BBC News reports on the attempt of Tristan Roberts and his collaborators to successfully administer personal gene therapy outside of formal medical supervision. Tristan Roberts is a computer scientist with no formal training in medical practice who collaborated with Aaron Traywick, the head of the young company Ascendance Biomedical, and other scientists to attempt to use gene therapy to treat Roberts' HIV. These "biohackers" and other scientists around the United States, who were not named to avoid public recognition, worked with them to formulate a treatment outside of the medical community.
Roberts Facebook livestreamed himself injecting the gene therapy into his stomach. The therapy did not show signs of success, which disheartened but did not discourage Roberts' and Ascendance Biomedical's aspiration to treat or cure Roberts' HIV. The report on the informal procedure cites prominent voices from the scientific and medical community who are critical of and concerned with the ethics of the biohacking approach. They expressed opinions that the group is not fully informed on the topic of using gene therapy to treat HIV and concerns that the group was being too cursory in evaluating ethical precautions.
This report may raise further questions in the reader's mind about the ethics of using personal gene therapies for a variety of applications. How freely should people be allowed to use gene therapies on their own bodies?
Click here for a link to the report
- Evan Holmes
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