Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/02/biohacker-aaron-traywick-found.html
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A strong contender for the 2018 Darwin Awards.
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Based on the spa’s promo video of the flotation tank, I think he went peacefully.
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This is the first I’ve heard of this guy (it’s cozy under my rock, but dark and mostly quiet) and – as heartless as this makes me – all I can think of is discovering my 9-year-old kid’s dead goldfish.
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Calling yourself a “biohacker” doesn’t make your snake oil smell any better.
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How long ago was this venture down into Venezuela? What were the results? Does anybody know?
While it’s sad when anybody dies, this guy’s days were numbered. You can only inject yourself with untested substances so many times before you discover one that is fatal.
This is about as surprising as discovering that one of those guys who flys wingsuits 1 foot off of the ground through slot canyons has crashed and died. Everybody said they were going to kill themselves sooner rather than later, and they did.
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Or that it does nothing at all to treat your real medical condition.
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Was reading a while back that the wingsuit form of base jumping is one of the few sports where the death rate is pretty uniform. The pros die at similar rates to the newbies–and that rate is pretty high.
I kinda get it, though. It’s the kind of sport that when something goes wrong, you’re not going to be able to recover. And to even get into it, you have to do hundreds of regular jumps, so you start to feel pretty confident in your ability. So even people who tell themselves they are just going to do it a few times find themselves coming back over and over.
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How I see Bio Hackers:
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The number 2 reason why I won’t inject myself with untested products (#1 is needle phobia)
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IIRC, after the herpes vaccination stunt, Traywick had a couple of fairly public meltdowns, culminating in an episode where he locked his collaborators out of their share space and piled their equipment on the sidewalk in front of the building. The collaborators, unsurprisingly, had some uncharitable things to say about Traywick.
The impression I got was of a person who wasn’t terribly stable to start with, and who was unraveling under public scrutiny.
ETA: Here’s the story:
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Technically, killing the host is a cure for any disease.
Well, that or he had a nasty reaction that could have affected his brain. In fact, it’s possible he could have triggered an anti-NMDA autoimmune response, the first thing I’d be worried about with an untested herpes virus treatment.
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Thought this might be the guy with the thing in his arm, but that was Tim Cannon.
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Biohacker Aaron Traywick
Good bye dear courageous one.
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When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
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Vice’s recent coverage includes a lot of and about Mr. Traywick:
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If only this was a Marvel movie there would have been a near-100% chance that he’d burst out of that chamber with incredible new superpowers.
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