 Hello hackers, biohackers, everybody, thank you so much for coming. My name is Michael Laufer, I'm Chief Spokesman for the Fourth East Vinegar Collective and I'm here to recruit you. Because we've done a lot of fun things, we've made a lot of great progress and a lot of different projects, but we still have things that need doing and we need more people. Oh, there I am. Alright. Everybody hear me okay now? Alright, I'll stop projecting them. Okay. So, to my mind, hacking as an ethos is an ethical issue. What it does is it takes what's possible and it uses that to leverage and do more than what's allowed for the greater good. So many things are possible when we move outside the boundaries of what's allowed and I think that's sort of the vibe here at DEF CON. So I want to thank the biohack village and DEF CON for having us, we're really honored to be here. And we want to talk specifically about health. This is what we work in. We're a global health organization, we're an anarchist collective. And the important thing to think about in terms of health is that it happens no matter what else is going on. As policy changes, as regimes change, as the landscape shifts, you still have to deal with your health. You know, you go to prison for 40 years, you come out, you're in prison during the revolution, after the revolution. If you don't have your health, you don't really have anything else. And not only does it deprive you of the capacity to live life, it really deprives you of engaging with life in a meaningful way. So, I hope some of you were at hope. Anybody go to hope and see us there? Thank you for coming across the country to see us again. We're not going to have a lot of overlap, hopefully. I'm hoping to talk about all the things I couldn't talk about at hope. That talk is online if you want to see it. If you have heard of us before, two years ago we were at hope. And I made kind of a stink because Martin Chacrelli was kind of in the news. Martin Chacrelli is CEO, or was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. And if you're not familiar, Daraprim is this anti-toxoplasmosis drug. Toxoplasmosis is a brain parasite. It's not a big deal for most of us. I think I have it. A lot of people have it. If you hang out with cats, you probably have it. If you have an impulsive nature, you probably have it. But if you have a compromised immune system in advanced stages of cancer, HIV, or if you're pregnant, it's very, very dangerous. And there's only one drug that's currently approved to treat it. The molecule in question is called pyromethamine and the brand name is Daraprim. Turing Pharmaceuticals has exclusive license on it and you take it for about a week and a half and you're done. And it was $13.50 a pill and then he changed the price to $750 a pill, to which a lot of people, myself included, took quite some exception. So it's not that hard to manufacture. I did it on stage and this photograph of me on the left is me throwing 200 milligram pills to the audience. So it's $750 for 50 grams and four times that's a $3,000 pill that I'm manufacturing for 25 cents. I'm throwing it to everybody. So then to continue the publicity stunt, I called him at this number. Unfortunately, this number no longer works because he's in Fort Dix because he just got seven years for insider trading or, you know, trade fraud. But if you do want to get in touch, whoops, I apologize, if you do want to get in touch, you can still write to him. Here, I did. He didn't, however, write back. I was really hoping that we'd be able to have an ongoing conversation. It didn't happen. But you know, his loss, I'm actually hoping to go to Fort Dix and see if he wants to chat some more. The big publicity splash that the collective had was when the EpiPen thing happened. We developed the EpiPencil, which was sort of a combination of off-the-shelf parts. You can build your own auto-injector for about $30. You can reload it for about $3. And we were feeling pretty good about ourselves because it seemed like a lot of people were getting a lot of good from this and we blew up on YouTube and then YouTube said, you're endangering the public. And I said, okay, if that's really what you think. So don't worry, this is still hosted. We have all the files on our website. It's now on the Internet Archive and the Alexandria Project. The ironic thing was is that after YouTube gave us the shaft, it turned out that Myland wasn't doing so good. So the FDA came down and said, don't build your own EpiPen. It's not safe. But then real EpiPens started to fail and they recalled something like 80,000 of them. And any time you walked into a pharmacy, it said, do you have EpiPens? Bring them back. They might fail. And they did a recall. And the dangerous thing is that because it's single use, you can't test it until it either works or it doesn't. The EpiPencil R version, you can test as many times as you want because it's reloadable and you can audit the entire process. And then on top of that, Myland dropped the ball. They were told to investigate and they didn't. And then on top of that, after that blew over and somehow it stopped being a problem, there was the shortage. You couldn't get them. Even if you were willing to pay $600 for a pair. And after all of that, and mind you, that was a year and a half ago. It was almost two years ago. The price still hasn't changed. And interestingly enough, the price of Deriprim also hasn't changed. You know, everybody got their sacrificial lamb. You know, Chacrally's rotting in Fort Dix. But Turing Pharmaceuticals is still raping people for their money. So in terms of the EpiPen thing, here's Heather Breusch, lying to Congress. Oh, do I have my phone? I do have my phone. Why is this important? Because I have this information. Now, this is a, should I call her? I'll just take a show of hands. Okay. Let's do it. So I called her a few weeks ago from Hope and I got her VoIP voicemail. You can't leave a message on her voicemail unless you have a passcode. But let's see. So four, one, two, seven, four, one. But little note, she was at home last night. Don't ask me how I know. Alright. So let's see. You guys here? It's important. We could chat about so many things. I have thoughts about you. So if anybody's really good at VoIP hacking, I think I'm gonna get this password thing again. Yeah, so I don't know. Yeah, I try that two weeks ago. It didn't work, but yeah. 5555 didn't work either. Anyway, anybody wants to crack that? Let me know and I'll try again. Anyway, that was fun. Sorry I didn't get to chat with her. So I have a secret and even my fellow collective members who are present don't know about this. But an old hacker tradition is spot the fed. Is there a fed in the audience? My friends would say probably. But there's somebody else in the audience from a different three letter organization. I was informed that there are two gentlemen from Glaxo Smith Klein who are present. Now why they're here is like such a mystery. But I have some theories that I'd like to share. A few years ago I wrote this expose about how Glaxo Smith Klein actually has the technology to more or less end the AIDS epidemic but probably won't. And from an, you know, an uncharitable perspective it's possible that they're here to sort of shake me down. But I'm hoping, I'm hoping that wherever those gentlemen are that the reason they're here instead is to say, you know, we kind of dig what you're doing kid. Let's have a drink. So wherever you are guys, let's hang out, right? Let's help each other. That said, this is the biggest deal that I talk about in general. The amount of technology and I think everybody here knows this is in general about technology. The amount of things that have been developed but aren't on the shelf is incredible. And this extends to health in an incredible, incredible way. All of the things that we could do but don't add up in these just frightening ways. And the Glaxo Smith Klein thing specifically, they have a new antiretroviral that they are trying to push through clinical trials. But it's something that with one injection can act as both a pre-exposure prophylaxis and also as an antiretroviral for people who are infected with HIV and is effective for four months at a time. This means that if you went into a community that had a high viral load you could dispense with the stigma of testing and say, we know some people have this and we don't care who. Everybody's going to line up, you're going to take your medicine. If you have HIV, this will keep you healthy. If you do not have it, you will not get it. And we'll be back next season to do this again. And within a generation you could essentially wipe it out. That said, and I don't want to make assumptions GSK people, but I have this feeling they're not going to be giving it away like that. But we could be. So how do you do this? How do you deal with the pharmaceutical crisis? The magic of pharmaceutical is that it's a molecule. It's chemistry. But there's this terrible cultural stigma against chemistry like oh you shouldn't do it at home, isn't it difficult? People should only be doing chemistry if they have letters after their name and have qualifications. Well I think we hackers have a different idea about things. That said, on top of that hackers work so well to try to destigmatize the frighteningness of technology so that people can have access. I mean in the 80s right, the culture was computers are scary. Oh god they're going to end the world and cause World War three and weirdness and now everybody's got one in their pocket and another on their lap and another back at home. Same thing about rapid prototyping. That was a niche thing until about eight years ago and now 3D printing is something we just throw around loosely. And in the cases of these things where technology has shifted and becomes something that was accepted, seems that there's a common thread. Two things. First, a touch of automation to take the things that are repetitive and easy to screw up. And then a good user interface so it seems friendly. You know, smiles at you. There are little pictures of folders instead of typing out a directory name. And so the question is can you do this with chemistry? And the answer is hell yes you can. This is an automated chemical reactor. These are two. And these are commercial. And you can buy them. Sorry no, you can't buy them. Why? Well they're prohibitively expensive, they're full of proprietary technology so if they break you can't fix them. Oh right and they won't sell them to you unless you're a lab. Not that there aren't work arounds for that. But if you look at these, they're not terribly sophisticated. What you're looking at is a jacketed reactor. The inner glass chamber is where the reaction happens. You can see there's a stir bar that comes down and keeps stirring. The outer jacket carries a fluid. The fluid is regulated temperature wise externally and keeps the reaction happening at a stable temperature. Very easy to do. Essentially a PID module. And then you have things that are injecting reagents at particular times. In the old days you just had a graduate student do it. Where you're like here, store this for 12 hours at 30 C and then when you're done with your book, you know, put this in and then do it again. But you know, some chemists came up with the idea that they could have better uses for their grad students. So they, you know, started having these produced. Now again, the difficult part is that you can't get them. But regulating temperature, stirring, injecting things at a particular time, how hard could it be? Not very. So how do we know? Well, you know, we have all of these technologies where we're hijacking all of that other stuff and saying, well, we can build this at home. And, you know, we did. So this was the very first alpha unit. This was super hacked together. I was, right, yeah. It's a Mason jar, okay, with tubing. That's a bicycle nipple to try and regulate pressure. And that's a T warmer on the side. Now, you can't do a whole lot with this. But this was a proof of concept that I built when I was living out of my VW bus. No breaking bad jokes, please. And, you know, I made aspirin with it. It was very, very simple. But as more and more people came on, it became more sophisticated. So again, this is the PID module. And these were like some lights that I set up to blink. It's user feedback, right? They blink. It means something's happening. So then we had a later alpha unit that was very hack and slash. We used an Arduino UNO, I think this was. Again, with blinking lights. But how do you put the other pieces together? Well, you have to inject reagents somehow. So there are these open source syringe pumps that were designed by a woman named Nieve Cuomo who lives in Spain. And so as you can see, these are 3D printed parts. These are the ones that she made. This I sort of put together out of garbage and somebody who was nice enough to print me some parts. This was an automated cassette retrieval system that I'd gotten out of an industrial dumpster. And we're fine. It's not great. But then, after we were at Hope the last time, we got a bunch of people who were much more sophisticated in software design, hardware design, putting these things together. So we got, sorry. So we shifted things a little bit. Here's me on the left. And you can see I'm holding one of the more recent generations of jacketed reactor. This is a Mason jar, within a Mason jar. And there's a 3D printed core that links them together. There are places where the fluid comes in and where the fluid is pumped out. And then there's a spot for the stir bar that comes to the center. And then separately in another Mason jar, there's the temperature regulation that happens. Then the next version we decided to move to the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is on the upper right. And you can see me holding the prototype breadboarded out there. And now, we're very pleased that we've managed to make the jump to actual circuitry. Here's the schematic. And here are the printed boards, which I think looks so cool. And I can say that because I didn't design this, right? I very much appreciate the members of the collective who did this work. And here's the other side. Here's the cutaway. And then we have a picture of it actually populated. So here you can see the switches, the power jack is on the left. There's a bank of relays on the right that control the things that require some power. On the flip side you can see the chips that drive the stepper motors and the little rail where the Raspberry Pi Zero drops in. And if you want to see it, it looks like this. So, who wants this one? All right. So I have a few. And to be on brand, I have them in these wonderful ziplock bags that look like mason jars. So, all right. So here, I'll first be a few out. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, sir. Okay. Who's, all right. Oh, sorry. Okay. I have a few more. I don't want to hurt anybody. But I have two more. Come up and chat with me after. We also have a workshop happening after that we'll all chat about. And I can give the last two out. All right. So, whoops. I just knocked the video out. I'm so sorry. There you go. Okay. Okay. Well, I can still talk about things. I'm not quite sure what I just hit. Somebody give me a hand? Okay. Cool. So I think I jumped ahead. No, that's all right. All right. So this is Von Hipple. Eric Von Hipple is sort of a godfather of user innovation and open sourcing. He invited me to MIT to come speak. And it seemed really friendly until he dragged me into a back room and said that he thought I was going to ruin the last 40 years of his work because people were going to recklessly utilize this and things were going to go wrong. And he likened it to the 3D printing world. If we had started by 3D printing guns then it would have been criminalized. And I was like, you know, if really the last 40 years of your work is threatened by me putting an idea forward. Go ahead. Yeah, it's fine. I'll just keep going. I was like, maybe you just need to get your act together, bro. Come on. I'm not that much of a threat. But in honor of that, we have a new reactor core that we are dubbing the Von Hipple. So this is our beta unit here. And you can see this, instead of being printed in three pieces and needing caps, it's all built together. You can actually screw the smaller jar on the top or on the bottom, drop this into the larger jar, screw it down, and it's ready to go. And look at how great this is. Again, I could admire it because it's not my work. The hardware team did a great job. So while this is coming back, who wants this one? So here's one. Whose favorite color is blue? And then I have a couple that are sort of semi prints so you can sort of see the interior and the base. So if people want to look at these later, I have them as well. So again, as this continues to boot. All right. So here, again, this is a new version of the syringe pump that can be printed entirely. You need almost zero parts for it. And so we continue to try to scale in two directions. One being for how can this go into sort of small scale production so somebody can grab our GitHub repo and maybe set up a shop and sell things because we don't sell things. But if somebody wanted to make kits, hi, anybody want to chat about that later? You can totally do it. And then on the flip side, if you're manufacturing everything yourself, it should be easy enough. So we have a file format that will drive things. And it's very simple. You can sort of watch it run here. And you can see it's fairly self-explanatory. You're basically timing. You're looking at when you're dumping the various syringe pumps and where you're keeping the temperature. There's a piece of user feedback. I'm not sure if I'm going to have time unfortunately to show you guys the user interface, but it's cool. It's really cute. And again, anybody who wants to come to the workshop after I can show you guys that. But the question always comes. Isn't the chemistry complicated? Aren't people going to make mistakes? Aren't there these scary stories of people who were manufacturing meth and gave people Parkinson's overnight? And the answer is, well, yeah. And that's where the hard part comes in. How do you design a reaction so it's robust? How do you make it so the errors are the margin for errors greater? And the answer is you do this with computational chemistry. So this is a screen shot from some proprietary technology to which you don't have access and I no longer have access. But this was a small startup called Comatica. And they had some very sophisticated machine learning stuff that was digging through the last five to seven hundred years of chemical literature to look at anything related to your reaction and build something within the parameters you wanted. And we said, oh, well, we'd like to make DeraPrem. This is how we made DeraPrem, you know, two years ago. And we said, okay, we'd like to do it in one step. And we, you know, we want to be able to do it with a huge margin of error. So if the temperature fluctuates or measurements are off, it doesn't matter. And this is actually a one step synthesis of DeraPrem that you can do. We didn't end up going with this one because one of the precursors is expensive. But we had them do it again. We got it down to two steps and with stuff that is commercially available and very, very cheap. So we tried to keep a relationship with Comatica, but there was this problem, which is they got acquired and Merck doesn't really like us. And I know this because they told me so. I did call them. And apparently my call has been escalated to the proper authorities, but it didn't come back. So again, another group I was hoping to have a live call with, which didn't fly. The big idea, though, here is that any of this, yeah? Okay. Hmm. All right, I'm going to have to accelerate a little bit here. The idea here, though, is that science is a human right. What is a human right? A human right? You have to explore that question. You ask what's human? There are two things that make us human. Human body and the human mind. Biohacking incarnate. If you can't explore intellectually and adjust your body as you see fit, and you're not free. So that said, we have a data science team and they set about trying to build a new version of comatica. So this is their data on the left, and this is our set of data so that the captions are switched. So this is, you can see the structure is the same, but we need access to their big database if we want to run this properly. Of course, it's very expensive and it's protected, but hackers to the rescue. These are QR codes for three dark net sites. Please take pictures like right now. These three places have this data. The data is password protected. Apparently a little bird told me that the password is very robust. If you are good at hacking tar ball password files, please crack this. If you are not good at cracking tar ball files, please save this data so it stays in the ecosystem. Everybody got the pictures? Yeah. Okay. And again, we have this ethical issue with which we deal. And the problem is that you have the medical industry disenfranchising you from access to things that you could do yourself, but you're not allowed because of the legality. This happened a couple weeks ago. A woman fell into the gap between a train and the platform and her femur was sticking out and she didn't ask for help. She begged people not to call an ambulance because she couldn't afford it. Something is very wrong. And there are a gazillion examples of this. You know, getting one stitch, the prices of any number of drugs skyrocketing, not being able to and in fact, I'm not even the hundredth person that come up with this idea. Hospitals are making their own drugs because they can't afford to buy them. Something's really amiss. So I want to talk quickly about orphan drugs. Orphan drugs fall into a particular category. I can tell anybody details who wants to know, but they get very, very expensive. This cures a bunch of cancers, but things don't work very well. Thank you. Oh, cool. I have more time than we thought. So this is Ketrude. It cures a particular type of cancer. The problem is it's extraordinarily expensive. However, like most drugs that are orphan drugs, they're biological derivatives. This is a Chinese hamster. I mean, not nationally, that's the species. But Chinese hamsters have ovaries that are really easy to grow things on. And this is how you, that's how Ketrude is made. Now, I want to stress this. The step for between making the biological material and creating the medicine is extraordinarily non-trivial. But something cool about when a drug is based on biological material. So here are the five most expensive drugs in the world. They're all orphan drugs. This means that fewer than, I think, 10,000 people in the world have them. And they fall under a whole host of laws that make it so that your patent can last for longer and, you know, you have zero price restrictions and on and on and on. Now, this is interesting. Glybera, it's a virus and it's harvested through army warm cells. Celeris is an antibody that is harvested through NS0 cells. Elipraise is an enzyme replacement as is naglizime. One's built using recombinant DNA methods and another one is just an engineered version of E. coli. And Synryze is a protein that you can actually pull out of human blood plasma. Now, I mention this specifically because we are in the biohacking village. And typically, when I come and give talks to biohackers, I have to sort of apologize and say, you know, I'm not really a biohacker. We don't really do biohacking in the collective until today. So what we're working to create is a way that people can have access to this. Now, if you recognize this fellow, this is George Church. I met him at MIT about a year ago and he was really, really cool. About six months later, he was quoted in New York Times saying this, which was really creepy and really disheartening. Now, to be fair, it seems like he was either misquoted, quoted out of context at the very least. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing he would say, but there are people who hold this opinion, even if it's not his. And to them, we have four words. So how do we get around this? How do we make it so that access is guaranteed? Well, we have an idea. The magic of biological material is that if you are set up to replicate and store it, if you get a small amount of it, then what you can do is make copies. You can store it. You can send it to people and they can make copies. And does this sound familiar? And given that these are the precursors for any number of medicines, why not do it? So we can have a distributed library of precursors for medicines and once biohackers get good enough at filtering things out, we eventually will have access to medicines for all. And never again pay for a service that would be dirt cheap if it weren't run by a bunch of profiteering glutton. So I and never again pay for a service that would be dirt cheap if it weren't run by a bunch of profiteering glutton. So how do you do this? So there are two pieces to this. One is actually distributing things. And another way is doing it in a way so that you can bypass a certain amount of anonymity and plausible deniability. Now this is being worked on. If you are a crypto person and you work on things like Tor and other anonymizers, there is a collective of hackers who's starting to build a structure that's going to allow us to be able to share things, a database of places that have what sort of biological material you might be looking for, and you will be able to set up a system of envelopes within envelopes. Again, sound familiar? And you will be able to be a node in the network where you either open it up and it's for you, or you open it up and it's another envelope and you just put it back in the mail and it goes somewhere else and you say, I don't know where it came from. And there are systems for making it so that you don't actually know exactly where it's going. Again, if you want to come up and hear details about this, there was a really great talk at Hope like four years ago about a way that you can put in a postal code and the machines will read it, but a human being won't know where it's going. And these priority mail envelopes, they slide inside each other really well. You know, they're made of Tyvek, so it's cool. So there are basically four types of biological material. There are million cells, there's bacteria, you have plants and you have fungus. And again, you can copy these. Now, for those of you who have ever worked with mushrooms or fungus of any type, Mycelium really likes paper and in the U.S. Postal Service, we have a special rate for shipping books called book rate. It's wicked cheap. And you can, if you want to share biological information as fungus base, you can merely inoculate a book and then just ship it book rate. Now, interesting thing, about 20 years ago, book rate became media mail. You could all show ship CDs. And I was thinking, CDs kind of look like Petru dishes, don't they? So we're working on ways to utilize this as a way to ship things. All right. So now I want to be a tad graver. I want to talk about the most common infectious disease in human beings. And this is dental caries, cavities. Now, how do you get a cavity? Well, you get a cavity because the enamel layer in your tooth is broken down and it sets up shop so that other bacteria can come in and hang out. Where does lactic acid come from? Comes from this guy. This is streptococcus mutans. And it has evolved so that it can actually grip the surface of your tooth. Very uncommon for most bacteria. It eats sugar and it excretes lactic acid. This is the culprit. And this leads to so many deleterious health effects that come after. Heart problems, vascular problems, type 2 diabetes, low birth weight and pregnancy, any number of things. And it disproportionately affects minorities and people in lower socioeconomic classes. Now, this is a gross picture I'm about to show you guys. So brace yourselves. This guy's 17. He drinks a lot of Mountain Dew. And his teeth were so rotted that when he went to have them extracted, local anesthetic did not work. Let's not have this happen ever again. So how do we do this? Well, the first idea is your mouth has your immune system working in it. So maybe we could inoculate against this. And some people thought some thoughts about this. And yes, you could theoretically inoculate against it. But the only way that that works is if you inoculate before it's in your system. You have this in your mouth really early on. Maybe if you have a newborn you could pull this off. It was tested and some, you know, one or two months old managed to get it to work. But I can tell that nobody in this room is of that age. So how do we do this instead? Well, if we could just do something about that one bacteria, so there was an idea. A guy said, what if we repopulate the mouth with a genetically engineered version of this? And how do you do this? Well, you edit it. And there are two edits that were done. This is the first one. And what he did was he said, let's make a new version of strep mutans that's immune to a particular antibiotic and also excretes that antibiotic. So as soon as you put it in there, it wipes the rest out and builds the same colony because it's the exact same species, more or less. And so the population stays stable and its life cycle stays stable. Let's make a second edit, the guy said. And let's make it so that instead of cranking out lactic acid, it cranks out alcohol. Trace them out. Trace them out, right? Like, don't get too excited. But he did this and it worked. Now, what I wanted to do today was hand out toothbrushes with this bacteria on it because you can brush your teeth with this for three minutes and never get a cavity for the rest of your life. How do we know? The guy who invented it did it. And 12 other people who are in one of the studies that he was actually able to do before he ran out of money in the FDA said you need to do a bunch more and all these extra things. But I don't have access to this. We did manage to get our hands on the one with the first edit. So this is strep mutans Clark, J.H. 1140. So this is the one that has the edit in it so that it will out compete regular strep mutans. It does not have the edit so it doesn't produce lactic acid but instead has alcohol. That's an edit that still needs to be done. Now, show of hands, how many people have done recombinant DNA stuff. Cool. Who wants this one? All right. So in addition, I have a bunch more of these and right after I'm done we're going back to the workshop and we have stab cultures because we can make copies of this. Now, one thing I have to warn you we're not entirely sure if these stab cultures took so if it's dead I'm really sorry but we have them and even if all these stab cultures are dead we have the starting material. We have a culture that is alive and we are going to be able to perpetuate it and we are going to be able to distribute it. Now, how do you do the edit? There are lots of different ways to do this. Okay. And if you've done any of these or want to try some of these go ahead because we have an endless supply now that we have one sample. Now, again, I'm not a biologist. I don't know a whole lot about this but the one that's sort of appealing from the hacker perspective is horizontal gene transfer and was explained to me by a dear biologist friend if you just get the bacteria that you really like to party really hard together they share traits. Now, what was done was the open reading frame for the production of alcohol dihogenase or sorry the production of lactic acid was deleted and then from a different species detailed in that paper which I will share with anybody who's interested it was pulled in the production of alcohol dihogenase was just stuck in there it was apparently a very simple procedure and again the bacteria falls from a truck and anybody who wants some of this can just come next door and we've got a bunch now critical important this will out compete your endogenous bacteria you do not want that to happen because it still produces lactic acid and it will still break down your teeth don't brush your teeth with this I'm not kidding once you edit it and you know that it's not producing lactic acid anymore then then call me and then we can all share it through the torrent system now sometimes people get scared now our dear Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park did say that life finds a way the thing that he neglected to create in his reality picture life does find a way but we're all life and we are finding a way and we're finding more ways now I'm closing in on the end of the hour but I want to speak just a little bit ideologically we're really happy about all the medical technology that we're managing to get into people's hands but this is a footnote oftentimes journalists will say what's your end goal what would you like to have happened and say I would like the collective to dissolve and not exist anymore because we're not necessary our hope is that the open-source movement does its natural ecosystem thing all the tools reproduce become common and people come up with better versions and better uses and the big thing that's holding everything up and continues to hold things up as you are all aware is intellectual property law there have been a few key points in history where economics and morality have come to an impasse classic examples are the Cold War the Reformation slavery in the United States and the dialogue went like this what's happening is a moral and the response from the establishment was well yeah we know and that's really unfortunate but this is sort of how our economy works and some of us said that's not good enough and that's happening right now because people right now are dying because of intellectual property law every three minutes somebody dies of hepatitis C three times a minute somebody dies of HIV every minute over a dozen abortions happen and roughly 11 drug overdoses happen all things which could easily be avoided with pharmaceuticals if they were accessible but they're not oppression comes from resource control resource control comes from information control information can only be controlled when it's commodified and this only happens when understanding is shrouded and the hacker community has done a great job of unfucking this particular problem in the tech world how do we do it you just are nice to the newbies it's great this is the greatest good you can do somebody knows some somebody wants to know something that you know you help them and this has been part of the hacker ethos for decades and something that the rest of the scientific community can learn a lot from and the biohackers are doing wonders for this so I'm about done I think I might have time for a few questions but I'll show a couple of things that I enjoy this is a cute little slide that I like to show again if the conceptual understanding is there then people can build their own knowledge and they don't have to keep going back to an arbiter of truth to ask for more this is a picture of a blank wall we'd like it to look like this again we don't create things at the collective that we're then trying to disseminate saying like we're so cool we're saying look we're all creating this together you're all part of the collective so here's my last slide and you'll forgive me because every time I show this I get a little choked up but this is a Carl Saganism is a picture of earth from space nobody's gonna help us accept us thank you so much am I done but I have time I tend all right so this is great so it hope I didn't have time for questions so one thing that I will say before I take questions is that right after this I'm gonna go two doors over and we're gonna see if we can make some stabs again we don't know which of them might or might not be viable but at least if you're interested in the idea stab culture so that once we do have ones that we know are working you can make your own if you want to come learn about that or see it or you just want to hang out and like you know have a cocktail or whatever like we'll be two doors over and we'll be working from four to five or four to four thirty four to five so we'll be working for another hour and it'll be nice and informal we can all just hang out and and I think it'll be pretty dope so I do have a few minutes to take questions if people have some and and if the GSK people want to identify themselves I'd like to let you guys go first no they're shy if you have any questions please step up to the mic so that we can get it in the recording I mean or we can just you know we can call it a day and go next door yeah go ahead and again I'm easy to spot I'll be here tomorrow I'm the guy who looks like he lost his wig and forgot what he was looking for yes go ahead hello there so so the device that you developed to make chemical reaction is anybody currently using that to like solve a problem they have themselves or are you aware of any case like that yeah so we don't know we hope so but things are being sort of we're releasing things in stages things are not at a solid beta stage at this juncture if you were building one like you're a pretty adept hobbyist because you kind of have to hack it together we're hoping that by the end of the year we essentially have a set of instructions and things that you can order and you can put together a kit for yourself now that said the reason I say we don't know is that we work very hard distance ourselves from end users because we don't want to be seen as pushing the technology like we've developed this and we think it's pretty cool but that doesn't mean that you'll think it's cool right the idea is that it should be an individualized choice if if you decide that making your own medication is the wise way to go we're trying to empower that but not saying this is a better option or a an option that you should take that said the difficult thing is that if you have a life-threatening illness under the current regulatory infrastructure if the system fails you you just have to shrug and wait to die and we think that people should have a little more choice than that but yeah again we have many details and if you're interested you know hit me up and and their files to be shared and we have GitHub repos and the whole the whole business yeah thank you couple questions for you what's the legal situation right now for someone doing that not for themselves or for others oh yeah the legal situation the legal situation is very convoluted the first lawyer ever spoke to I described what we were doing and the words out of his mouth were they're going to kill you and I was kind of shocked and I said it's your legal opinion and he said you know the FDA the DEA big pharma the Catholic Church I mean they're going to come after you I'm surprised you're still alive and I was like that's unfortunate so to be fair we have not received any sort of prosecution or injunctions to date we think that it's likely that will happen eventually we do have lawyers who have been very generous with their time and they're helping us to prepare for that likely eventuality the closest thing was the statement that the FDA release saying you don't make your own EpiPen and we said well it's not an EpiPen it's an EpiPencil but you know yeah the legal situation is is hairy so how do you think I'll work practically let's say a patient makes their own but then they have to work with a physician say hey I made this myself you know they have to be monitored by the physician have you thought about how the practical aspect of it yeah what's it's really it's it's touchy right again the main thing is if if somebody has a life-threatening illness and their choice is to either die or break the law like where are you gonna fall on that and to our mind given the intellectual property thing if if you really subscribe to the logic that violating intellectual property is theft if you're perpetrating an act of theft to prevent an act of murder which is what we would call it if you're withholding medications from somebody who needs it that's that's morally pretty in an unambiguous so yes sir yeah hey nice to see you yeah to create talk my questions about validation of the stuff that you're proposing or working with now yes like does it work how do you know that it works and I mean if you want to measure a chemical you got to use mass spec or NMR and stuff like that where do you see that going great so things are hairy and we have tried to do a fairly thorough risk analysis there are a lot of concerns when you when you do any repopulation right you're the biodiversity of the mouth changes and goes down is there concern about it migrating to the throat or the gut or the antibiotic migrating to the throat of the gut there also people are typically concerned about the things that Shreve Mutans usually does all those health problems is this one create those as well and there are detailed answers to most of those and the jury is still out on some of them but such as it is the examples where it has been tested in humans there have been no deleterious effects and specifically for the heart infection one which is like the really scary one there's a particular genetic marker of a sub substrain of Mutans Clark or Mutans that has that tag that creates that and the particular substrain that we have doesn't have that marker so theoretically that should not be producing that but these are these are all things and again we're not saying you should brush your teeth with this once you manage to make the edit we're saying we hope you make the edit and then you have the option so again all those things are there and well in terms of our documentation we're going through to try and make that risk analysis very transparent see like your concerns that are valid concerns here's what we think and we encourage you to read more here the original papers etc etc but yeah but very important thing when you start messing with biological material things get complicated yeah I guess to be a bit more pointed with the question is like where do you have your own data or like are you collecting your own data with your own plan for well as soon as I edit that thing it's going right in here right like yeah like as soon as as soon as we get the edit like I'm I'm I'm vector zero oh that's the other thing you can't spread it between people unfortunately because I thought we were gonna have like a make-up party to save the world and it was gonna be so great and then all the biologists were like no and it doesn't work like that and I was like are you sure and they were like no it doesn't I asked them like finally one of them was like well I don't know like maybe for like a really sloppy make-out like maybe one in three thousand times and I'm like I feel like I know some people would be willing to put in the work for that but I mean I think they were just humoring me I think it's very very unlikely that you can actually pass it between people but again if you're good with editing organisms if you can figure a way that it could be passed you want to edit it like well let's try it right because better we can save the world and have it spread so thank you so in addition procedures for making these drugs you've been working on do you have procedures for end users to verify what they thought they were making is what it is and if the concentrations are what they expected them to be right so this is probably the most common question I get it's like if you manufacture a medication how do you know that it actually is that medication so this is where the front-end work comes in right we we did chemistry for hundreds of years before we had GCMS and NMR and those old-school wet chemistry methods that were used during that time essentially just built a robust reaction on the front end and so the work that we do with the computational chemistry makes it so that the pathways are such that if you do screw up the reaction you just will have unreacted product and there are there are some methods of anal analysis at the end they're low-tech things often have sharp melting points you can do thin film and there's this guy from Fisher scientific next door who suggests he's got an analysis method that uses lasers somehow I just heard about this and I'm like super excited to talk to him because GCMS NMR is not something you're gonna be able to build in your basement but like lasers are so again I don't know how that works but again trying to build things on the front end doing good wet chemistry and so that analysis isn't necessary and then maybe if we can build an analysis unit that would like put in an extra layer that's where we are thank you and I think I'm out of time yeah so thank you all so much for coming I appreciate it and I'll be two doors down in just a little bit if you want to hang out one