Update: We appreciate that thousands trusted our story was real, though it hadn’t hit mainstream news when we reported on it within a day after this tragic event. Now it’s on every MSM source I see. Sources at the bottom, including a Go Fund Me account for the Traywick family.
The Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. has now confirmed that biohacker and CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, Aaron Traywick, was found dead on Sunday. While not many details are known, we do know he was found in a spa in Washington, D.C., face down, doing flotation therapy in very shallow water.
He was only 28.
His friend (featured in BBC article below) posts about the death here.
(“Floating” is done in a sound-proof pod, filled with salt water at body temperature. The practice, which gives the sensation of floating in empty space, is meant to promote a state of deep meditation. I’ve done it a few times, including with Dr. Mercola. It was fun and easy and the tanks are usually very large. You can sit up, and are very buoyant (float very easily). I didn’t feel claustrophobic at all. Millions worldwide use floatation tanks with no problems.)
Traywick, also a transhumanist (a movement seeking to evolve our species beyond its natural limits, primarily via technology), was a visionary to some because of his strong ties to biohacking; a type of scientific research that seeks to push medical technology without the use of academic, state, or corporate partners (it also tends to heavily emphasize independence and experimentation).
The video below is an example of the type of projects he worked on:
(As you noticed in the video above, Traywick and his friends experiment on themselves, something Machiavelli Davis regards as a strength, “Working with a tight knit team of passionate friends is also a far better experience than just being brought together because of a corporate job.”1)
And, just this February, Traywick publicly injected himself (see below) with a substance he co-created as a gene-editing cure and immunization against herpes. “The procedure itself is a simple one. If my herpes goes away, and the vaccine remains detectable in the blood upon subsequent lab analysis, we know it works as a cure. For Andreas, so long as the same happens, and he still doesn’t have herpes, then we have 90 percent of the data necessary to prove the vaccine works.”1
When the FDA got wind of Traywick’s herpes Type 1 & 2 trial, they “expressed concern about the safety of self-administered gene therapies and advised consumers to refrain from undergoing treatments not approved or studied ‘under appropriate regulatory oversight.’”1
(Tristan Roberts, a 28-year-old computer programmer, is part of a growing community of biohackers, and was a friend to Traywick. You can read about why he became a self-experimenter to try and cure his own HIV in this article, from the BBC.)
Our hearts go out to his family and friends. The biohacking community has lost a giant. If you are able, please help his family lay him to rest, by donating to the GoFundMe that was set up for his parents.
