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dissonant music

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[Michael Laufer] He was a very

controversial figure, in a lot of ways.

[water dripping]

[Michael Henderson] I remember he told me that

he didn't like aging,

that the saddest day of his life

would be to see his father die.

And so he's going to do everything in his power

to help extend human life.

[Josiah Zayner] Every single major figure

in the biohacking world was working with Aaron,

because he paid them some money.

[Alex Pearlman] This was a bad actor within the community

who performed bad science in a terrible way.

[Rita Traywick] He wanted to help people.

He was very, very smart.

[Man] I think he was trying to change the world.

[Gabriel Licina] He was a snake oil salesman.

[Greg Neimeyer] He clearly had many of the features

of psychopathy.

[Mac Davis] I never actually saw Aaron do anything

that was legitimately unethical or dangerous.

[Josiah Zayner] There's all these conspiracy theories.

[Tristan Roberts] The more digging you do,

the more you realize that

a lot of people had motive behind it.

[Edwina Rogers] I'm not sad that Aaron

is no longer with us.

It was a matter of time

that he was going to kill somebody.

[Reporter] Aaron Traywick,

the CEO of the biohacking company

Ascendance Biomedical,

was found dead Sunday

floating in a sensory deprivation tank

in a meditation spa in Washington, D.C.

Reporter: He was what is a called a biohacker,

and a controversial one.

He claimed his drugs could cure HIV, AIDS, and Herpes.

He was 28 years old.

[typing]

[typing]

[Josiah Zayner] Aaron, his number one fault

was he used the C-word really often,

and the-C word is, he called things cures.

"This is a cure. That's a cure."

If he never would have said those words,

nobody probably would have ever had problems with him.

[Interviewer] We're live, so... [laughs]

[indistinct off-screen dialogue]

[Aaron Traywick] Oh we're live right now?

[Interviewer] Yes.

Oh my God. Ok so yeah, I'm good, man.

Uh, I'm not gonna be staring off into space anymore.

So, I'm Aaron Traywick,

I'm the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical.

We have three, open access gene therapy platforms

that are open to researchers,

independent and commercial, around the world.

These technologies, these platforms,

are capable of bringing the cost

of delivering disease management strategies,

cures, um, and vaccinations

to members of the general public

at less than $100 a dose, per patient,

for what is intended on every therapy that we develop

to be a one-time use, one-time cure.

If somebody in their home can manufacture and produce

everything that their own family would need

need in terms of their healthcare, I mean,

that would be beautiful.

I mean, that's the idea, the science fiction idea,

of a maker applied to the area of human life,

where we need it most: healthcare.

dissonant, pulsing music

[Michael Laufer] So, Aaron Traywick,

it's always an attention getter when you

take your pants off and stab yourself.

Not everybody is going to have the bandwidth

to be able to sit down and understand

what you're doing on a really deep level.

And if you do something a little showy-

Oh, you want me to put my pants...

are you sure? [laughs]

[Michael Laufer] -you can catch the attention of people

who should be interested and,

and would be, but otherwise might miss it.

So yeah, good guns to him.

[indistinct chatter]

[Mac Davis] He publicly stated

that the healthcare systems were failing us.

He suggested and really believed that the situation

that we were in as humans today

was so dire that we needed immediate,

radical improvements to our lifestyles.

In terms of longevity, and disease treatment,

he saw that the things were possible,

and that they needed to happen

as quickly as possible.

[Michael Henderson] I think he looked at his self

as being a motivator.

He knew that he was like this Batman-type character

that folks would hate him, or love him.

But he needed to, uh, have this burden to...

to change the world.

I remember he told me

that he didn't like aging,

that the saddest day of his life

would be to see his father die.

And so he's going to do everything in his power

to help extend human life.

So, it was very family-based,

his motives and reasons.

dissonant music

[Aaron Traywick] I am from a firmly-rooted

middle class family in Alabama.

I was adopted at 7 days old.

My parents raised me in a very, very small town,

one of the smallest in Alabama,

right where they filmed Big Fish,

if you've ever seen that movie.

My father was a welder in the National Guard,

and my momma was a, a nurse at a rehab clinic,

and later worked for the State, still does.

- [dog barking] - [birds chirping]

Growing up, my grandparents

they died pretty slowly of diabetes

and our family, we took care of 'em.

And you know, day in, day out, almost every weekend,

a lot of my childhood was spent, you know,

caring for my, my grandparents.

One day, my grandma was in the hospital

and she was in the ventilator.

And the doctors come in and they tell you

there's nothing they can do for her.

And if you give 'em this much money every day,

they can keep her alive as long as you want.

I was disgusted at the idea

that if I ever was in that position,

then I would have to be making financial decisions

based on my own self-preservation,

at the cost of my loved one's life.

[birds chirping]

[Kristen Bennett] His Christmas list, yeah,

was always comic books,

and then what other books he wanted.

[Kimberly Bennett] He had, like, t...

was it, how many boxes did he have, two or three?

[Rita Traywick] Three.

[Kimberly Bennett] They were like big white boxes

and they were filled up with comics.

And he would never let us touch 'em.

That's one thing you did not mess with

when you went in his room.

Yeah, if you did, he had special ones,

and they were all in a cover,

and you could only look at those.

[Rita Traywick] He saw one set of his grandparents

struggle with medical care and getting medications.

And, um, I think he,

he just wanted to help people all round.

Then his, his daddy's got, um, emphysema,

and that was gonna be one of his things too,

to try and find something for,

you know, lung diseases.

He wanted to take care of me and his daddy,

and he always wanted to take care of these girls.

It didn't matter, they... he wanted to,

he wanted to be able to take care of them,

and that was part of his goal.

If you've got a problem,

he wants to try to figure it out, help try to solve it,

and try to make everybody okay.

[traffic sounds]

[Aaron Traywick] I went to a

public liberal arts university in Alabama.

I just followed my passions.

In the process, I gained an education out of it.

[Interviewer] Just tell me your name again

and your organization.

Aaron Traywick,

Coalition of Alabama Students for the Environment.

[Aaron Traywick] Then wrote a thesis for my degree.

And moved on from there into the world

to continue what is essentially,

and always will be, self-directed research.

[birds chirping]

After doing a lot of community organizing work

and establishing a decent career for myself

around public health and the environment in Alabama,

I traveled very frequently through South America,

trying to understand a little bit more

about where the psychological development

and evolution of humanity was headed.

Life extension, it seemed to me,

was the real barrier that if this one was surmounted

in some way, we could be creating a world

where individuals could feel safer, and not so shocked,

and cajoled, and tossed around by the pressures

that come with living an existence that is perpetually

required to deny

the inevitability of its own demise.

suspenseful music

[Edwina Rogers] Aaron Traywick was my first cousin.

This was where he lived when he was in Washington.

He learned that lobbyist world

that he had access to through me.

I did a lot of work internationally,

uh, lobbying for foreign governments,

and also for companies.

I got a phone call.

Aaron told me that he was in Colombia, South America,

working on a microbrewery.

But that gig had ended, and he needed to find a new job.

First impressions were interesting,

because we picked him up at the airport

and he was like a little ragamuffin.

I mean he was sort of like a hobo incarnate.

He had the tattered T-shirt,

he had the long straggly hair,

and all of his worldly possessions

in this knapsack, and dirty tennis shoes.

So, our very first thought with him

was to get him a haircut and then go get clothes for him.

[Edwina Rogers] I had three personal assistants

at that time.

One of them really wasn't working out,

and I could replace one personal assistant with him

so that he could come to Washington

and get a job, and, and have a career.

We just integrated him into everything

for the three foundations that I run.

He spent most of his time working on projects

for Global Healthspan Policy Institute.

But he also helped me start a foundation

for wealthy gentlemen in Tucson, Arizona

that's all about, uh, stem research.

[Greg Neimeyer] She trundled him through

the Senate and the House

and introduced him to members of Congress,

and got him involved in the business,

and got him oriented, just exactly as you would expect

in trying to mentor somebody into a new kind of business

and industry that he was completely unfamiliar with.

[Aaron Traywick] I got started here on Capitol Hill, D.C.

Wanted to find a way to, uh, really contribute,

you know, to the field, to aging research,

and particularly the underlying causes

of aging-related disease.

dissonant music

[Aaron] I would consider myself a biohacker

only in the sense that Jonas Salk was a biohacker.

[Announcer] In 1954, a vaccine to prevent paralytic polio,

developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

[Man] Who owns the patent on this vaccine?

[Jonas Salk] Well, the people, I would say.

There is no patent. This is, could you patent the sun?

[laughs]

[Aaron] He self-tested the polio vaccine

on himself and his family,

saving millions of lives in the process,

and creating open source information that was then able

to spread freely around the world and eradicate the disease

in a timeframe that could never have occurred,

had he not made all those decisions,

on behalf of himself and humanity.

It's about not waiting around for other companies,

other people, other researchers to come up with the cures

to help my family, my loved ones, my friends,

my community, the world.

It's about taking it into your own hands,

doing it yourself, getting the work done,

and not letting any delays get in the way.

suspenseful music

[Alex Pearlman] Aaron came out very secretive.

"I have a ton of money. I'm gonna be a biohacker.

I'm gonna make cures for people.

And we're gonna upend the system."

And had this persona that I felt

was very, very different than what biohackers,

who were self-identified biohackers,

had previously displayed themselves as.

A big part of hacking and hacking culture

is working outside of establishment,

science, academia, research.

[Biohacker] Okay, we're gonna make an agarose gel

for separating our DNA.

[door shutting] [beeping]

[Alex Pearlman] Garage or kitchen culture

is a part of what people associate with hacking,

and whether that in reality means a community lab,

or a shared maker space.

[steam hissing]

Just the idea that it's not part of an institution

is part of hacking.

[Narrator] So how did we get here?

We have always been biohackers.

For thousands of years, humans have been engaged

in the pursuit of knowledge.

We made medical discoveries by testing on ourselves.

Self-experimentation and citizen science

were popular during the Victorian Era.

That's when the Naturalist Movement emerged,

and standardized the Scientific Method.

Major discoveries were made in all branches of science

in the late 1800s:

physics, astronomy, natural history, and medicine.

And then when science and technology merged

with the consumer market,

it gave birth to the modern healthcare economy.

In the early 20th century,

mass production met chemical engineering, just in time

for World War I and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry.

Regulatory bodies, like the FDA,

are then created to control them.

World War II ushers in the atomic age,

and cements in place a military industrial complex

that sees science as something to be controlled.

Corporations and the government

then end up monopolizing the pursuit of science,

and while great leaps are made,

they're made behind closed doors.

Big Pharma privatizes advances in medicine,

and independent self-experimentation

is seen as more of a primitive approach.

Leaps in computing power and the internet bring the promise

of shared knowledge and open source connectivity.

But as this space is also corporatized,

the hacker is born.

electronic music

The internet is fertile ground

for the modern citizen scientist

because all that computing power

unlocked the human genome.

And now, players in Big Pharma

even want to patent human DNA.

A breakthrough new technology with limitless capabilities,

called CRISPR, is discovered.

It's a revolutionary gene-editing tool

that can permanently edit any organism's DNA.

CRISPR technology is disseminated

throughout the biohacking community

and made accessible to the masses.

It's happening at a rate

that the powers that be can't control.

And now, the age of biohacking is upon us.

- [street noise] - [sirens]

[Michael Laufer] I feel that hacking is an ethical concern.

It's a good, and I argue that it's the greatest good.

What it does is it takes what's available

and it leverages that in order to do more

than what's allowed.

The medical community has not figured this out.

The chemical community has not figured this out.

The biological community is starting to figure this out,

which is why we have coined the term biohacking

and so many people are doing it, and it's a great blessing.

We are trying to get medicine and medical technologies

to people who otherwise

wouldn't have it, however we can.

EpiPens started failing left and right.

As if it weren't insulting enough

that they were overcharging, and they failed,

and they weren't safe,

and you weren't supposed to make your own,

it's still $609 for a pair of EpiPens.

I'm just gonna show you, this is the set up.

It's the auto injector.

You take the needle from one syringe,

you plop it on the other syringe, you load it,

and you're good to go.

Is there anybody here who suffers from anaphylactic shock?

Who wants this one?

[audience applauding]

When I think of biohacking, I think of people

who work with the living organism as a medium.

That's the bio part.

And then the hacking part is utilizing the... hmm..

the hacker ethic of saying,

"We can make a better world with technology.

We can utilize things in ways

for which they were not designed."

And we don't wait for permission to do so.

[engine revving]

[motorcycle engine]

[Tim Cannon] If you put a magnet under your finger,

you could sense these electromagnetic fields

and it was like somebody

hit me in the side of the head.

It was like the revolution started without me.

"Ah shit. I mean I gotta catch up."

And so I heard about that in April, and by May,

there was a magnet in my finger.

I just was not waiting anymore.

There is no fucking way that I would ever pass up

an opportunity to prove the efficacy of, of this movement.

[typing]

[News Reporter] A microchip implanted beneath the skin

gives people the same capabilities

as dozens of cards and devices.

[Tim Cannon] What's going to happen is, uh,

I'm going to receive an incision,

my skin will be lifted,

and separated away from its fatty tissues.

And the device will be inserted.

We are not going to be using any anesthetic.

It's really, really gonna hurt.

You don't have to listen to them.

You don't have to fucking do it their way.

If you build an alternate institution,

at the end of the day

they will have to conform to our standard,

if we push hard enough, because it's better.

And we can do that, 'cause our proposition is there,

and our talent is there, and our skill is there.

And we got just the right amount of

[raises voice] fuck you!

That's it.

[audience applauds and cheers]

[Michael Laufer] There's no movement

in the history of the planet

that ever had such high aspirations.

[indistinct chatter]

If we can say we don't like the structure of the jungle,

that the strongest survive, then we can shift that.

You see people who are not supported by money

or infrastructure, or materials,

and so they make do with what they have.

[Man] There we go.

[Michael Laufer] But they are less afraid to do so.

Man: And so yeah, so when we're done,

you just stand here in the corner by the sink.

And if we are like "Oh shit, run and get, like,

a fuckin', you know, butter knife quick.",

that would be your role.

[larva rustling]

[water running]

[indistinct chatter]

[Man] You want it to sit there and get it closed

even before you suture.

[Woman] That's perfect placement. Thank you.

[Man] No problem. So, there you go.

[scissor snip]

[Woman] You rock my world, dude.

electronic music

[Man] Almost more delicate than a surgery.

[Russ Foxx] There's an RFID chip in my hand,

and we were just trying to get

the reader working again.

[indistinct chatter]

This is the reader here.

[reader beeping]

My RFID transponder I use to activate my motorcycle.

[engine revving]

[device beeping]

And I use it to access my safes at home for security.

[device beeping] [safe clicking open]

We're the ones that are

putting in the experimentation,

and putting these things into our own bodies.

We are gonna be the people

that develop these technologies

and get them noticed

before they're taken to the next step.

[Michael Laufer] I often harken back to the era of

the early alchemists, because

they were trying to pursue science

during a time where doing so

was punishable by death.

And they did it anyway.

And that's a pretty heavy risk to take.

Um, a number of people in this community will do things

that are on the margins of legality

or are entirely extra-legal.

[Gabriel Licina] 620 microliters?

[Man] That sounds about right.

[Ana Kasparian] The Science for Masses team

has created eyedrops that allow people to see in detail

when they are in the dark.

The solution is made of something known as CE6.

They wanted to test this out

by using the liquid on Gabriel Licina.

He's a biochemistry researcher.

I'm going to eat your soul. [laughs]

[Ana Kasparian] Within an hour,

Licina said he could identify shapes

the size of a hand about 30 feet away in the dark.

[Gabriel Licina] I was answering 100 emails a day,

people who were like,

"My 9 year daughter has retinos pigmentosa.

RP you know, and she can't see in the dark."

I'm like, "I am not sending weird science molecules

for you to test on your children."

suspenseful music

My name's Gabriel Licina.

Right now you're in Sci House

which is a 501 C3 nonprofit research

and educational outreach laboratory.

I graduated from high school in 1999.

And I went straight into college,

into the Computer Science program,

and started rapidly failing all my classes.

And then kind of got smitten with science.

I just got really excited about

how powerful and foreign biology is.

I was like, "Oh, this is beautiful."

I was really passionate about changing the world.

I saw this very powerful technology

that was capable of doing something positive.

I was like, "All right, so I have a background in biology,

I work in a laboratory."

I'm like, "Let's talk about biohacking."

I ended up having a lot of text conversations

with this guy named Aaron.

Sometimes I had phone calls,

and things escalated really rapidly.

[running water]

He was talking with everybody else that I knew

from the biohacking community.

This would be Mac Davies, this would be David Ishee.

And turns out that all these people

were also kind of pulled into this

because it was the magical money faucet.

So we are on this conference call with Ascendance.

Aaron's like, "Okay what do you need to do X, Y, Z?"

I'm like, "Okay, we need a place for the lab equipment."

He's like, "All right find a place."

So I find a place.

I'm like, "Somebody needs to sign the lease on the place."

And he's like, "Okay one time power of attorney, go."

I'm like, "Okay we need this, this, this, and this."

He's like, "Find all the links on Amazon, find it on eBay,

find it on gov deals."

We'd send him a link, boom.

$20,000 worth of hardware would just show up.

[dog barking]

[dog barking]

[dog barking]

[David Ishee] I was raised around dogs.

My family's been dog breeders for a long time.

My great grandfather bred dogs,

my grandfather, my father.

My name's David Ishee.

I'm a biohacker in Mississippi.

Were in my lab.

[puppy barking]

There's a lot of genetics that goes into it.

Dogs have more genetic diseases

than any other species on the planet,

over 600 different unique genetic diseases.

And for some context, wolves have seven. [laughs]

So that's hundreds and hundreds

of genetic diseases that we made.

And we don't have the tools to fix them.

And so I say that we do have the tools to fix them,

we're just not using them.

I originally had the idea to do

genetic engineering on dogs,

and to make genetic engineering

accessible to dog breeders,

and so was looking to get a product developed.

dissonant music

Aaron presented Ascendance as being a biotech company.

Basically he would fund the development,

which I had been struggling with,

and in the end he would have the thing, right.

So I would get to use it,

which is all I really wanted.

I stepped through what would be required.

It's like, "Okay, well, Im gonna need DNA.

Well how do you get DNA?

Okay well I need bacteria. How do you get bacteria?"

I needed ampicillin to grow bacteria

because I needed bacteria to grow plasmid DNA.

And so I was searching all over the Internet

and I stumbled onto this website, The Odin,

that had ampicillin for like $3 for a gram.

And so I was convinced at first that it was a scam.

Then I learned more about Josiah.

So I eventually called Josiah

and I was like, "Hey, can I get a little help here? "

So, uh, how's the pregnancy going right now?

How long does it actually take?

Sixty-three days.

[laughs] Sixty-three days. Exactly?

Yeah. So I have a couple

of kanamycin-based plasmids.

I was having trouble getting them to grow.

Send over a list of all the stuff you need,

and I'm sure we can get it out.

[Josiah Zayner] Aaron... I'm really close friends

with all the people who worked with him,

and I helped him out.

That's one of the things he didn't know.

Behind the scenes,

I was helping out everybody at his company.

You know, I was trying to push them in the correct direction,

so that they didn't do anything stupid or crazy

or nobody got hurt.

My name is Josiah Zayner

and I am founder and CEO of The Odin.

Biohacker-in-Chief, I guess. That's really lame. [laughs]

I'm also the first person in the world

to genetically modify myself with CRISPR.

[indistinct chatter]

I received my PhD in Biophysics

from the University of Chicago,

where I did lots of protein engineering

and genetic engineering.

[on tape] Okay I want to show you what NASA's like.

[on tape] It is 2:00 p.m.

After that, I received a job to work at NASA.

[on tape] Nobody in that lab. No one. No one.

[on tape] In all the labs, nobody.

[NASA, the hardest-working people in the government.

I was like, "Enough of this shit."

I couldn't really get a job

because obviously I don't work well with others.

[on tape] Okay so this is my apartment/lab.

So I decided to start my own company.

I ran a crowd-funding campaign

for these CRISPR kits.

I thought it would be an amazing idea

if people could do CRISPR at home.

This is where we package and ship out all of our kits.

We send out a shit ton.

This is where we keep all of our DNA.

This is basically all the important shit that we have.

What I'm trying to do is

I'm trying to push the field forward,

by doing cutting edge experiments

that are well-thought-out, well-planned.

Safety is well-understood

and the experiments are well-proposed.

When you look at your DNA,

that's the ultimate introspection.

Like, what can we change there?

What does that mean for me to change my DNA?

What does that mean for me as a human being?

When scientists first discovered CRISPR,

it was used in bacteria to cut DNA.

But now, what you can imagine

is if you want to engineer

any piece of DNA inside humans,

all you have to do is you have to know

the RNA that matches the DNA

and then you could go in there and cut it.

We're gonna change one base of DNA.

And that one single base of DNA that we change,

that's all it takes to change the function

of a whole organism.

One single base of DNA.

[Woman] Three, two, one. Cheese. [clapping]

Thank you.

[Alex Perlman] A couple of the events that have transpired

since I started reporting on biohackers,

the first major one was Josiah

on Facebook using CRISPR on himself.

And I was just like, "Whoa."

This will modify my muscle genes

to give me bigger muscles.

[Jane Metcalfe] Josiah is a committed bio punk.

He injected himself with a plasmid

containing a CRISPR'd myostatin knockout

just to see what would happen.

[typing]

[Josiah Zayner] Ooh. Hurts a lot more going in.

All right, there we go.

[laughing and clapping]

[Alex Pearlman] This is what people were really afraid of,

was like, "What if, because CRISPR is so easy to use,

people just start using it on themselves?"

And then it was like, "Well, there it is.

People are gonna use it on themselves."

The question isn't about safety necessarily.

The question I think is more about human lives.

There are so many people

who are suffering and dying right now

because they can't get the medical treatments

that they need, because regulation, the FDA.

[Mac Davis] It's already possible to contract out genes

to be made for you, and you can put them in your body.

It's just the way it is.

And, uh, it's gonna take some time

for people to understand that.

[glass clinking]

[Walter Patterson] In the same way that man found

the power within an atom,

he will start to change himself.

He will start to rid himself of the sad situations

we have all been accustomed to within this life.

Disease, sickness, feebleness, and old age.

These are all things that are biological issues.

[Gabriel Licina] The fairy tale of becoming a better person,

that's the biohacking thing.

You're better, faster, stronger.

[reverberating sound]

Right?

We want it. We want that thing.

It doesn't mean that we're opportunistic

for trying to not be miserable.

Desperate animals do desperate shit.

[Tristan Roberts] I think we really can't wait

for the established players

who are making huge amounts of money

from treating HIV

to develop an actual cure for HIV.

[traffic sounds]

[traffic sounds]

I'm Tristan Roberts.

I was a junior in college

when I tested positive for HIV.

Conventional medication for HIV

will run you around $20,000 per year

in the United States,

which just pretty much means that you're

beholden to someone to pay for your stuff,

whether it be having to stick with your employer,

being terrified of leaving.

They've got you by the balls.

It breeds compliance with those systems.

And it further perpetuates the problem.

The end goal is to make this stuff affordable,

where you can buy this for a few dollars

rather than thousands of dollars,

and have it be treated once,

and be good for six months, rather than a few days.

[Aaron Traywick] What's up, man?

Nice to meet you in person. Hey.

- Hey, Aaron. - How are you?

- [inaudible] - Traffic was terrible.

[Tristan] The person who connected me with Aaron

knew that he was working on some sort of HIV gene therapy.

He knew that I had HIV, and that I wasn't on medication,

and that my risk tolerance is a bit higher

than most of the population.

He spoke of the success he had had

with the fertility treatment, Inovium.

[Aaron Traywick] Women are constantly being told

that they're running out of time to give birth

with their own eggs.

But realistically and scientifically,

that's just not the case.

Why look to donor embryos

when we can use your own genetic material

to help you give birth with your own children?

[Tristan Roberts] What really blew my mind was that

some of them were even post-menopausal,

and they were able to conceive of children.

And I was just fascinated by people

who were, like, not stuck to the status quo.

Aaron didn't ask why, he asked why not.

So I was like,

"Yeah, this guy is like actually onto, like, something."

Tristan Roberts: Do you have a car?

Aaron Traywick: I do Uber.

[indistinct chatter]

[Tristan] We had a really good walk and talk.

And I agreed that, you know,

if they were able to develop a gene therapy,

I would probably be down to test it out.

[Mac Davis] I met Tristan.

We really connected on our sense of spirituality,

our relationship with activism.

I had been trying to figure out solutions for society,

knowing that it was possible for more people

to receive an adequate standard of care.

Um, He told me,

"I've got a group of people who also had that idea.

Why don't you join our weekly discussion?"

And that was the Ascendance group.

[Aaron Traywick] A lot of our team branched off

to form this company, Ascendance Biomedical,

so that we could tackle breakthrough treatments

that we felt we could bring to market,

and to the individual who wanted them,

in a much more expeditious way

than the standard FDA clinical trial processes.

[Mac Davis] More than anything,

I think I wanted to see the HIV therapy happen.

I talked to Aaron on the phone about what the plan was,

and he sounded very committed, very motivated,

very visionary in terms of where he saw the project going.

If I have HIV,

and I go and I get tested on a weekly basis for HIV,

and I'm taking HAART, antiretrovirals,

the common treatment for HIV,

the insurance provider can look at my blood test data

and they can say, "Okay, the HIV level,

the HIV's still there, but it's at a manageable level."

And we can see that

if the person gets off the antiretrovirals,

it'll go back up.

So the government will keep paying the company,

the insurance providers will keep paying the company,

to keep the patient sick.

And there is no incentivization structure

set up for cures.

[Walter Patterson] If we start out with something,

I'm just going to show you, just a small,

and this is just a small vial of the N6, um, you know, sample.

[Tristan Roberts] There's an antibody called N6,

which has been studied by the National Institute of Health.

It destroys most HIV.

Like 98.5% of all strains of HIV are destroyed.

[Mac Davis] It was November of 2016 that the NIH published

the discovery of finding a human that had the most effective,

broadly neutralizing antibody,

or naturally-derived immunity to HIV.

And not only did they find this person,

but they actually identified exactly what gene he had

that allowed him to do that.

Because of that, what we can do is we can take that gene,

or that information that's necessary for defeating HIV,

and put it into another person.

In the circulatory system, you have the little guard cells.

They kill baddies, like foreign invaders,

and these are called white blood cells.

Now, the virus HIV attacks these white blood cells.

And so eventually over time,

this causes the thing called AIDS.

Well, if we inject a minicircle

with the special transfection agent,

a magical thing starts to happen.

The DNA begins to produce N6.

And N6 will bind to 97% to 98% of the HIV viruses.

The hope is to kill off the viral load,

and thereby eventually allowing

normal function to return, as the white blood cells

now are able to go without getting killed off.

[typing]

[Gabriel Licina] Tristan sends me this paper.

He's like, "Hey, does this research seem legit?

I need a science person to look at this."

And I was, "What's up?"

He's like, "Oh, top-secret project."

It's like, "Cool, top-secret project, that's fine."

And I was like, "Yeah, this is pretty legit."

[Mac Davis] What we did as a team

was developed a delivery mechanism

for adding that gene to a persons body.

[dogs barking]

[dogs barking]

[David Ishee] N6 was built on my system.

I developed a vector and a protocol for follistatin.

And I developed it in such a way

that it could be applied to different things.

So if you wanted to pull out follistatin

and put in the N6 antibody, you can do that.

I forced Ascendance to do a lot of careful testing.

Luckily, Aaron would listen to me.

So it was produced in a petri dish.

N6 was produced by the vector,

uh, and then tested that it binds HIV.

[Tristan Roberts] I got just a picture of some test tubes

from David Ishee.

No, no caption, it's just, just test tubes.

And that was his way of letting me know that,

you know, it's ready.

[Interviewer] You excited?

[Tristan Roberts] Um, it's been,

I've been waiting for this for like six months.

So yeah, I'm pretty ready.

Live from Washington, D.C.,

the world's first patient zero testing of an HIV cure,

using gene therapy technology.

Fill this sucker. There we go.

[David Ishee] I tested everything

and I prepped everything that he used.

We had a long conversation and I tried to make it clear

what the potential risks were.

[Aaron Traywick] So you insert the needle from the side.

Okay, where it's nice and floofy.

[Aaron] Mm-hmm.

And then once you're, once you're in there,

you can let go of the skin. Right?

So you got to pull.

[Mac Davis] Pinch and pull.

[Tristan Roberts] Kinda right there.

[Mac Davis] Yeah anywhere in there

[Aaron Traywick] We do not advise that anyone

watching this video do what is about to be done here.

Um, these compounds are not for human consumption.

They are for research purposes only.

Tristan Roberts is completely within his rights,

according to the FDA, and the rule of law in this nation,

to self-experiment in any way

that he deems medically appropriate.

[Tristan] So I want to dedicate this

to all the people who have died

while not being able to access treatment,

even though those treatments were available.

[Interviewer] How are you feeling?

Pretty jazzed. [laughs]

[all laughing]

[Aaron Traywick] We're just gonna have to show the world

what radical gene therapy technology can do

to help people take the health of their lives

into their own hands.

The N6 will be the frontline treatment for curing AIDS,

and for ending AIDS.

suspenseful music

[Michael Henderson] I put him on a pedestal.

I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing,

here's a guy who's, like,

using their bodies as a laboratory."

Tristan's name would come up in conversations all the time.

We watched Dallas Buyers Club.

You know, there were allusions

to the HIV positive community

that were seeking alternative treatments

to find a cure, change their lives.

[Tristan Roberts] Yes, it, yeah, it was just an hour ago.

Um, I feel a good sense of relief.

Like, there was a lot of build-up.

This has been, like,

in planning for, like, uh, six, six months,

when I first heard that this was even a possibility.

And it's sometimes hard to believe that it's real.

Everybody I've met that this has been explained to

told me, "That was really courageous."

And Tristan is a little bit of a hero in their eyes.

He was taking responsibility for his illness,

not just letting a doctor handle it, or the government,

or a pharmaceutical company.

Him injecting himself

I see as a statement of patient empowerment,

and of human empowerment.

[Tristan Roberts] There was a wide range of reactions

to that initial injection.

There was definitely a fair amount of criticism,

and I don't think most of it was warranted.

But at the same time, people who are established

in the existing biomedical paradigm

are, of course, going to support the system

that butters their bread.

So, nothing too surprising.

[indistinct chatter]

[David Sun Kong] The question that I think

has been on a lot of people's minds

which connects to the New York Times article,

the quote from you in the article was,

if they're willing to inject themselves with hormones

to make them, their muscles bigger, you can imagine

they'd be willing to test more powerful things.

Anyone who does synthetic biology

should be under surveillance,

and anyone who does it without a license should be suspect.

Yeah.

Again, I wasn't trying to win a popularity contest.

That was aimed at academia.

I think the academics

are the most dangerous part of our society.

[general laughter]

[George Church] Yay.

[Woman] Yes. Disgruntled post-docs. [laughs]

[general laughter]

[George Church] You can't really protect yourself

by pushing down the knowledge.

You can't hide the knowledge.

[laughing]

We have this little problem

called intellectual property law.

[George Church] What you need to do is to have

as large a fraction of the population as possible

watching out for people

that are talking or doing something

that they think is questionable.

If you see something, say something.

We need to create that culture of surveillance.

[George Church] It is technically illegal

to experiment on anybody, including yourself.

In practice, it's rarely enforced

unless you're selling the drug and labeling it,

This will add years to your life.

I think there's risks at all levels,

whether it's an individual, whether it's a small team,

whether it's in a garage,

or whether it's in a government facility

that's super secure.

That whole spectrum could produce a bio-weapon.

And partly, it's more dangerous than

nuclear weapons because

it's so much easier and cheaper.

[Edward You] The Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate

came into fruition after the 9/11 attacks.

A month after that horrible event,

we were actually hit with then the Anthrax mailings.

And our primary mission is one of prevention.

So, how do we prevent

not only another 9/11 from happening again,

but in particular, how do you stop an adversary

or someone acquiring, developing, or actually using

a weapon of mass destruction?

I oversee programs looking at biosecurity,

and really trying to ensure and prevent

the misuse or exploitation of biology.

[audience applauding]

[Man] Ed, come here for a second.

Cross your arms, look serious.

Edward You: All right

[Man] What do you think? Yes? Yes.

[audience applauding]

So why the FBI? Why are we here today?

WMD Coordinators are special agents.

These are men and women that are trained in chemical,

biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive matters.

There's at least one of these individuals stationed

in each of our 56 field offices across the U.S.

From the FBI's standpoint, we look at biology,

and even the biohacker community,

as very important areas of innovation,

of new applications.

And with that, we want to make sure

that we protect that.

We are meeting our mission

and helping the biohacker community

do their part in protecting science

and safeguarding it.

I want you all to think about this for a second.

So what happens if you're a professor

or you're a student working in a laboratory,

and you observe and see something

that just isn't right?

Now you have somebody within the FBI.

You're not calling big FBI, but you're calling,

"Hey Josh. Not for nothing, but I saw this.

What do you, what's your take? "

So, it absolutely is a two-way street.

What we've actually helped foster

is a neighborhood watch mentality.

Because if you think about how the community is growing,

who's best-positioned to identify

what's going on in their own community,

but the, the members of the community themselves.

suspenseful music

suspenseful music

[Patti Zettler] Hey. Hi. [laughs]

[Tristan Roberts] Hey.

[Patti Zettler] In general, FDA's authority

and institutional interests

lie in addressing public health risks.

[indistinct chatter]

One question I had

when I read about his self-injection is

"What's the relationship between Tristan

and Ascendance Bio?"

When I read more about what Tristan had done, I wondered,

"Is this someone who is

engaging in true self-experimentation,

"I've made this thing for myself

and I want to see what it does to my body."

or is there some tie

to commercialization or distribution?

The FDA made an announcement

about the self-administration of gene therapies.

Any use of gene therapies in humans

are subject to FDA jurisdiction,

and the sale of such products

for editing the genes of humans

is prohibited without FDA approval.

Tristan seems to have strongly-held beliefs

that are driving his decisions.

This is my data, this is my identity.

I'm saying that this worked for me personally.

And my concerns about

people taking ownership over their health-

[Patti Zettler] One thing that worries me is

just because something's dressed up in the terms of

patient empowerment or consumer empowerment,

and self-experimentation,

does not mean that's not what it is,

and does not mean there's not

a commercial interest behind it.

[Aaron Traywick] We're not concerned about the FDA.

What we're concerned about is

the FDA not moving in on the areas

where it should have moved in decades ago.

Because it's such an easy win for them,

and, and such an easy win for Americans.

- How are you doing? - Doing all right.

[indistinct chatter]

[Aaron Traywick] We just want people to have the opportunity

to have access to research compounds that they can use

for self-guided and self-directed research.

[Doctor] Deep breath. That's it.

[ Aaron Traywick] What we saw initially with Tristan

was a very strong immune response

for his CD4 and CD8 levels.

A stronger response indicative of

positive immune health than he had ever before seen

in the course of his experience with HIV.

[indistinct chatter]

[Tristan Roberts] As an activist,

it's like I'm pushing the envelope.

Why aren't we doing this, you know?

If, if it does end up working, then to some degree

like, it would validate this entire notion

that we should have been doing this

for the last two decades.

There's, it's inexcusable that we've let people suffer

from so many different diseases.

[water bubbling]

[Aaron Traywick] The vaccine itself is the first application

of an open access platform for gene therapy delivery

that we have created.

Each of our platforms can be characterized,

if not open source, open access.

We have our infectious disease platform,

of which HIV is the first application.

And we have our genetically-programmed

nanorobotic platform,

of which the herpes vaccine is the first application.

So, the plan is for us to test out the herpes vaccine

and to confirm that it is safe and effective

for use as a vaccination against herpes.

[train wheels squealing]

electronic music

[bike tires whirring]

[Gabriel Licina] So, every person

that was working for Ascendance

had, like, a different thing

that they were passionate about.

And then it got kind of sucked under the

Ascendance magic money fountain.

And so Andreas was very passionate about

creating a vaccine against herpes.

[Andreas Stuermer] I read a lot about herpes,

how it causes side effects

that most people don't know.

Like 90% of the age-related blindness, spine disease,

it even is involved in Alzheimer's.

It just seems like a very scary virus.

My goal was basically

just stopping myself from getting it.

[Tristan Roberts] [laughing] We're debating

whether we want to do this

[Gabriel Licina] Yeah I know, right?

- [Tristan] Ugh. - [Gabriel] Uh, door. Door.

[door squeaking closed]

Gabriel Licina: So, right now, we're about

this far down on our flow, flow chart

of working on the, the herpes, uh, prophylactic.

[Andreas Stuermer] I talked to lots of people,

and that guy was referring me to Ascendance,

he said, "You know, you have this project,

they have the resources, they have the money,

so they could fund you.

So between all these things, then you feel confident

to then move to, like, a stage one clinical study with us.

Andreas Stuermer: First you have to test it out,

and then you modify the protocol,

you see if it works better, test it.

Yeah, do it, see how it fucks up. One step at a time, dude.

[Gabriel Licina] Biology is really small.

So if you say I totally have a thing and then

you hold up a vial nobody can really look at that

unless somebody else tests it.

[Andreas Stuermer] I've always been very supportive

in giving people access to stuff.

But it has to be very honest.

[indistinct chatter]

This is a very experimental thing,

and not safe or anything.

All right.

[airplane engine whirring]

electronic music

[Gabriel Licina] It was so not ready.

We were in the beginning

of second party verification.

So a month before the BDYHAX conference, I said,

"Look Aaron, we might have something worth testing,

but don't make a thing out of it.

We could test it maybe in the hotel room

with a couple of friends."

And what does he do?

He fucking throws a huge chunk of cash

and gets his name on the banner

and sponsors part of the conference.

Tune in on Sunday

for the first, uh, testing of the, uh, herpes live vaccine,

3:30 p.m., don't miss it.

[Adam Traywick] If you have herpes,

you should be watching this,

'cause this vaccine is just as applicable as a cure

as it is for a vaccine.

[Gabriel Licina] He's talking about

how he's going to do a live test of this thing on stage.

And I'm "Dude, Andreas doesn't want to do this thing."

[chatter]

[Andreas] Yeah it was really a big surprise for us.

He said I've got it fixed, don't worry about it.

And you know, like he's the boss.

[audience clapping and cheering]

Thank you.

[applause]

Thank you so much for joining us today.

So, we are Ascendance Biomedical.

Uh, my name is Aaron Traywick, CEO,

Andreas Stuermer, lead researcher,

Machiavelli Davis, production specialist,

uh, Walter Patterson, production specialist

and Gabriel Licina, laboratory manager.

This will be, uh, you know, one of the few live testings

in the world of gene therapy technologies.

The most important thing to know about this

is that this is just the first application

of an open access gene therapy delivery system.

Our genetically-programmed nanorobotic technology

allows the gene-thetic immunity to bind-

[Gabriel Licina] He started talking about nano bots

and then the next step is curing cancer.

Again, pave the way for our work in cancer,

which will be the massive breakthroughs

that we really wanna see.

So, without further ado, I'll be taking off my pants.

[audience laughs]

Intramuscular injection

is how this has to be performed.

[Gabriel Licina] I should have just walked away.

But nobody else knew how to handle the materials,

and it was happening one way or another.

[Aaron] Luckily I have herpes.

I didn't get this from my momma.

[quiet laughter]

[Gabriel] At that point, I'm trying to mitigate stupid.

But the alternative was somebody not knowing

how to handle the materials,

also potentially making it more stupid.

[Aaron] Good to go?

[Gabriel] So, there's only, like 20 micrograms in there.

So, it's like really, really freaking small.

So don't, like, bump it.

[Aaron] Yeah don't worry. I'm a pro.

tense music

[quite audience chatter]

[Mac Davis] I think it's all the way down here.

tense music

Yeah, yeah. It's down.

Yeah, that was it.

[Gabriel Licina] It's just such a small amount

Huh.

[Mac] 20 micrograms.

[Gabriel] 20 micrograms, dude. It's like nothing.

[Mac] Aaron's performance kind of exemplified

a lot of things that

we as a community agreed not to do.

It's very clear to people

who have worked in science for a long time

that even if a project seems like it's almost done,

sometimes it takes another couple years.

Wow, science! Very exciting, people.

[audience applauding]

[tense music]

[Alex Pearlman] When Aaron injected himself

on stage at BDYHAX, I was like

"This is not good. "

This was all of a sudden a bad actor

within the community

who performed bad science, in a terrible way,

that was sensationalist and irresponsible.

And I think all of a sudden, a bunch of heads turned.

[Gabriel Licina] It was all showmanship.

In fact, he sent a text to Andreas after the injection,

going "What did I just inject myself with?"

[Tristan Roberts] It was pretty clear that he didn't know

what he was putting into his body.

Informed consent wasn't there.

And I think that's a crucial part of self-experimentation,

is like, at the very least you need to know what,

what you're putting into your body.

[Josiah Zayner] Literally, as far as I know,

the injection either didn't have anything in it,

it was basically just water,

or the amount of DNA that he injected was just so minute

and small that there wouldn't have been any effect

or anything happen anyway.

There's a little drop. See the drop?

[Andreas Stuermer] Yeah, you never get everything out of it.

[Josiah] You ask any one of those guys who were involved,

all the ones on-stage with him-

All right, well you already clapped, so.

And we're done here, everybody go home.

[Josiah Zayner] You ask 'em,

[indistinct chatter]

every single one of them will give a different answer.

Like, how is this gonna contribute to science in any way

when you guys don't even know what he injected himself with?

Aaron: Next week, tune in Saturday.

We'll be filming live the, uh, phase two injection

of the HIV therapy phase two.

This will be a 250 to 500 times higher potency

than the initial safety test.

Um, and following this, we will be headed to Venezuela,

where we will be able to deliver this treatment

to individuals who are dying currently of AIDS and HIV.

[Dave Lee] This is Aaron Traywick.

Disturbingly, he told us he plans to bring his drugs

to AIDS patients in Venezuela.

All we can do is we can say to these people

we know that you don't have access to these medications.

You know these people are desperate.

You know these people are poor.

And so you say,

"Okay, these are the ideal people for us to try

our untested, unregulated, potentially unsafe drug."

There is no reason to believe that it isn't safe.

Obviously that-

[Dave Lee] There's no reason to believe that it is.

Just because they're ill, just because they're dying,

doesn't make them guinea pigs for your-

We're not talking about them as guinea pigs.

You can't even test.

There's not even reagents in that country

to be able to test whether or not the treatment works.

All we know is if it works, they don't die.

[insect noises]

[snakes jaw cracking]

[Tristan Roberts] Aaron had set a deadline

of producing the second version

of the HIV gene therapy

for February in 2018.

And the idea was that we would come together,

do another injection, produce it for a video.

So he had invited all these different

documentary crews there,

at the same time

with the hope that we would be

testing out the next version.

So not only was it not ready,

but we were also dealing with

this organizational meltdown at the same time.

So it was definitely a media trash fire.

pulsing music

[Tristan] One of the main things I wanted to discuss face to face

when we had most of the team together in Jacksonville

was to nail down some policies

about open source and transparency.

[Tristan] Gabriel was also really concerned

about Aaron's use of the word "cure".

We need to be very careful about, like,

what we're calling these things.

[indistinct chatter]

We set the deadline of:

If you don't talk to us by the time

when the second injection is supposed to happen,

then we're going to have a livestream

and gonna discuss our dirty laundry.

[Interviewer] The night before Tristan Roberts

was supposed to inject himself

with the second round of HIV therapy,

we met up with the

Ascendance Biomedical crew for dinner.

[Interviewer] It's like you want to make the thing

so that everyone owns it and you want to own the thing.

No, I want to make the thing

so that everybody can benefit from it.

Whatever gets it to the most people as quickly as possible

and actually alleviate...

Well you know the best way to get it to a lot of people?

Give it away for free.

And I don't think we've ever seen that open source

has been able to do that over traditional marketing-

[Gabriel Licina] Oh wow, really?

Do you want to talk about Linux or-

If you give everyone in the entire world

access to everything that you're doing,

then you leave the door wide open

for unsavory and potentially negative players

to take that technology

and do things that can hurt themselves,

and that can hurt other people,

but ultimately that can hurt the field.

I personally was, like, really concerned about, uh,

Aaron's commitment to being open source.

I was working on the website and I said,

"All right, well, we need to say

at what point does it become open source?"

And he told me, and I quote,

Open source appears to be an effective marketing strategy.

And that was when I was just like, "Oh god, like, what?

This guy is just, just, just making shit up."

Let's say that you,

let's say that your treatment works, right, for you.

[Tristan] Mm-hmm

Who then has control over that?

Well, ultimately, it depends on the clinical development

and how were able to partner with nonprofits,

NGOs, and hospital networks around the world.

He's trying to say he does.

The only thing that Im saying here is that, um,

it requires a lot of different partnerships

outside of our group. And so...

[Gabriel Licina] [laughs]

[Aaron] Are you going to be able to distribute it?

Are you going to be the one who negotiates

with the governments and the embassies and makes sure

that they can actually go into the countries?

[Gabriel Licina] I've done that before. I, I've done that.

But you are assuming executive control.

I've not heard any offers to get involved in those processes

by anyone else.

[Gabriel] Just fun story. Um, I'll just not do lab work.

We're working through it.

He's like, "We're working things out."

He stands up and he looks at his phone

and then he just walks away from the table.

Aaron did not really realize that we're anarchists

and we don't really take kindly to

[laughs] that sort of, like, action.

[Gabriel Licina] So the next day, I have to go to work.

And I suddenly get, like,

16 text messages from Justin at the lab.

They're like, "I'm outside, I'm stuck outside."

Because Aaron was the signer of the lease,

he showed up,

and then he had someone come with a power drill,

and change the locks on all the doors.

[Aaron Traywick] Gabriel, who served as our lab manager,

and Justin, who served as the laboratory technician,

have been effectively, um, kicked out of the lab space,

and the locks have been changed.

[Tristan Roberts] Yesterday,

when we're supposed to have the livestream,

he locks us out of the lab.

And this is like a microcosm of the bigger picture, right,

where, like, the people who are funding it

have the control over the locks, you know.

They can just, like, push the researchers physically out.

[Reporter] A big part of the

mission of Ascendance Biomedical

is showing that this kind of research science can happen

outside of the conventional institutional structures.

I have to be honest, what we've seen so far this week

doesn't inspire a ton of confidence.

Well, the only way that I ever

want the world to see us

is as a never-ending fight against these diseases.

[Tristan Roberts] That night, I asked him, like,

"Hey, do you need help?"

And I'm, like, helping him, like,

dump all of their personal stuff outside of the lab.

And he can tell that I'm trying to be too nice to them,

that I was taking their side.

And that's when we had this sort of like,

"And you Brutus?" moment, where he felt hurt.

And he's like,

"Oh, it's because you've been friends with Gabriel longer.

That's why you're taking his side."

And that was just infuriating, for him to not recognize that,

"No, I, I'm mad because you're not listening.

You're not working through these problems.

You're just ignoring them."

[ants skittering]

[traffic noises]

[Rita Traywick] I remember him telling me

something that he had a company starting,

but I couldn't understand what it was,

'cause, uh, it was just way over my head what he was,

what he was saying.

He asked me one time, he said, Well if you could live longer,

would you, would you want to do that?"

I said, "Well I don't know,

it all depended on what kind of health I was in.

Guess if I was in good health and could do things, yeah."

He always knew that he was adopted.

I mean he always heard the word adoption, so he,

he, we always told him.

I went to the hospital to get him,

it seemed like there was a nursery full of newborn babies,

and he was kind of in the middle by himself,

I guess because they knew we were going to be picking him up.

And he had this jet-black hair at the time,

so he looked like a little orangutan.

My mama always said he looked like a little old man.

Then the older he got, the younger looking he got, I guess.

Woman: Yeah.

But he was very, very smart, very smart.

[ Rita Traywick] He was in the gifted class.

He just liked to learn.

[Kristen Bennett] That's what set him apart,

that he was so smart that other kids would pick on that.

If you're smarter than everybody else,

they don't like it.

[Rita Traywick] He was bullied at school.

I would go up to the school and say,

"Hey, you know. Oh no, it's just a stage he's going through,

everything's okay, everything's okay."

But looking back, he definitely was bullied.

And I think that was one of the things that made him

a little bit different from everybody else.

He would come home from school and go in his room,

and read his books, read his comic books.

And you know, I'm sure he was depressed, too.

And it just kind of scared me that he,

that he wasn't going to make it.

I mean I just, I don't know,

I felt like something was gonna happen to him.

dissonant music

[Reporter] Edwina, I want to hear from you.

[Edwina Rogers] Okay.

Well, I don't know where the U.S. Government's

gonna get 150 billion dollars for, and I don't know, he's...

[fades out]

[Aaron Traywick] Edwina Rogers, a woman with over 25 years

of great experience as a professional lobbyist.

Through our connections, we set about finding

the chief luminaries in the field of aging research

and its underlying causes and conditions.

Edwina Rogers: Aaron did a good job

of trying to keep people separate.

He didn't want us to all to be in a room

talking to each other.

Because I think he knew if anybody talked to me,

I would warn them, I would tell them the truth.

Aaron and I reached out to all the scientists we could find

that were working on anything that extended the health span,

or extended life.

He was going around asking that they pay him on the side,

and that he could, you know, get them special access.

He had access to all my emails,

he had access to all the websites

for the three foundations.

He started taking airline tickets and invitations

that I would receive to give speeches.

He would say things like,

"Oh, no, she's not available,

but she asked that I go in her place."

suspenseful music

This was Aaron's bedroom.

He really liked the Vishnu here

because he thought that it was, uh, spiritual.

As we found out later, he was using drugs.

He had drugs in the house, uh, mainly cocaine.

People started to complain about how aggressive he was.

If we were meeting with a Congressional staffer that said,

"No, we're not interested in this project, you know,

we don't have any funds available for that,"

Uh, he would double down and start, you know, pressing them.

This is the email explaining to him

that because of all these problems,

that we have to demote him, and that we can no longer have him

in the position as a Chief Operating Officer.

And then immediately a week later,

we decided that we had to terminate him.

Because after he got demoted, then he called the chairman

and said that the problem is actually Edwina, it's not him.

And he needs to be able to, uh,

for people to see how brilliant he is,

and he needs to report directly to the board.

[Greg Neimeyer] I'm coming home and

Edwina is sitting in the car in the cul-de-sac for hours

because she doesn't want to come into the house,

because she doesn't want to be ambushed by Aaron,

and be here in the house alone with him.

Well at that point, it's like

no, no, no, this dog does not hunt.

We had to move him out of our house,

get him out of our lives.

It was unfortunate.

He clearly had many of the features of psychopathy,

a psychopath.

People were a mark, they were to be used.

He had the, the, the capacity for charisma

He could turn it on and be very, uh, disarming

and, uh, and winning, very apparently capable and genuine.

But beneath it was predation.

So, so, I do have uh, I did have serious concerns about his,

his mental health.

[Tristan Roberts] [in background] Yeah I heard

there was, uh, some issues.

[Tristan] We start shaking the tree and seeing what was there.

And that's when we started talking to the early investors.

And we found out that they had been promised equity.

And Aaron was sort of running a shell game,

where he was giving them equity in something worthless.

[indistinct chatter]

dissonant music

[Gabriel Licina] He totally offered me

a consulting contract, which is the same contract

that he offered David Ishee, which is the same contract

that he offered Mac, which is the same contract

that he offered Andreas

And every single one of them said 30% of the gross profits

from anything that you consult on.

And that's already four people,

and there were more people involved,

but 30% times four is more than 100%.

[Edwina Rogers] After we severed our ties,

he was still going to everybody

that I had introduced him to,

and he wasn't telling them what had happened.

For example, there was a scientist in Greece

that had come up with some therapy

to rejuvenate women's ovaries, so that they could possibly

have a child, if they had already gone into menopause.

And so he went back to that scientist and said,

"Let me do your marketing and, you know,

we can do some clinical trials, and we'll charge $5000."

But he was keeping the $5000, you know, himself,

and he was using that, uh, to live on.

It was a very clear pattern.

I had seen Aaron do this so many times to different people,

including, you know, back to my girlfriend

who had breast cancer, who was wealthy.

Give me money and I'll, I'll try to get you,

you know, this treatment.

[Tristan Roberts] I mean, it's one thing to, like,

take investor money uh, and run off with it.

But what was really saddening was taking people

who have illnesses, their money, you know.

That is... [exacerbated sigh]

To some degree, it's like,

yeah, he would try to, like, fund something,

but he didn't have the bandwidth,

the lab didn't have the bandwidth to actually be able

to, like, deliver anything in a lot of these cases.

So, I think that was scamming, you know,

there's no way around it.

[Aaron Traywick] The question of false hope?

Well, that's just another way of saying

the experiment isn't complete yet.

And we don't know if it worked or not.

And of course we don't,

'cause that's why we do experiments.

[Josiah Zayner] I said that nobody at his company

was, like, a professional scientist

that he was working with.

He said that was a lie, and all this stuff.

And I'm like, "Look man, I know everybody you work with.

I've talked to them all.

I know everybody who did everything, like..." [laughs]

Aaron was trying to sue me.

I was the only individual named in the suit,

me and Gizmodo Media Corporation,

for $250 Million for libel.

And it says stuff like, "Mr. Zayner, obviously jealous,

said these things about me

in an interview with The Atlantic and on Facebook."

That his company wasn't

working with legitimate scientists

or medical doctors, which they should.

It was eventually dismissed

because he filed in federal court,

and there was a bunch of legal things

that he didn't under... understand when he filed,

that the judge just threw it out because of.

[Mac Davis] I saw what was happening.

And I figured Aaron's a strong guy,

and he is super committed to making it through anything.

He had pushed away most of his friends,

uh, for the sake of being

completely dedicated to this business venture.

And he didn't talk to his family very much.

And the media portrayal of him,

uh, although he was a very proud person naturally,

uh, and very confident,

it really destroyed him on the inside.

[traffic noise]

dissonant music

[water dripping]

[Reporter] Aaron Traywick,

the CEO of the biohacking company Ascendance Biomedical,

was found dead Sunday

floating in a sensory deprivation tank

in a meditation spa in Washington, D.C.

Traywick and his company

developed experimental gene therapies

that people tested on themselves,

without approval from the FDA.

[water bubbling]

[Melanie Traywick Feith] They actually came to my house,

the police did.

I just remember just feeling so panicky inside,

like, oh my gosh, but I never dreamed it was gonna be that.

That he was dead.

Just I'm like, "What?" You know, like..

[inhales sharply] I just was...

wasn't expecting that at all,

just you know. It was just really bad.

[Tristan Roberts] I was walking my dogs

out behind my family's house when I heard of Aaron's death.

I got a text message from someone asking,

"Why is Andreas saying that Aaron is dead?"

And I hadn't heard anything at that point.

A lot of us were just shocked, you know.

I mean he's, like, the same age as me.

So that rattles your own mortality on some degree.

At the same time,

I think there was like a confluence of factors

I think he definitely was depressed.

As a mutual friend put it,

"We've all been watching Aaron drown for the past few months."

And I was like, "Uh, yeah, it's kind of, kind of true."

[Josiah Zayner] The news spread, you know.

Most biohackers are a decentralized community

on social media.

And you know, Facebook, there's all the, and internet,

there's all these conspiracy theories,

some people linking it to his injection,

which is not possible at all.

He did the injection, like, three months ago.

If he was gonna have an immune reaction,

it would have happened days or weeks after,

not three months later.

[Michael Laufer] He had been cut off, or cut himself off

from contact with everybody for the last four weeks.

And if it was just that what he was trying to do didn't work,

and he was so depressed, that killed him,

that's, that's horrific.

On the other far side of the spectrum,

some people think it was a hit.

That's similarly scary and depressing.

He was a very controversial figure, in a lot of ways.

So the fact that he wound up dead,

especially after the collapse of Ascendance Biomedical

under really unfortunate circumstances,

seemed strangely timed.

[water lapping]

[Mac Davis] Part of me didn't believe it.

Part of me wondered if he had been murdered.

Part of me wondered if he had faked his death and escaped.

[Tristan Roberts] There was definitely

a lot of media attention following Aaron's death.

I mean it was pretty much, like,

straight out of a Law & Order episode.

This notable figure dies under mysterious circumstances.

And the more digging you do, the more you realize

that a lot of people had motive behind it,

not just big pharma, but also, like, all the biohackers

that he had, like, misused their, like, reputations

in order for his own personal gain.

And then, but ultimately, it's... it's the mystery.

soft music

[Rita Traywick] Melanie and I went to D.C.

and we went in this place.

I think it was just an accident.

I mean we really don't know.

And it's out there that he had used ketamine

but they said that there wasn't enough in his system

for him to have overdosed on it.

Somebody had said that he had a bruise on his forehead.

And, uh, we kinda think maybe he slipped

and fell back into the floatation spa.

Uh, I don't know.

We saw him April, April 14th.

[sighs]

emotional music

He had his suitcase with him.

He was going to the airport

when he was leaving from Memphis,

and he told his daddy, he said.

"Everything I own is in this suitcase."

[sniffling]

He would just pick up that suitcase and go.

[giggling and sniffling]

[Kristen Bennett] He was my uncle, but growing up,

we were really like brother and sister.

Um, like, that's most of my childhood, is, um, like,

me and him playing outside and, um,

just me and him doing stuff.

[emotional music]

I just can't believe he's gone, really.

[bird calling]

[Mac Davis] I didn't know when he died

that at the time I was Aaron's best friend.

Over time, I ended up being the person

that he talked to the most.

and going to his funeral, meeting his family,

giving his eulogy, and being inducted into the family

was a really, uh, precious experience

that I was not expecting.

[flowing water]

[door opening]

[Gabriel Licina] A day after Aaron violated the lease,

I came up to the landlord, I'm like,

"Hey man, hear you have a unit that needs to be filled."

So we just, like, stepped right back into that same building.

And we picked up the pieces.

Ascendance didn't have intellectual property

on anything.

So all the people who did stuff

got together and they were like,

"Well, that was dumb. Let's, uh, keep doing our stuff now."

[seabirds calling]

[water crashing]

[Gabriel] We're working on plastic-eating fungus,

and using directed evolution to make it so that the fungus

can live in the ocean, so that it can eat ocean plastic,

like the Pacific Garbage Patch.

[water splashing]

So this is the ocean water that we inoculated with Styrofoam,

and the fungus.

It's, like, cloudy, it's totally growing,

and it's aggressive, which is good.

Uh, we want it aggressive.

We have aggressive problems to deal with.

[water lapping]

We're also working on a project

for accelerating tree growth,

so that trees, and actually anything with a cell wall,

can grow twice as big, twice as fast.

It's like being punk rock.

Staggering around with needles

and taking your pants off on stage.

Like you can only get away with that shit

when you're a kid.

At some point, everybody's gonna have to grow up.

It doesn't mean that we all need to become, like,

hardcore adherents of late stage capitalism,

uh, but, you know,

there is something to be said

for not being ridiculous all the fucking time,

and, you know,

trying to do something that matters.

[Tristan Roberts] We are in sunny Los Angeles.

Because after a year of going back to the drawing board,

the next version of the therapy is ready.

I'm pretty excited.

I'm definitely ready, but at the same time,

I feel a little bit more jaded

and wizened since last time.

How do we pivot?

How do we not just have this be a sad little note

in biohacking history?

[Tristan] After Aaron's departure,

there was some issue of like,

"How do we raise the funds for this?"

But, we've been able to secure what we need

to move forward.

[Walter Patterson] These two get combined.

This is the PI in 30 microliters.

This is the DNA at one microgram at 20 microliters.

There you go. Ooh, yeah perfect.

[Tristan Roberts] Now I'm testing out this cocktail

of these different substances.

And once we have that, then I think we're pretty set.

And we'll have to pursue clinical testing.

That's 144, um, microliters.

Yeah.

Right. The last one.

[Tristan] Oh, there we go.

[Mac Davis] I really wish Aaron was here to see

how far we've come,

because I know that's what he would want to see

more than anything.

If we can produce the cocktail,

and if it shows the results that we would expect,

then we would know that the work we were doing

ultimately mattered and paid off.

And it would be a functional vaccine for HIV.

[Mac Davis] Did it all get in there?

[Tristan Roberts] Yes.

[Mac] Awesome.

All in all, I don't think I'm gonna die from it,

so I'm all right.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it.

Sweet.

pulsing music

[Tristan Roberts] Throughout human history,

people have been either the victims

or the beneficiaries of their genes.

Those genes express and they create what you are.

So to be able to alter which genes you're expressing,

whether that be by removing some or adding to that,

totally changes the game.

It allows you to become something else that

be it more than what your... the lottery of life handed you.

pulsing electronic music

[Josiah Zayner] I don't plan to be a biohacker forever

and just be, like, poor, injecting myself with shit.

China is really interesting because the market is huge.

[trunk closing]

Maybe we'll have business here in ten years, five years.

Start slowly, move into the culture,

help develop biohacking as a thing in China.

[slurping]

[Josiah] If anything, Aaron challenged everybody.

Then people like me and other people

starting to think about, like,

"How can we do this safer and more effective?"

It's easy to look at Aaron and choose him as a scapegoat

and be like, "Oh man, he's, he's like the worst

of the biohacking community."

But in reality, his only fault

was that he called things a cure.

Otherwise, the stuff he was doing was no different

than most of the other people are doing,

and even probably far less harmful,

and some of these people are making millions of dollars.

I have a tattoo on my arm. It says,

Create something beautiful.

And we were gonna do all this stuff

because we just wanted to do beautiful things,

we just wanted to make beautiful things,

and we were gonna do it just for the discovery,

for our, our passion.

I think biohackers are way ahead of their time,

and I think they're pushing things

almost to a pace that's just crazy.

I'm sure we'll see a lot more people

eventually in the future injecting themselves,

and it actually being really, really successful.

[powerful music]

[Aaron Traywick] At its foundation, to me,

it appears as simply freedom, morphological freedom,

the freedom to be able to invent the technologies

that can enhance your life,

regardless of the circumstances you may have been born in,

or the genetics you are predisposed to.

Um, I mean ultimately that's, that's what it is,

is self-guided evolution, self-directed evolution.

And that is something that every individual

should have the right to have.

And if every individual has that right,

then the collective, like humanity as a whole, benefits.

And our, our culture, our world, our species

is all the better for it.

[Interviewer] Well thank you again

for taking the time to speak with me.

Aaron, stay safe and best of luck.

[Aaron] Absolutely. I couldn't agree more,

and, uh, I was glad to do it.

Thank you so very much for having me here.