• Brian Hanley has completed a self-experiment in which he injected a plasmid encoding growth-hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) into his own leg muscle and used electroporation to drive uptake, aiming to raise systemic IGF-1 and increase muscle mass; blood samples are now being analyzed by George Church’s laboratory at Harvard.

• Hanley’s company, Butterfly Sciences (bf-sci.com), publicly lists this GHRH trial alongside other open-source gene-therapy prototypes, including a “snake-venom hyper-immunity project.”

• Participants debated the trade-offs between naked-plasmid and viral-vector delivery: plasmids suffer from poor nuclear import, lysosomal degradation, and nuclease attack in large mammals, while viral vectors such as CAV-2 canine adenovirus solve these bottlenecks but introduce higher costs and immunogenicity concerns.

• Current best-practice bioproduction for human-grade viral vectors still relies on mammalian cell lines (HEK-293, HeLa) in batch bioreactors, which remain more cost-effective than continuous culture at small-to-medium scale; full automation is limited by manual steps like centrifuge loading.

• Speculation arose that Balaji Srinivasan—former a16z partner with a genomics background—was under consideration for a senior FDA role, raising hopes that a more permissive regulatory stance could accelerate human gene-therapy trials.

• Market concepts discussed include targeting Asian “cram-school” populations with cognitive-enhancement or anti-sleep gene therapies (e.g., CLOCK-pathway alleles) and launching a “dog gene-therapy app store” as a lower-risk platform to iterate on vector technologies before human use.

• Background reading shared during the conversation included Raptor Engineering’s TALOS FlexVer PDF on tamper-resistant hardware and a Hacker News thread titled “Impending Crypto Monoculture.”