Max Berry

Even if Minicircle has somehow done what thousands of researchers failed to do, follistatin itself is very unlikely to cause 30% life extension. Or muscle growth, at least with the levels they’re claiming. Placebo effects are real. Anyway, check it out: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…

@NikoMcCarty I think your link got messed up, here's the working one diyhpl.us/wiki/polymeras…

Sometimes, when you think you are ten years "ahead" in biotechnology, you are actually ten years behind. DARPA recently announced a ~$40M program to synthesize DNA directly in living cells, using pulses of light. This is a great idea! DNA synthesis is way too expensive ($0.07 per base, or thereabouts) and is the limiting ingredient for most experiments. If we could coax cells to make arbitrary sequences in situ, then we could skip the ~5 days it currently takes to order DNA from a company and clone it into cells. We could run biology experiments much faster. But the more you look into this idea, the more you'll discover that biohackers have been talking about it for, like, several decades. And not just light-based approaches, either, but also really nice ideas centered around electrical pulses or other ways to make proteins without using DNA or RNA whatsoever. We should be funding more "out of the box" ideas. Biotechnology has followed quite a linear, status quo funding cycle for the last 10+ years at least. I'm sure many of these ideas won't work out, but this whole website is a goldmine. I'm feeling inspired!: diyhpl.us/wiki/polymeras…

@peerbase_ sure, send it over

@yashgaroth I'm producing a documentary that mentions follistatin.. and we referred to your work. I can send it to your email to get feedback if you want.

I did a writeup on Minicircle, the gene therapy startup injecting people with ~plasmids~ tl;dr: Minicircle is claiming obviously implausible numbers in plasmid capabilities and delivery efficiency: several orders of magnitude above the state of the art. Link in the next tweet

@peerbase_ I added a short update at the top of the doc in August, after the follistatin longevity paper was retracted. A few more tidbits there too. I don't expect to add anything further, but you never know.

@yashgaroth any update on this?

Thanks to @yashgaroth for the talk! Thanks to @michaelcurzi for video editing. YouTube link: youtube.com/watch?v=6-R3EL…

@shelbynewsad hgpauction.com

where do nyc biotechs find cheap lab equipment?

regular cells contaminated: oh no, mycoplasma! Three months of work down the drain :( virtual cells contaminated: the moldovan hackers have demanded the ransom be paid in fartcoin before we can access the lab computers again :(

Development of human embryo gene editing continues in the shadows.

@Jiankui_He same

I hope people remember me as "Chinese Darwin" in 50 years.

Thank you @dmgerhard for the great feature on Oct4 and super-SOX in @TheScientistLLC covering both our @CellStemCell papers! the-scientist.com/pluripotency-s…

@ashleevance Hasn't eGenesis raised half a billion dollars to make humanized pig organs? United Therapeutics is also working on it. Not that there isn't room for more players, but I wouldn't say it's being slept on.

The Los Angeles Project - a new startup - has set out to genetically engineer pets and much more

@hsu_steve Agreed, but naval reactors aren't the best example since they use 93% enriched uranium, which can be directly weaponized by a small child. Fine when they're surrounded by the military and/or ocean, less so otherwise. Plenty of great designs out there that avoid that concern.

This was stopped cold by emotional reactions of ape brain wiring. When future historians look back they will wonder why the ~70 year pause in advancement of nuclear energy. They'll also notice that energy usage per capita plateaued in the US during this period. Future historians may also wonder why progress in human genomics was delayed for decades. 🤔 Ofc, this future historian better be an AGI, or they might miss the plot entirely. "Ape brain no good" 😐

getting a lot of questions about my "not interested in biological weapons" shirt that are already answered by my shirt

@craigstolarczyk From Minicircle? Nah. I was hoping this would prompt them to release some more, but no dice.

@yashgaroth Nice overview. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. From what I've seen, the data looks pretty thin. Is there a full data workup?

@aitherick Are there any changes from the preprint I cited in the writeup? Reviewer 2: needs more details on plasmid design, blood testing is insignificant and doesn't need 7 pages of zero-data graphs. Control group comparison is missing. ug/mL -> ng/mL is fixed at least, but I called that

@mm03993418 @4LOVofScience @aitherick @DavidIshee7 @NickDranias @DraniasMark @GeorgeColindres MIPs are probably an improvement over regular minicircles; they're certainly easier to make. Minicircle the company didn't invent or develop MIPs though, to clarify for anyone reading - MIPs have been around for a decade. Anyway, I crave blood (to run assays on).

@4LOVofScience @aitherick @DavidIshee7 @NickDranias @DraniasMark @GeorgeColindres yeah, i've read the papers on minicircles. all I'm saying is one group of people says minicircle's tech ("mini-intronic plasmids") works amazingly well, another group says it's an obvious lie, and there's a straightforward way to tell who's right, lets do it

It’s a good write up and a very good set of criticisms. I should know I built the thing and have injected more FST minicircle into myself than anyone alive. Those guys are just scammers I worked with until I found out they were scammy so they just ran off with my work to cash in.

@patrissimo @eddylong33 @DavidIshee7 The Thermo Fisher follistatin ELISA should work ok, I can spike different quantities of recombinant follistatin into serum to get a standard curve. The more samples the better though, esp. given David's data about natural fluctuations. I have access to a few plate readers etc.

@eddylong33 @yashgaroth I volunteered a couple months ago, as I am local to Max B and getting the gene therapy soon. I don’t know how easy it will be for him to create the test as it is non-standard, and now @DavidIshee7’s data makes it seem futile to only do a couple tests, but I’m game to try!

@NickDranias I've done what I can with what I have available: Minicircle's very limited publications, and the entire wealth of scientific research into gene therapy over the last 30+ years. I agree that the health risk is near zero. If it wasn't, I would have been more forceful in my wording.

@NickDranias I like Prospera's mission as an alternative to the FDA, the FDA sucks. But you must be vigilant about the kinds of people the FDA was originally founded to counteract, or else people will just point to those examples and say "see this is why FDA" and you're back at square one

@NickDranias The desire to avoid legal entanglements is why I elected to remove some more...risque language from the writeup. I will be curious to see how the Prospera community handles the situation on its own.