Who Is Former NASA Scientist, Coronavirus Vaccine Biohacker Josiah Zayner?

Josiah Zayner, a former NASA scientist, has replicated a COVID-19 vaccine that had worked in monkeys and tested it on himself.

Zayner live-streamed the process over a couple months and found that his experiment produced a promising result. Multiple COVID-19 vaccines are currently undergoing human trials however, vaccines typically take years to develop.

U.S. drug firms are attempting to produce a vaccine only months after the coronavirus pandemic began. Zayner, who left NASA in favor of engaging in do-it-yourself experiments, argued that by working outside regulatory structures, he could test a vaccine more quickly, and certainly more cheaply, by giving it to himself.

Even though his experiment produced a promising result, Zayner found many unanswered questions in his experiment. After his inoculation, it wasn’t clear whether the antibodies he found in his body actually made a difference in fighting the virus.

Zayner has long-believed that biohackers such as himself have the potential to make science move faster. However, after attempting to make a vaccine Zayner now understands why vaccines take years to produce. As the U.S. rushes to produce a public vaccine in a short amount of time, Zayner said he has discovered why the long, slow process of clinical trials shouldn’t be rushed.

“Human beings, their biology is so complex,” he said in a recent interview. “The results are going to be messy. The experiments are going to be messy. So you test 30,000 people so that the messiness kind of averages out.”

Before starting his own experiment, Zayner initially took a test that showed him he didn’t have antibodies. But after his experiment, Zayner found that he did have some antibodies, just not enough to produce a positive result on an antibodies test. While those antibodies didn’t appear to be the neutralizing type, he wondered whether the result came because the vaccine was picking up signals from antibodies to a different virus.

“I’m very suspicious of my own data,” he said.

Zayner's fame began when he injected himself with the gene-editing tool Crispr while giving a talk at a San Francisco biotech conference. Such stunts have made him an informal figurehead for a growing movement of do-it-yourself scientists emboldened by advancements in technology that have made such feats as engineering biology increasingly simple.