At another conference in February 2018, Traywick dropped trou on stage and injected into his bare left thigh an experimental herpes treatment developed by his company. With that motion, he thrust the clandestine world of biohackers into the spotlight, defining for the world an image of these DIY biologists as a group of madcap impresarios. Shortly after, his company imploded in a conflagration of Jerry Springer-esque drama, some of which was caught on camera by Vice. Most of his coterie of biohacker contractors either quit or were fired (depending on who you ask), leaving Traywick with therapies he’d promised to develop but no one to do the work. Still, Traywick seemed undeterred, recently launching a presale campaign in which people paid $35 to join a waiting list for Ascendance’s unregulated therapies, even as it seemed highly unlikely that they would ever come to market.

Then on Sunday, this dream of low-cost, open-access gene therapy came crashing down, when at the end of a session in a sensory deprivation tank at a D.C. spa, Traywick was found dead. The immediate reaction was disbelief. By Monday morning, my Facebook inbox was flooded with messages from biohackers wondering if this was perhaps yet another one of Traywick’s stunts. Rumors and conspiracy theories ran amok. His exact cause of death is still unknown; police say the autopsy results are not expected for several weeks.

While Traywick’s life tested the limits of DIY science, his death symbolizes a crossroads for the movement. Will it continue to push the limits of self-experimentation or will it take steps to ensure safety?

“Before Aaron, no one cared about what biohackers did,” said Josiah Zayner, Traywick’s rival of sorts and a biohacker who pioneered the on-stage injection stunt, in August of last year when he injected himself with a gene to promote muscle growth. “Then we all realized maybe we should care more.”

A year ago, Traywick bulldozed into the biohacker scene seemingly from nowhere. When I first encountered him, it was not through biohacking but while reporting on a company call Inovium he had started with a pair of doctors in Greece. The company claimed it had developed a novel fertility treatment using something called platelet-rich plasma to help women who had difficulty conceiving. At the time, the company was launching a clinical trial for the treatment at several fertility clinics in the United States, claiming that in addition to helping premenopausal women conceive, the treatment could also potentially reverse menopause altogether.

By a few months later, Ascendance had partnered with many of the most well-known figures in the biohacking sphere, offering funding, lab equipment, and the promise of profit-sharing to those willing to give their time and skills to Ascendance, developing extremely experimental therapies. Traywick’s offer was attractive. Before Ascendance, most of them were self-funded, hackers tinkering in sheds and garages with lab equipment cobbled together from eBay. And the biohacking world offered Ascendance cheap labor that gave credence to its messaging of “decentralization” and openness.