It would seem that every biotech company is gangsta until Josiah Zayner orders their products. Zayner, a former NASA scientist turned biohacker, recently received an email from biotech company ATUM, asking that he remove them from his website where he has them listed as one of his preferred synthetic guide-RNA providers.

ATUM says that the reason for this request is because they are concerned that Zayner’s customers will use ATUM products on humans.

Zayner’s reaction was one of amusement, and he shared the email with his social media audience – with a foreword stating, “I can’t even mention companies anymore. That is how they are afraid of biohackers.”

This is not the first time Zayner has expressed frustration with biotech companies that refused selling products to him or his company. In late 2017, only two months after he had gained notoriety for injecting himself with CRISPR in a proof-of-concept demo where the gene-editing tool was supposed to make him more muscular, Zayner received an email from biotech company Synthego saying that they would not sell products to his company The Odin – because according to them, The Odin is not legitimate company.

Zayner found the claim about the legitimacy of The Odin to be outrageous and countered it with the simple fact that he operates a real, George Church-backed biotech company with actual revenue and employees:

“I have a PhD from the University of Chicago, five employees, $500000 in 2017 revenue, and George Church is on our board,” Zayner stated.

Zayner then went on a rant about how often biotech companies refuse to sell to him, saying, “This shit is crazy because it happens so often. It goes like this; I try to pay a biotech money for goods and services and they turn it down because of who I am or what I do or the address of the company.”

Towards the end of his rant, Zayner, who has an instructional video on how to order CRISPR DNA from Synthego, raised a noteworthy point when he noted that what Synthego was doing, was tantamount to suppressing science:

“I have never bad mouthed any companies in the press or mentioned companies that I have used for some of my crazy experiments to protect them,” Zayner explained, “And still places refuse to work with me but espouse their commitment to cutting edge science. Seems like suppression of science to me.”

Zayner then joked that maybe he should have done what most biotech companies are notorious for, particularly Venture Capital based ones; and faked everything:

“I guess I can make some elaborate online presence, list fake funding on CrunchBase, have a very non-detailed website using SquareSpace default template like most biotechs. Make up some story about how we work on CAR-T cells and we have a combined 40 years pharma experience.”

But all this frustration and tongue-in-cheek clapback at biotech companies was Zayner in 2017, right now, in 2019, Zayner is not bothered. This is because of the growing popularity of biohacking and DIY-biology. Zayner predicts that due to this growth, there will be so many biohackers that their purchasing power will be more than that of the institutional scientists that companies like ATUM and Synthego eagerly sell to.

“In less than 5 years, biohackers will have more purchasing power than the rest of the scientists combined,” notes Zayner; who upon this prediction, adds that as for biotech companies refusing to sell to biohackers, “Fuck them.”

What is sadly funny and ironic about all this, particularly the 2017 Synthego incident, is that a month later in 2018, Synthego was outed as the company that had supplied Dr. He Jiankui with the synthetic guide-RNA that he used with CRISPR to create the world’s first gene-edited babies. This discovery was found in the consent forms Dr. He gave to the parents of those gene-edited babies before conducting his experiments on their embryos.

According to the consent forms, Dr. He had not used ‘clinical grade’ reagents, but rather ‘research grade’ reagents labelled as “not for use on humans” with one of the reagents, sgRNA, provided directly to him by Synthego. A vivid reminder that the Chinese CRISPR babies scandal, which has turned biotech companies like Synthego and ATUM into science suppressing gatekeepers, was an institutional science scandal, not a biohacking one.

This trend towards gatekeeping and science suppression from biotech companies shows that the urgency to start biohacking and accelerate everything has never been more pressing, and so once again, it falls upon us as biohackers to keep radically pushing for access to biotechnology and break down all barriers of entry. We are becoming a massive market and someone will either sell to us, or we will pirate everything.