Biohacker movement grows in public universities with health applications

Professors at public universities have turned into biohackers to deal with health problems. Informally, they intervene in their own well-being with consolidated scientific techniques or still in development, which include both herbal supplements and devices to monitor stress.

Angelo Amancio Duarte, 56, is one of those people. Professor of the graduate course in computer science at the State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS), in Bahia, Duarte found in the biohacker movement a solution for muscle pain and memory loss.

“It was a time of great suffering”, said the researcher. During the period, without finding answers in other conventional treatments, Duarte came across the concept of “biohacks”—strategies that control the body’s internal and external environment to improve physical, mental, and emotional performance.

“I didn’t do any physical intervention,” continued Duarte, referring to the idea that biohacking only involves applications like chips in the skin.

“I started changing eating and exercise practices, taking supplements to replace some nutrients in my vegetarian diet,” he said.

In the pursuit of improvement, the researcher was also interested in devices that monitor heart and brain rhythms. He cannot, however, test all new technologies, since many, being made in the US and Europe, have a very high price.

The teacher learns about the news of the movement in an internet group, in which the biohacker community shares possible interventions.

According to Duarte, members review scientific articles, report experiments carried out, in addition to positive or negative results so that others can replicate.

Before testing a new product, the professor said he always evaluates the technology’s safety. “Hack is a very personal thing,” he said. “You need to take the risk.”

For the UEFS professor, the risk exists not only because of the initial stage of many innovations, but because of the charlatanism that exists in the movement. Some of the proposed interventions, such as to improve cognitive performance, are based on research with fragile results.

“That’s why I always research before doing any hack”, said Duarte.

In the assessment of Li Li Min, a professor in the department of neurology at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), the risk with techniques that do not work or whose safety is unknown exists due to the enthusiasm of biohackers.

“They want to put science into practice, but they end up trampling the scientific process”, stated the neurologist. Min stated that he is developing an electrical neuromodulation stimulator, with potential for application in medicine.

“But we will only know if the stimulator should be put into use or not when science allows us to say”, said Min.

Discussing biohacking within the public university, according to the neurologist, would reduce some risks of having pseudoscience in the movement. Therefore, Min defends the creation of biohacking laboratories in these public spaces.

“Society is demanding the quick application of knowledge in everyday life, an aspiration that must be answered from the perspective of systematization of knowledge and scientific methodology”, stated Min.

One of the biohackers who works at a public university is Fernanda Matias, 43. Professor of biotechnology at the Federal Rural University of the Semi-Arid (UFERSA), the scientist joined the movement to relieve symptoms of an autoimmune disease, diffuse systemic sclerosis, which I couldn’t do it formally.

At another time, after becoming ill due to Covid, Fernanda found herself with sequelae in her cognition that would interfere with her role as a teacher. She said that she started microdosing Ayahuasca to alleviate these symptoms after reading studies on the characteristics of the biocompound.

“Ten drops a night helped me a lot,” he said. The biohacker philosophy also influenced Fernanda’s line of research, which started to create products for the Brazilian market.

For three years, the scientist studied plants from the Caatinga and the Amazon, which she prefers to keep confidential, in order to create a biohack that would help people sleep. “I tend to do research that reaches the market”, explained the researcher.

The “sleep elixir” would have helped people who previously needed medication to rest at night, according to Fernanda. In the researcher’s definition, the product does not fit the definition of medicine. “It’s a biohack,” she said.

“These are plants that have already been studied. Biohacking accelerates this process of arrival and appropriation of science by people”, stated the researcher from Ufersa

For Juliano Sanches, a doctoral candidate in scientific and technological policy at Unicamp, corporate pressures from the health industry drive the existence of biohacking groups outside established clinical settings.

Sanches, who maps the biohacker movement in Brazil, sees the community as a form of activism. “It is based on the principle of increasing patient participation in decision-making about management practices and technologies,” he said.

With biohacks, there is both greater patient participation in decisions about their own bodies and the health market, and the greater opening of scientific knowledge to society.

This sharing is one of the great ideas of the movement. “It breaks the passive model of scientific literacy, in which the scientist knows and society only absorbs knowledge in a linear way, without questioning and participation”.

Social fear against biohacking or attempts to ban it ends up boosting interest even more, according to Sanches.

Marcelo Khouri, who coordinates the research group Language, Technologies and Post-humanism, believes that there is a moral panic in relation to the movement. “The growth of biohacking is inevitable,” he said. “What we need is decent public education for science and technology.”

For Khouri, the laws of bioethics in Brazil are strict, but only scientists would be aware of this responsibility. “The ethics of biohackers is not to close knowledge to anything”.

“It is up to the government and civil society to discuss the size of the risk they are willing to run”, says the researcher.