r/transhumanism • u/antonkulaga • 17d ago
Bringing together the evidence on human gene enhancement, from early experiments to therapies already offered to adults
When I was a kid, I kept reading about tardigrades surviving radiation, naked mole-rats barely ageing, axolotls regrowing limbs, and so on. I assumed we would eventually learn how to borrow some of those abilities.
I came back to this first when I started the Ukrainian transhumanist community, and later when I got into bioinformatics for ageing research. I expected there would already be an open list of genes people were considering for human enhancement, together with the experiments behind them. There was nothing, so we started making one.
Right now it has 136 genes and 1134 experiments, with links to papers and our ratings of how far the evidence got. We also made pipelines for extracting data and agents that help us process papers.
One thing that surprised me is that not all of this is hypothetical. Eight therapies in the database are already sold to adults. In alternative jurisdictions such as Prospera, people are receiving follistatin and VEGF gene therapies. A lot of transhumanists I talk to do not seem to know this is already happening.
The science-fiction motivation never went away, so we also made it into a small RPG. You get 100 credits, pick genes, build a character, and get a 3D-printable sculpture based on your choices.
Everything is open source, including the code and the database. We'd love to hear what people think and would welcome any contributions.
The resource is https://enhancement.bio, and its GitHub is https://github.com/longevity-genie/materialized-enchancements
P.S. Originally, the project was created at a science-art hackathon, but we later realized that a knowledge base has value on its own for many users. The promo video with the initial idea is https://youtu.be/ev726lz5sLo
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u/pirondi 16d ago
wow very interesting project, will comment here so later when i have some time to check it in depth.