The Business of
How much do you think people would pay to always have perfect knowledge in their brain of where true north is? To be able to see in near-infrared at will and without external aids? To be able to hear music and talk bi-directionally on the cell phone without an attached speaker or microphone? Well, by whatever method we estimate a rough tally of prospective annual revenue on a napkin, each of these capabilities is sure to push well into the billions of dollars. Military applications alone would make these numbers. Just think of the advantages in battle and maneuver! Yikes!
But are these capabilities too far-out to be true? Not according to Amal Graafstra. In a 2013 Ted Talk, Graafstra demonstrated that progress has already been made towards developing these and other fascinating “upgrades” to the human body. His company, Dangerous Things, is a Seattle-based enabler of the biohacking community. They sell tools, guides and know-how, so that do-it-yourself hackers of the human body, called “grinders,” can safely explore, tinker and invent.
As Graafstra puts it, the human body is like a sport utility vehicle, and your brain is you, the driver. To complete his metaphor, grinders are biohackers who invent the after-market products and add them to your SUV base model, gifted to you at birth. The goal is to improve the body’s performance, and improve quality of life. Medicine prevents problems and fixes problems; biohacking upgrades the body.
This effort to upgrade the human body is one branch of biohacking, where citizen science meet biology. Other biohackers participate in genome editing. One biohacker group built Biocurious, which asked for $62,000 on Kickstarter and raised $500,000, so that they could sell glow-in-the-dark plants to consumers. Now they
by Dr. Forrest Nabors
Alyeska Venture Management
biohacking