For the biohackers, decentralization is a feature, not a bug. It’s a safeguard against corruption. “The biohacking community,” Fabrizio “Fab” Mancini, a chiropractor and frequent flier of the daytime TV medical circuit, tells me, “is not owned by any one entity. It’s actual individuals.” In a community for whom deregulation is entirely the point, though, how do you screen for bullshit?
I ask Asprey about the vetting process for the slew of vendors and speakers hawking treatments on his trade show floor, many of them expensive, few FDA-approved. “I don’t look at anything as being fringe,” he tells me. “It’s either known or unknown, and it has evidence or it doesn’t.”
On the last day of the conference, I attend a talk on snake venom. A man named Sincere Seven is extolling the medicinal virtues of microdosing viper, cobra, and rattlesnake venoms directly into his patients’ bloodstream.
Flowpresso lymphatic drainage technology.
Photograph: Will Bahr
“The snake heals its prey before it kills its prey,” he claims, before personifying the serpent. “I inject venom into you that will induce a rapid healing. Flood the body with white blood cells, kill off viruses, kill off bacteria, kill off tumors, kill off cancers—cause I don’t wanna eat that.” (Trace amounts of venoms are currently used in FDA-approved drugs and have been found to be effective in stroke treatment.) Seven is asked by an audience member if snake venom could be used to treat autism. While he hadn’t personally tested it yet, Seven stresses, “I’m willing to work with anybody … Me and my colleagues, we are the clinical trials.”
“Oh, my gosh,” a woman breathes in the audience. Whether she is moved or horrified, I can’t tell.
At the end of the day, I get it. It’s not fair to say that I hate my body, exactly—the thing certainly has its merits, and what’s more, biohackers talk constantly of the power of positive language in manifesting your reality—but we’ve never really hit it off. One of my earliest memories involves my parents calling 911 when I had breathing trouble, the paramedics looming over me so tall I swear they scraped the ceiling. In college I was walloped with Lyme disease, my wrists frozen stiff one morning to the point that I couldn’t open my dorm room door. I’ve broken several bones, had a (non-cancerous) lesion removed from my scalp, passed a kidney stone. I have insomnia and depression and a perpetually swollen ankle. I’ve had Covid at least five times. As of this writing, I’m days away from an appointment with my dermatologist, who’ll carve a portion from my back to determine whether or not I have skin cancer.