I am inordinately pleased by the existence of Longecity.
This is a forum where people discuss supplements and nootropics. I started looking at it when I was conducting the nootropics forum, assumed it was similar to every other forum that fits that description, and didn’t pay it more attention until today.
Today I looked at it in more depth and discovered their group buys.
The way this works is: people on the forum hear about some exciting new chemical that was found to have promising effects in an experiment, after which researchers say something like “this might be ready for human trials in a couple of years”.
Then everyone pools their money together, pays thousands of dollars to get a research laboratory somewhere to synthesize them a big batch of the chemical, distributes it to everyone in the forum, and they all ingest it and see if they grow wings or a third arm or whatever.
Needless to say this is a terrible idea and they will all probably die of some horrendous disease unknown to medical science. That’s not even in dispute.
But I was raised on science-fiction stories, and one of the most common tropes was some wonder drug being developed and then suppressed by the government. When I was like seven, I read a story about a kid in a science fair who invented a chemical that let people photosynthesize, and the government made him stop because it would destroy the food industry (my childrens’ books were better than yours). The basic structure of the mad scientist genre is small-minded fools delaying a genius in supremely great work. And in a world where the government is trying to put the brakes on the personal genomics revolution and drugs succeed or get ignored for confusing reasons, it’s easy to worry that real life might borrow from some of those tropes.
For example, a research team recently did something that looked like they might sort have reversed aging in rats. The lead researcher says he wants to start human trials soon, but he “is reluctant to forecast how long it will be before the compound might be readily available for use”, the chemical seems to be really expensive to manufacture in sufficient quantities, and the bioethicists will want to have their say about what if rich people can afford it more easily than poor people, and so on and so forth. Overall this doesn’t seem likely to be an exception to the rule that nothing ever makes it to market in less than five or ten years.
Meanwhile, the people on Longecity have already gotten a price tag from a chemical supplier and a couple dozen people willing to be human guinea pigs.
This particular case I am not optimistic about – they seem to be looking not at the precise chemical used in the rat studies but at a cheaper substitute; although as far as I can tell their biochemistry checks out, I feel like if the cheaper substitute worked the original researchers would have used it themselves. And this substitute also seems to be commercially available in some places and no one is aging in reverse. So this will probably be a no-go.
But they’re also working on group buys for a kappa opioid antagonist that someone says might help social motivation and a TrkB agonist that acts as a BDNF-mimetic and appears to treat Alzheimers in a mouse model.
I cannot even come close to endorsing this. The responsible part of me says that it is a terrible terrible idea and they will all come down with exotic cancers and die. It probably is a sweeping condemnation of our government that they haven’t burnt the whole website to the ground and then scattered red tape over the ruins so nothing can grow there again.
But another part of me is full of glee that a random Internet site has just made an entire class of dystopias impossible. If there is a miracle drug out there that makes you super-smart or reverses aging or something, and for some reason like an evil conspiracy or just bad luck it never “made it”, someone on Longecity will have taken it within a week of it first being mentioned online. And if they report that they think it worked, a couple hundred people will figure out hare-brained and probably illegal ways to get some.
I think a good motto for western civilization would be “Our institutions are stupid and our population is insane, but occasionally these two flaws perfectly balance each other out and it’s sort of neat”
You have found an internet site which has made a large class of dystopias less likely. I kind of wish you hadn’t publicized it.
considering the data gathering power of the government is a lot higher than that of random people who might be interested in joining Longecity, I think getting more people involved is mostly upside. L
Also the government doesn’t really plan these things.
Longecity isn’t exactly hidden, and I don’t think the Illuminati read my blog.
we do now
If you guys really have a Google Alert set up for the word “Illuminati” and read anyone who talks about you, I feel kind of sorry for you.
Hi.
I think I read that same story in my youth! Bonus points for the kindly grandpa with the folksy discourses on the scientific method. Also the poster on the science of lipstick.
Found it: Top Secret by John Reynolds Gardner.
Thank you. I am going to get this book right away.
Do they replicate the studies in animal models themselves before human administration or just dive right in? Having done some garage microbiology, I’d feel compelled to at least verify the research myself before downing some.
They sure do have a lot of material stickied, but it all reads a lot more like Erowid than “HOWTO Design Your Own Clinical Trial”. (Tangentially related, does anyone know what’s happened to http://randomiseme.org/?)
That is a good motto!
I wonder which governmental organization would actually be responsible for getting rid of this, and how they’d even find it? Is there an FDA agent out there tasked with “find all the weird self-experimenters and get them!”? This leads me to an idea for a Law and Order episode: agent Whoever sneaks through the house of Longecity’s webmaster, only to find themselves fighting a seven-foot, four-armed humanoid monster pumped up on “anabolic Resveratrol”.
I don’t think this is actually illegal, I don’t think anybody actually wants to crack down. The FDA is worried about people making money by selling snake oil to unsophisticated consumers, people who are wacko enough to buy a batch of research chemicals and then drink them are not really their concern.
The FBI keeps in touch with the biohacking community, but the concerns there are terrorism and accidents (neither concern is particularly elevated). The DEA has conducted a few operations against psychoactive research chemical vendors (Operation Web Tryp and Operation Log Jam); their authority is over controlled substances, though. Given the broadness of the Federal Analog Act, JDTic might fall under DEA auspices; I’m less sure about the TrkB agonist.
I’ve heard some viewing-with-alarm from the BBC about designer drugs staying ahead of the law, but I don’t know whether there’s anything the British government can do to stop designer drugs at this point.
Indeed, the main effect of outlawing “designer drugs” is that newer, less-well known designer drugs are created to take their places. The best thing to do would be to quietly stop trying to put an end to it, and hope the use of these remains confined to the current small group of users.
“It probably is a sweeping condemnation of our government that they haven’t burnt the whole website to the ground and then scattered red tape over the ruins so nothing can grow there again.”
I would worry that by writing this blogpost you will drawn attention to the forum and cause exactly that to happen. The really heart-wrenching dystopias, like 1984 and Brazil, always seem hopeful just before the crushing end…
eep eep eep
GENERALIZATION FROM FICTIONAL EVIDENCE DETECTED
TERROR DRONES DISPATCHED
Kudos to these people for generating so many positive externalities. For the most part they’ll probably do more good for the rest of us (and a few of themselves) than harm to themselves.
You… had amazing kids’ books.