s part of what I’ve been saying! Pharma companies and grifters have promised or insinuated things about medicines that aren’t true or actively harmful. Some steroids have been sold to 14yr olds like they’re candy! I think CAR-T and other bioeng has a lot of promise. I’ve even heard today that we may have an injection that can treat several kinds of cancer based off research from covid! Biotech is awesome, so is this thread. I want us to avoid alternative medicine quackery because that distracts worthwhile research and discussions with unsupported nonsense about using vitamin c tablets to cure cancer and other soykaf like that.

>>9028 MSM Got me wondering how the chinese biolab in downtown california got found out. >>10679 Alternative medicine is often rooted in functional biological systems. There used to be a program where people would live with tribal shamans and try to synthesize medicine from the plants that they would use to treat conditions. The probem is that the barrier of entry to be a scientist now just means you got a paper. Before being a scientist meant you had to fight for your position, and defend yourself against a bunch of other scientists who were always trying to prove you wrong, not faking research until you make profit.

>>10657 >Whenever something is being sold to you as a cure-all for several unrelated problems, it's snakeoil on the other hand, there are i.e. nutritional defficiencies that can surely effect a large number of systems. Though most are more subtle, when you're badly dehydrated, water is a real panacea.

>>10312 Incredible, probably the single post in this thread that's actually about biohacking and not some biology nerd nonsense. Everyone itt should do some actual "biohacking" by going to the gym Anyway, to elaborate on some of your ideas: Designer glands are probably where it's at, for example gonads that produce specific androgens. That seems to be doable but expensive, transplants from select animals might be more realistic Artificial joint replacement is already a thing, artificial ligaments would also be cool since ACL/MCL is one of the weakest points in human body design Artificial knuckle joints made of tungsten is something I definitely would pursue if I had a right surgeon. Like artificial joints they give arthritic patients but made of something heavy like tungsten instead of plastic Laser eye correction is a irl powerful biohack that can greatly improve a person Limb lengthening is another example of biohacking even though more aesthetic than practical, still has more to do with biohacking than whatever this thread is about Hell even a stripper getting her tits enhanced is doing more biohacking than the silly little guys here babbling about basic biology

What would the minimum equipment and knowledge be to engineer a gut bacterial that produces tiny and controlled amounts of sex hormones that one could trade for emeralds? Is there an easier or more practical way?

>>11046 That sounds like a bad idea because you wont have control over if the bacteria multiplies and spreads to other people and it also wouldnt control how much is released in an individual. >>10312 Why the fuarrrk would they use gasoline instead of ethanol or vinegar ?

>>10757 What do you think of non diabetic people using glucose tracker for a better understanding of how foods reach with there body?

>>10757 leg lengthening might get a pass cause you actually induce growth. Tit job is however just adding decoration. Its not hacking in any sense unless you wanna say fake body is a spoofing attack on male brain. As for real biohacking - roids/drugs/... is the most real already existing thing. Strict diet that induces keto also falls into this. Here you actually push buttons to change the system behavior.

>>11046 undergraduate degree and a few thousand, but it's mostly time and expertise customizing bacteria is normal coursework or club level stuff now

>>11046 Grow the emeralds driectly inside your body.

>>6898 Corpo society encourages sameness and discourages difference. Mutation, transformation, that's change and its embrace. But many "transhumanists" chase mythos of eternal life and enhancements that all accentuate that sameness. Look at all the teens taking drugs to look like the same 5 body builders. Where's the horns? The tails? Transhumanists are fashion, they want to live forever in robot bodies being the same kind of being forever. They fear the ship of thesius. I don't consider myself transhumanist, thought we share the same technology we have different goals and reasons behind why we use it. The transhumanists of today want to escape death and keep things the same as they are as long as they can. They want to forever be as they are, make their own neverland. Notice all the tech billionaires, what do they pursue? Cryogenics, mind uploading, young blood transfusions, deaging. They want to live forever, they don't want to adapt or change. Look at the fashion companies put on everyone else. Young humans are encouraged to all look the same. Same hairstyles, same hair, same body type, and be disgusted by all their differences. Any difference becomes a defect. That is why I say transhumanists are "afraid of change". Transhumanists as they exist now are only interested in doing the same thing, looking the same, living forever in neverlands, in being the same and avoiding change wherever they can. They are like computer people who refuse to use new technology, they want to stay with their commodores for life and view everything new with suspicion. Even with AI, they just want to make immortal mind-clones of themselves, "alignment" and "the greater good" as their excuse. Fashion will impose a sameness on humans with "acceptable" changes. Instead of making humanity one big cavendish banana, prone to collapse at the slightest need for adaptation - instead go full mech and bio augmentation, be as different as possible, explore the farthest reaches of experience and the broad span of difference that makes for a better humanity. Sink or swim. Self-experimentation, mutation, and changing forms and mind. That's growth. That's transformation. See what else I've said.

Hope this is relevant but how viable is it to do your own DNA test at home? I mean in a way that doesn't give your DNA to other people. Do you need special knowledge or is there a machine you can just buy? Preferably without internet. My interest is stuff like Neanderthal remnants or personal traits but maybe in the future paternity/family links.

>>11066 I obviously know little but could it be fine tuned? Or personalised on an individual basis? Maybe it's for the future to develop.

>>12004 You mean sequence your own genome? You could buy a nanopore device for a few thousand and run it at home. But you'll likely need to set up a company as biotechs rarely sell to individuals. Another route would be to work at a university lab and sneak in your own samples. There are also some euro companies that do privacy oriented genome sequencing.

>>12023 Probably the first one. Thanks.

>>12053 If you actually have cash to spare trying to sequence your own genome at home but have no experience then I can help you out with the details.

>>12054 Nah I'll have to get cash first lol

Im super paranoid about things I can't see or fight hand to hand. Is it practical to engineer a guy biome that breaks down things like methanol or botulism? Would the bacteria just die out if you aren't consuming that all the time?

>>12199 >Gut biome Why would it even correct to guy, wtf.

>>12200 its a typo retard. look at your keyboard. no idea if its practical... your intuition is generally right though, once a species has been introduced to your gut the actual composition is determined by what you eat. maybe your best bet is to eat a bit of everything and make sure every bacteria ends up there.

The fast way to get a healthy gut biome is to find someone who already has one, ask for some of their poop, and put it up your rectum. This is not a joke or a troll. It's done medically in some cases.

>>12206 "Oi mate you look healthy, can i push your soykaf in my ass?"

>>12203 No, I literally typed gut and it changed to guy before my eyes, hence why I found it strange.

>>10680 lay off the drugs anon

How would you best archive your own DNA/genetics if you were about to experience some virus or radiation that would alter it? With the intention of later rebuilding yourself the exact same. Can you pay for this through private labs? What storage medium is best?

>>12291 >with the intention of rebuilding yourself at the exact same time idk what you mean by this but I dont think its gonna happen readily cloning is a thing but rapid aging is not. consider knocking up several women first and on average thats pretty good

>>12292 Not really cloning, it would be peace of mind to have the data stored. I considered 5d crystals but don't know how to buy them. But I would be fine with just doing some kind of gene therapy and replacing everything on this body with the og data. Because they will change my DNA probably

>>12293 have you thought about IDK getting a nice suit to protect ya or maybe just not getting irradiated ? what you're asking for is magic scifitech that just dont exist. sometimes you're just screwed. 5dpd

>>12291 >How would you best archive your own DNA/genetics if you were about to experience some virus or radiation that would alter it? Each of your cells has a separate copy of your DNA. A virus or radiation wouldn't alter every cell.

>>12291 DNA repairsomes help prevent DNA mutation but it's unclear if ones acquired from other organisms really work on humans.

>>1596 >share software >diy centrifuges https://github.com/illthinkitlater/Centrifuge Very poor and low-cost. I have tried to make it without any 3D-printed parts (too expensive for me). Ofc it falls in resonance at some frequencies, and, also, very unhappy about vibrations. Just want to share this.

>>12298 This is the simplest centrifuge you can make and dont need 3D printing or any special parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dluLnhe0o0

guys is it viable to breed with micro organisms? I want to make a sort of Jurassic park terrarium of the little guys and keep it sealed for a couple decades. will I succeed or will I just make something that eats me alive in my sleep? has to be low tech though, i found these that might help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_chloride_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer#Compounds_found_to_promote_horizontal_gene_transfer

>>12945 It can be hard to maintain an ecosystem, especially if it is sealed. Bacteria will grow to use up the available resources and then die off. For bacterial evolution experiments they usually keep diluting them every few days with fresh medium. You could try keeping algae + pond creatures in a sealed flask. The sun would let the algae grow and the creatures eat the algae. They are more fun to watch under a microscope.

>>12946 thanks for the info.i will try the latter, but is there a way to harvest the dead bacteria for genes?

>>12947 Sure. Extract the DNA and then sequence it or PCR amplify the region you want. But this is probably not what you are aiming for. What are you actually trying to do? I suggest volunteering at some university lab to get experience first. Otherwise it can be quite frustrating due to the reagents you would have to buy and how messy and unreliable many biology experiments are.

Where is a good place to purchase a DNA printer? I want to make DNA plasmids and programmable bacteria.

>>13135 You will probably be better served by paying a company to synth DNA for you. Much cheaper for the scale you will (probably) be working at. Have you worked in a lab before? If not, gonna rec the same thing as >>12951, find a local university to take you in so you can get your hands dirty. (Also, you can get copies of many, many bacterial plasmids from them for free instead of paying, which will be very nice)

who's idea was 2/4 array and who is responsible for understanding it? do you think that the DNA protein arrays are the primary array or does it come expanded from a binary? how do the proteins know what to do? if you think about it OP mammals are the same species with different amounts of one thing or another, we all have the same skeleton with different length bones and the same organs with different numbers and sizes. heres some ideas: replace the information for one gland with another gland you have invented which is somehow responsible for culturing stem cells and surgically replace the gland with the stem cells gland. thinking of some way to increase or replenish RNA

>>13139 I work in a lab. Just not a biology lab.

Are there any supplements or techniques to shrink the amygdala that isn't the usual bs meditation, exercise, deep breathing, cold water immersion?