Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen. One of the folks who I talked to told me that he was so insecure about being a ginger that he was looking for any way to stop it.
And rather than dyeing his hair, I suppose, he went for melanotan. But then he said he also had a friend who accidentally took too much melanotan and people started reading him as being a different race than he was.
There's an episode about Seinfeld about this. When Kramer got in the tanning bed and he stayed in too long, scared his new black girlfriend's family. So I'd be very curious to see how that plays out in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, Silicon Valley has become more than just the birthplace of groundbreaking technology. It's also a hub of biohacking.
According to WebMD, biohacking is making changes to your body or lifestyle to improve something about yourself. like your health, brain power, or athletic ability. So eat a balanced diet, get sleep, move your body. Simple, right? But biohacking is also notorious for bizarre hacks at best and medical misinformation at worst. Think tech giant Brian Johnson using his own son's blood.
to crack the fountain of youth. But that hasn't stopped people from pushing the limits of the human body. In fact, what if I told you the rise of prescription injectables like Ozempic may have some biohackers turning to the unregulated injectable market? And to help me out, we've got Jasmine Sun, an independent journalist who writes a Substack newsletter about Silicon Valley culture.
Thanks for having us on.
and Karen Mashke, Editor-in-Chief of Ethics and Human Research, a journal from the Hastings Center for Bioethics, an independent research center. Thank you very much. Sound freaky? Don't worry, I got you. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
I actually want to start with you, Jasmine. Can you set the scene for us? What is the new trend making its way through Silicon Valley? And what is it hoping to hack?
Right. So I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the rise of, quote unquote, Chinese peptides in Silicon Valley. which is a biohacking trend that's exploded throughout 2025. I think I first saw it as a meme and people talking about it on Twitter, on Axe.
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Chapter 2: How has biohacking evolved in Silicon Valley?
Again, the vast majority of them having no human clinical trial evidence with the exception of the GLP-1s.
When I first came across your story, I was like scanning, scraping the inside of my brain, trying to remember the last science class I took in 2004. For those of us who don't know or simply may not remember, what are peptides?
Yeah. So peptides are a pretty broad class of chemical. It's basically a short chain of amino acids. So think like a mini baby protein. A lot of peptides occur naturally in the body. So oxytocin or insulin is a type of peptide. Of course, that's one that we do have lots of evidence for.
But I think because it is such a broad category, people have been extrapolating from the success of proven peptides like insulin or Ones like semaglutide, GLP-1s, to all sorts of these other amino acids where we haven't really studied the effects. We're not exactly sure how they work, but folks are trying all sorts of things.
Okay. So Karen, as a bioethicist, can you break down what makes biohacking so compelling to people, like especially in the tech space?
Yeah.
I think there's been a longstanding issue for 50 years or more in this country about people thinking that regulations are too strict, that when they want to do something to their body, they should be able to do it. And some of that came out of the patient advocacy movement back in the 1940s through the 1960s.
And it's still prevalent today in the patient advocacy movement that science moves too slowly. we have unmet needs, meaning we don't have the right kinds of drugs to cure people or make them better, and that there's an urgency to people who are really, really sick. And so that kind of thinking has been translated into a lot of these other
populations who are not necessarily sick, but want to be able to do something to enhance their body. And enhancement can take all kinds of forms. It can take it through peptides. You can enhance your body by doing personalized gene editing, which has been done by biohackers.
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Chapter 3: What are Chinese peptides and why are they popular?
hustle culture is back in, people are celebrating these long hours. And as one of my sources said, why be consistent at the gym when I could work 16 hours straight at my research job? I think another factor too has to do with the way that Silicon Valley thinks about the establishment, thinks about institutions, and thinks about themselves.
So I think a lot of folks who are in the tech community really pride themselves on feeling like they are on the frontier, like they can figure things out themselves. And so this sort of, quote unquote, do your own research mode of approaching medicine is really appealing. The idea is like, oh, the FDA is so slow. It takes like 10 years to do all these studies.
They're really risk averse because they're really worried about the downsides. But These folks might think, well, I'm a pretty smart person. I have a computer science degree. I'm good at using ChatGPT to do research. I've built a company from scratch in a field where no one told me I could do it before. So like, why couldn't I also take my health into my own hands?
And so I think also the very risk tolerant culture, the very I'm a frontiersman, like I can figure out stuff before the institutions can culture also makes people a lot more comfortable with exploring, you know, these unregulated drugs. I think several founders who I spoke to who are using these peptides are
literally compared their risk tolerance around health to their risk tolerance around their companies. They said, you know, I know there are downsides. I know it could go wrong, but I'm somebody who is willing to take the risk because sometimes the upside is worth it. Coming up.
They see technology not just as a way to make their human lives more efficient, but actually as a way to transcend the limitations of the human body to sort of merge with the machine and become more than our, you know, fleshy selves.
More with Jasmine and Karen after the break. Genomics pioneer Robert Green says many parents want their healthy newborn's DNA screened for diseases that may or may not show up later in life. There is an argument that knowledge is power and many families would like to know everything, whether it's treatable or not. The debate over revealing the secrets in baby's DNA.
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Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
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