Today's Galileos and the Reformation of Biotechnology
Today's Galileos and the Reformation of Biotechnology
Scientist-Influencers and Biohacker-Creators
As a kid, I was told the story of Galileo Galilei being imprisoned for challenging the status quo geocentric theory through science and how it took centuries for society to catch up and acknowledge him not only as sane but as a hero.
If I were to point to today’s Galileo’s, I’d point to biohackers. Folks doing crazy biotech, genetic engineering stuff outside of traditional institutions that limit them. Those who skip the prestigious journals and share their biotech with anyone who wants to watch the future on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram.
While for some biohackers imprisonment has meant to be banned from online platforms, non-biohacker scientists backed by prestigious credentials have been favored by the algorithms to accumulate millions of followers, likes, and views. This piece explores the impact of content creation in these two “kinds” of scientists: Scientist-Influencers and Biohacker-Creators.
The Scientist-Influencer
Scientist-Influencers (SI): not the PhD student doing boring scientific dissemination or “days in the life”. Not science-based companies whose founders barely even post on LinkedIn. SI are scientists who woke up to the fact that the world cares about their work and they could make a larger immediate1 impact (and passive $) if they productize their science through YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and newsletters.
After three years of launching his podcast, Andrew Huberman now has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube, 6 million followers on Instagram, 500 thousand newsletter subscribers, and 300 thousand likes on TikTok. His sponsors now include nutrition supplement AG1, online therapy service Betterhelp, and fitness wearable WHOOP.
Content creation is a two-faced business. Andrew’s consumer product is actionable insights for a healthy and productive life, wrapped as a podcast that he partially monetizes through $10/mo or $1,500 lifetime memberships (for access to exclusive content, early access to events, and AMAs). Whether an audience pays or not, they’re the product too, as their trust and attention is sold to brands that “sponsor” the podcast.
Peter Attia’s audience includes 669 thousand YouTube subscribers and 1 million Instagram followers. Interestingly, his podcast relies entirely on $19/mo and $149/yr member subscriptions (no sponsors). His book, Outlive, has sold over 1 million copies. Though he holds an MD from Stanford, he’s not an active academic researcher.
Similarly, Sam Harris has 674 thousand YouTube subscribers and monetizes only through $100/yr memberships. What makes him particularly interesting as a SI, is the product he built separate from the podcast: meditation app WakingUp that you can access for the modest price of $20/mo, $130/yr, or $0 if you get their “scholarship”.
While some sports players collaborate with brands only as an image that supports it, others co-develop these products and even buy equity in those companies (e.g. Roger Federer and ON). As more scientists build their personal, consumer-facing brands, I strongly believe that the next step for those SI is to become the main actors in the product development process of consumer products and protagonists of the stories that these products would otherwise lack.
These SI will not only become co-developers, early adopters and thus true influencers in the success of these consumer bio products, but also the translators that biotech so often needs. #ItsTimeForTheMKBHDOfBiotech. For the most part though, content is not changing their science. Their funders remain the same, their research is still conservative. The audience never joins the stage.
Introducing…
The Biohacker-Creator
Biohacker-Creator (BC): full-time bioengineer who does experiments academia wouldn’t fund and are interesting to a niche audience of both scientists and non-scientists. Their main activity is science and they productize it through fun and interesting videos. Not to be confused with the fitness coaches though the line may get a little blurry if Bryan Johnson played with CRISPR instead of olive oil.
Now, don’t trust me. Listen to the first 30 seconds of billionaire Balaji’s interview on the Decentralized Science (DeSci) podcast: “Look at Veritasium, look at 3Blue1Brown, look at some of these science channels on YouTube. There’s an audience for it and actually there’s a fairly well-heeled audience that wants to learn about this stuff. You could actually monetize your teaching now, for example, and use that to fund research”.
Balaji is indirectly answering what I call “The Chesky question”: if social, behavioral changes are harder to predict than tech laws like Moore’s, what are the behavioral changes we will see in the 2020s and beyond? The somewhat crazy answer offered by Balaji and a humble writer is this: consumer trust shifting towards individual creators will lead to content-funded science.
The Thought Emporium is a DIY science (not only biotech) channel with over 1.7 million subscribers and 200 million total views on YouTube, 5.3 million likes on TikTok, and 156 thousand followers on Instagram. Biotech videos range among his most popular ones. Only on YouTube: Grape Made of Meat (9.8M views), Rat Neurons Playing Doom (3.4M views), Synthetic Spider Silk (2.6M views), Meat Leaf (2.5M views).
The Thought Emporium also does livestreams on project planning or lectures on technical topics. Hear me out: even if it’s just $2 bucks, how crazy is it that seemingly random people are sending this seemingly random dude money that they could otherwise spend in McDonald’s, to have him do the science they want to watch? How crazy is it that over 800 people actively support him on Patreon with memberships going from $1/mo to $500/mo, collectively making $1,600/mo?
Unlike a crowdfunding campaign where backers can get something like a t-shirt or the first version of a product in return, content itself is the main product of this new model. As this content reaches larger audiences, I think these donations may turn into a literal vote for the ideas they want to watch. If the SI hold AMAs, could BC hold brainstorming sessions of crazy biotech ideas that actually make it to reality given enough backers?
David Ishee is a biohacker who started streaming videos on his CRISPRed dogs on YouTube five years ago. Though his channel’s metrics may not be as impressive as others, he’s been featured in the Netflix documentary Unnatural Selection and Walter Isaacson’s Code Breaker book, the latter for being part of a group of biohackers who made and injected themselves with a COVID mRNA vaccine before all big pharma launched their own. Today, David receives over $1,400 in Patreon monthly donations while working at The ODIN, a biohacking kits co.
Jo Zayner is the founder and CEO of The ODIN. An artist at heart whose art happens to be science, it’s sad to see how the algorithms have in fact banned her. Microbiome transplants, CRISPR to increase muscle mass, growing chicken cells in your kitchen, and an expedited COVID vaccine were all videos available for anyone to learn to do biotech from anywhere in the world. Hands-on, step-by-step, livestreams where she answered questions. It was beautiful.
Throughout her career as a biohacker, Jo has received all sorts of requests from dozens and dozens of people who want a cure for x or y disease. Today’s healthcare system, including academia and pharma, has failed them. They don’t care whether Jo has an MD-PhD from Harvard or Yale. They just want a solution and Jo is the only person who’s crazy enough to try this sort of things out.
Jo is the reason why I was able to actually learn and do genetic engineering as a 15-year-old in my house in Mexico, away from anyone who could tell me that I’m too young or not smart enough to learn about such beauty. A friend of ours, Roya, has a similar story. Fast-forward 7 years, she’s now selling badass lab robots to Jo for her new company. Full circle.
Biohacking to me is about creating the world you want to see. To start right now, instead of waiting for permission, because sometimes, when you want to see something in the world that doesn’t exist yet, you can’t wait for a reformation. You gotta be the Galileo and do it yourself (lit DIY, lol) first.
Stories
Stories have always been the connective tissue of society. My crazy dream is that the Reformation of biotech, driven by consumer behavioral shifts in content creation and consumption, brings about more Scientist-Influencers and even more Biohacker-Creators. A future in which anyone can cook is a future in which we not only trade money for entertainment and education but access to our biological data for actual insights and new designer biotech.
As always, eager to read your thoughts! Please message/email me or leave a comment :)
Could a podcast more impactful than all of the papers a scientist has written? The work shared may be the same but the channel and how it shapes the message changes. Podcasting for non-scientists optimizes for actionable insights while writing for reviewers of top journals optimizes for scientific accuracy and novelty… or so we think.