> why don’t we just…inject follistatin itself? Maybe cost of manufacturing recombinant protein, maybe rapid degradation means you’d need a lot of injections, maybe there are bad immune reactions? Or more problems I haven’t thought of?
Myostatin and Follistatin work in concentrations and both are constantly produced and cleared from your system under normal conditions. In order to be interesting, you need to increase the background concentration of myostatin, and a single injection isn't going to do that for more than hours at most, and you would need to inject a *lot* of it.
The reason why Follistatin is particularly interesting as a gene therapy is because for it to be interesting, you want it produced constantly throughout the day and over a long period of time. This is quite different to therapies where you want just enough of a dose of a thing to trigger a particular effect or you just need a little bit of a thing released over time.
Huh now I feel like maybe I should make a public statement. It would go sth like a longer version of:
—-
“I like and respect Max, he’s brilliant and knowledgeable and coming at this with a pure heart. And his take is simply incompatible with my direct experience of unmistakeable, unexpected results (sudden huge cardio improvement after a week when I was only expecting to get swole faster). I’m doing a VO2 max series while turning off and on the treatment and will have some objective data soon (though conflated with the reversibility concern), which ofc may or may not support my experience.
I appreciate both Max’s informed skepticism and Minicircle’s innovative treatment, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world where new things were accepted without critical review, or a world that didn’t have inventions so awesome that it’s hard to believe they could be real.”
Red flags galore. Science ones, but also regarding the founder. "Unqualified" does not begin to describe him. Would you buy a used car from a guy named "Machiavelli Davis"?
This and the Lumina dental treatment rhyme, but this one is even wackier.
I wonder how many similar things we're going to get?
Tears in my eyes from laughing with Max Berrys comments on biologist pay and those god damned CHO cells. Cheers to those still in the trenches.
> why don’t we just…inject follistatin itself? Maybe cost of manufacturing recombinant protein, maybe rapid degradation means you’d need a lot of injections, maybe there are bad immune reactions? Or more problems I haven’t thought of?
Myostatin and Follistatin work in concentrations and both are constantly produced and cleared from your system under normal conditions. In order to be interesting, you need to increase the background concentration of myostatin, and a single injection isn't going to do that for more than hours at most, and you would need to inject a *lot* of it.
The reason why Follistatin is particularly interesting as a gene therapy is because for it to be interesting, you want it produced constantly throughout the day and over a long period of time. This is quite different to therapies where you want just enough of a dose of a thing to trigger a particular effect or you just need a little bit of a thing released over time.
Berry not bishop * :)
Huh now I feel like maybe I should make a public statement. It would go sth like a longer version of:
—-
“I like and respect Max, he’s brilliant and knowledgeable and coming at this with a pure heart. And his take is simply incompatible with my direct experience of unmistakeable, unexpected results (sudden huge cardio improvement after a week when I was only expecting to get swole faster). I’m doing a VO2 max series while turning off and on the treatment and will have some objective data soon (though conflated with the reversibility concern), which ofc may or may not support my experience.
I appreciate both Max’s informed skepticism and Minicircle’s innovative treatment, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world where new things were accepted without critical review, or a world that didn’t have inventions so awesome that it’s hard to believe they could be real.”
_Technology Review_ write-up: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/13/1068330/minicircle-prospera-honduras-biohacking-follistatin-gene-therapy/
Red flags galore. Science ones, but also regarding the founder. "Unqualified" does not begin to describe him. Would you buy a used car from a guy named "Machiavelli Davis"?
This and the Lumina dental treatment rhyme, but this one is even wackier.
I wonder how many similar things we're going to get?