I Made a Covid-19 Vaccine in My Kitchen and It Worked – Science Still Sucks | Hacker News Reader

I Made a Covid-19 Vaccine in My Kitchen and It Worked – Science Still Sucks

josiahzayner.com

30 pointsemre30 comments

Here is where I immediately have a red flag from the author:

"sometimes I hide the fact that I have PhD because I don't want it to be a symbol of authority or intelligence for myself"

yet, at the top of the site "Josiah Zayner, PhD"."

well, which one is it Josiah?

sometimes != always

makes sense that he would want to strengthen his credibility in an article like this, no?

That’s a very nit-picky thing to critique, while ignoring everything the post is writing about.

If I say "sometimes I feel people are losing the ability to precisely comprehend what they read" it does not necessarily mean I feel this way right now, although I might.

The limiting factor in drug development is not creating the drug, but in testing it. I'd like to see a biohacking approach to drug testing.

When Jenner created (really discovered) the original SmallPox vaccine, he basically just inoculated people with Cowpox and Horsepox. That was over 180 years ago. There were no phases, clinical trials or testing standards back then. Real medicine and snake oil were difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish.

Before Jenner, there were groups inoculating people with actual Smallpox (typically in the nose, because it was quicker to recover from). The Chinese started doing that 500 years ago, and it was even used by troops in the American revolutionary war. Some of those people would die of course, but the ones who recovered would have an immunity.

A lot of people may have died from many of these early tests, but so many people were dying it didn't quite matter.

> A lot of people may have died from many of these early tests, but so many people were dying it didn't quite matter.

This is the old ethics question: There is a highjacked planebfull of passengers flying towards a football stadium. Should it be shut down?

Many contemporary societies lean towards not shooting as you can't compare deaths.

Regarding vaccines the current approach is to first try it out on animals and then do controlled clinical studies with healthy test subjects etc. Still some people do suffer from those for the greater good.

The reason there's so much red tape related to drug development is because people were so free with drug testing in the past. There was a time when the FDA did not exist. We had a situation where people could sell anything and call it a cure without testing. Word of mouth was all that was needed to sell a cure whether it work or not. It was up to each buyer to decide if it cured the problem. We had situations where the cure was worst than the illness.

We need testing. It's the only way we can have confidence in our medical system.

I agree testing is important and your historical perspective is illuminating. My question is: What happens if the FDA does a bad job? It has a monopoly. They have an incentive to deny everything. If they deny a new drug and people die, it's hard to blame them. If they approve a drug that's dangerous, they get egg on their face.

In the US, drug testing is governed by complex regulatory frameworks as well as risks from tort liability.

If the government is willing to suspend these[0] in order to fast track vaccine development, then why isn't this the default for all new drug development?

The answer is political expediency, of course.

[0]https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/08/14/57...

Can any biologist confirm there is some actual science going on there? (otherwise, we should flag this).

The live-stream is no longer available. The main documentary output seems to be here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SracILuRbiZt4f7EVH2J...

Yes, the sequences are available [1] and well within the capabilities of a hobbyist with a little gumption - all they're using is commercial off the shelf services available to any researcher or student.

Whether its good science or not is beyond my understanding of this particular subject. It's definitely not usable for any sort of premarketing approval.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q18Sh-67NigwabhxBQAtLfRq...

> Whether its good science or not is beyond my understanding of this particular subject.

Same here, so I came here to check the comment section looking for someone better informed. Unfortunately the post has been flagged already, so we're unlikely to ever know.

This sentiment is not unique to biomedicine. It's pretty often you see people finger elitism or capitalism for screwing people over because "I can make it myself."

Ethically, you are more than welcome to experiment on yourself. That's your prerogative. But, as has already been expressed here, the issue is once you start giving your creation to others. Even when the science is conceptually very simple, like in the case of nucleic acid vaccines, a huge number of variables can impact the safety and efficacy endpoints for the recipient. That's why trials and regulation are essential.

Are these regulatory systems perfect? Absolutely not (they are in dire need of reform). But they form an essential safety barrier for the general public. Decrying them as class warfare is incredibly naive.

That is more or less my understanding. This person clearly feels comfortable with his own work. His choice. I would never inject his homebrew, and I would not trust my own understanding enough to do this myself. I don’t think that makes me naive. From what I’ve read, it took no time at all to create the coronavirus vaccine. The time taken was mostly around studying efficacy in various groups and checking side effects.

What I think this highlights is the perceived role and efficacy of regulation in society. Social media, for example, is going through a regulatory discussion, and given its growing role in matters of consequence I don’t think it beyond the pale to consider regulating it. We made that decision about medicine long ago, and I’d assert we are better for it.

Your pointing to that component of science that is commonly underappreciated in the public reception: mutual review. Be it in the form of replication, criticism or peer review.

Science is a social activity. So cooking things up in a kitchen all by yourself is consequently not.

The proper way to go forward would be to seek out the accepted forums and channels of his peers to get opinions on his work. That is as much a part of science as is experimenting.

Unrelated: Do I understand it correctly that his sample size is n=3? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17c7LtrUlnzadif63pR8G...

This was flagged (I don't know why), but it seems like a very interesting article to me and would like to read the discussion here, so I vouched for it. I don't know enough about the science to opine on the content, but I think it's worth a second chance.

The article checks two bad boxes for me.

1. It disparages the work of individuals/organizations unjustly, who have done society a great service throughout this trying time. An attitude which has the potential to feed anti-vax sentiment/scepticism. 2. It suggests and endorses, without the proper caveats, something which is potentially dangerous, that is injecting yourself with a homegrown vaccine.

Might be interesting to read a commentary on this individuals experience from a measured place (a practicing scientist for example breaking down the risks of what he/his group did), but the content as it stands doesn't deserve to be promoted in my opinion.

Those bad boxes were checked for me too, but the realization it gave me that "wait, I can actually synthesize a vaccine myself" trumped the first two.

Good point, could have been a great article if it took a more careful tone and just demonstrated how cool it is that the tech now exists to do this yourself (with sufficient means + skills), without adding the other negative elements/suggesting that folks should do this themselves.

You can synthetize a vaccine candidate yourself. The problem is to be sure that it creates enough immunity and that is safe enough.

> I know it sounds a bit dramatic but there really is a class war going on. [...] Your life, your child’s life, your mother, your loved one depends on how much money you make. The government and Pharma companies aren’t going to help you when you can’t afford it either.

> If one were to replicate the experiment from scratch, the total individual cost would end up being around $3500, the major costs being $1600 for DNA synthesis and $1200 for the kits to measure coronavirus spike protein antibodies.

Ah yes, fighting the good fight by spending several thousand dollars of disposable income on your hobby, to show people that the government-subsidized vaccine is class violence. :)

It’s expensive only due to lack of scale.

Also, the advantage of having it available 6-12 months ahead of the official one may be worth the cost to those at risk.

I think he wants to spread awareness that people in power can use technology and medicine to widen the class divide, and biotechnology shows signs of going that direction.

I think that a biohackers’ line of reasoning goes: the same way that some pills once existed as ground-up herbs, today’s biotech (and vaccines) started as ground-up biomaterial.

Of course people have been hurt from eating herbs and injecting biomaterial, so testing and quality control will always be a massive issue.

I still see a biohackers’ rebuttal, however: sometimes people are hurt by their own cooking, or restaurant food, so the issue of quality control among mass-distributed biomaterial is not totally new, and not insurmountable.

> All three of us developed SARS-CoV2 spike protein neutralizing antibodies. I still can't fucking believe it. Not only did we create and test a successful vaccine, we showed that we could get a gene therapy to work (a DNA vaccine changes the DNA in your cells and so is a gene therapy also)

Seems incredibly dangerous. What if 3 years from now, he realizes the changes he made are crashing his immune system? There is no "undo" button.

I mean it's just a protein and a basic immune system response.

It changes the DNA in a few cells, that produce the spikes. These cells are killed by the white cells, and after a few steps you hopefully get immunity. The objective is no permanent change of your DNA.

(Actually from time to time a virus fail and it get copy to the DNA of the cells that produce sperms or eggs and it get copied in the next generations. We have a few of these virus, but it is not the usual outcome.)

Is the immune response as strong as in individuals receiving one of the approved vaccines? From what I’ve read about the mRNA one, what stood out was the fine tuning they applied to the sequence so that the effect is much stronger than what would be obtained by just using the virus sequence directly. Sounds like that would be lacking here.

um. biontech made their vaccine in a couple of hours. thats not where the problem is at. pfizer's role. is logistics(run trials involving 50k ppl) and manufacturing(how do you make a billion doses?).

An interesting bit...

"I know it sounds a bit dramatic but there really is a class war going on. There is a group of people who are actively making choices that cause a disproportionate amount of deaths among those in lower social classes."

Thoughts?

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