Athamanatha Kitsune
SUMMARY OF THE SITUATION WE WANT TO ADDRESS
When people ask a doctor to treat them for a genetic disorder, presently they can expect a long and repetitive process. Perhaps some are lucky enough to have the chance to use a new and experimental genetic therapy, but even that is not a guaranteed long term cure. Most are still likely to be stuck with their genetic circumstances for life, along with the enormous cumulative medical bills for the effects, surgeries and pharmaceutical mitigations - assuming the disorder is not fatal.
There is cause for concern that the present path of development in the medical and pharmaceutical fields is insufficiently expedient. People are dying around the world daily as a result of Eroom's Law and the flaws of the economic system in combination with the way treatments are presently developed. When a disorder is rare or specific enough, it is ill fitted to the present paradigm and side effects of any treatments that may arise from genomic incompatibilities with unique individuals, are not effectively predicted.
A shift of paradigm and mindset is required, to one that considers humanity not to be some kind of endpoint, to be honed and maintained with its existing hubristically focused techniques, but rather as an early waypoint on a far longer journey. It's important to know that an over-attachment to anthropocentric thinking is a great harm to the long term potential for survival of Terran-origin intelligent, sapient life. We are in the early history of the development of Terran-origin life in this universe. The recognition of this fact and the acceptance of the role we are to play as the catalysts of the progress of that history through enabling the innovative changes desperately needed, amounts to enablement of a path to the ability to transcend our limits, presently referred to by some as Transhumanism, though more aptly it might more inclusively and broadly over time be called Transcendent, Biophysical and/or Morphological Freedom Activism.
That is to say, desiring and working towards transcending the mortal body and its limits. This can take many forms, but Put Together is focusing on freedom of form, or morphological freedom and associated freedoms, which are about being able to physically and biologically be anything you want to be. As in changing the shape, appearance or composition of the body itself. Conveniently for everyone, that includes what is very often needed for being 'healthy'.
We are also more generally about improved understanding of the causes of dysphoria and about understanding between all people; opening eyes and minds to the possibilities and to what lies beyond the perceived world immediately apparent to you.
Certain groups we have communicated with and been involved with previously, have denied that whole body adult genetic editing is even feasible, when repeatedly, new studies and information keep coming to light that chip away at their position. Our perspective is that it is not sufficient to dwell on the current capabilities of science, instead it is imperative to have a sense of where we are trying to go, and to direct our research with, and most importantly, from specific goals.
INCREMENTAL VS FIRST PRINCIPLES AND ZARAVASH'TA
I've been having the same argument over feasibility for the last 15 years with various scientists and the evidence just keeps building that they don't do enough research or reasonable mental extrapolation of possibility before retorting. To me, they exhibit too much incremental thinking. To them, I say you need to go back to first principles and use the existing scientific research as data to input, not as the be all end all.
Instead of asking "How do we make the existing tools do better?" or "How do we extend from the existing tools?", we need to ask "How does the genome all actually work anyway, and how can we make tools that generalise to all handling of it?"
DNA is a code. So like any code, it can be handled by computers. Computers can compile code and use it to build complex simulations. If you are trying to make a Digital Twin model for a sense of what positively works and what does not (and how you can combine what works into a successful gene editing vector) for any specific biological body, this is where you need to start.
Instead of limiting yourself with the top-down approach of using pharmaceutical methodologies and surgery, when it is clearly of insufficient speed, efficacy, personalisation and precision, try instead something tailored to the source of the problem. A generalised suite of tools for whole body gene editing that starts from the individual's own genome.
THE CONCERN OF BEING OVERTAKEN, OPEN SOURCE AND MOTIVATIONS
If you don't do it this way with a team of altruistic intent and the ethics of freedom of form in mind, you get overtaken by those with OTHER reasons to develop gene editing tech. Such as armies for supersoldiers, or unscrupulous corporations wanting to pull a GATTACA. If you don't ensure that the right motivations arrive at the goal first, the wrong ones will. And then the rightly motivated folks get a whole lot less say.
Part of the point of our gene editing system is to introduce biocybersecurity into genetic editing too! It's literally what a whole module (Vectron) of the software is for. Laberation will make full use of this to make it possible to safely share gene edits between users. You would download a vaccine... or anything you want to change yourself with. This brings the intended spirit of the internet to gene editing.
Open source is essential to the ethics we need.
If it was a proprietary system, you'd have a few dozen corporate employees who could fix a vulnerability, probably - if it was in their interest as a company. If it's open source, anyone who knows how to code can contribute fixes to be included in the project, and as we have seen with Linux (used in a ridiculous number of critical systems worldwide), vulnerability patching is not only very effective for the most part, but the vast majority of contributions are for positive efforts, not for exploitation.
DIGITAL TWIN
Simulations of the body can be used to provide a 'digital twin' of each individual genome being worked on, to precisely track what each edit and vector to carry them can do.
It can be considered inspiration, one way or another. If you can rewrite the DNA of your body such that you give it sequential instructions to follow, you can program it to transform as well as what to transform into. A digital twin model makes this much more intuitive, accurate and specific to each person's needs.
OVER-RELIANCE ON A HALL OF AI MIRRORS
Large Language Model AIs are a fascinating avenue of research currently transfixing the world - and transforming many jobs. Unfortunately, since they are technically still a form of very glorified autocomplete and akin to talking to your reflections in a fairground funhouse hall of mirrors. They are not suitable for the purposes of a gene editing system which requires no hallucinations, strong ethics and the ability to interface with and run on analogue hardware with frickin' lasers to manipulate the very code our bodies are built with.
What we need instead is an artificial sentience, which takes a different kind of approach to any LLMs. Where an LLM is opaque, an artificial sentience can be more transparent. Where an LLM replies with what it thinks follows the few words you just said, regardless of the wider context not explicitly directed to it, an artificial sentience is able to perform a wider analysis of the situation in your cells and handle many more inputs.
THE POSITIVE ACTIONS WE ARE TAKING
So now I've explained the tech we need, here's what we're doing at Put Together. We've started a biotech company. Vulpine Labs is the name of the B corporation (Public Benefit) we founded to protect and nurture our open source projects to develop a gene editing system that will do no less than cause an evolution revolution. https://www.vulpine-labs.com
First, it is important to recognise that while gene editing technologies of today appear to be in their infancy and have limited applications, the means to develop far more sophisticated tools for the purpose are all basically present. Science does not stand still, and engineering can often bridge us to things previously assumed to be impossible.
We took a look at our situation in 2008, that is, the situation of the health of humanity, of transgender people, space travellers, explorers, people affected by climate change, transhumanists, furries, therians and otherkin, including those who consider themselves transspecies. How could we be of most help?
Technologies that already exist have clear shortfalls.
* Hypnosis is fooling yourself. It doesn't actually change your biophysical reality in every sense, because in this world we live in, no matter what you have trained your mind to think, your body is still roughly the same.
* Surgery is messy and risky. Although some surgeons can do a great job, there is still a need to cut into the body and expose it to risk and a lengthy, often painful healing process. So that wouldn't be of much use.
* Prostheses don't change the underlying body.
* Implants as we know them today, may add some functionality or alter the shape, but they typically only last for a certain period before they become worn out or chemically problematic. They may also disrupt certain tissues in deleterious ways.
* Neuroprostheses (cyborg implants as we know them from sci-fi) are technology applied directly to the body with surgery. So they are still messy.
* Drugs are like throwing wrenches into a machine to see whether you can hit the right nut and turn it. There's a strong chance you will also hit other things, and the potential that doing so may cause damage. You then have to repeatedly take them to maintain the desired effect... which also maintains the potential side effects... and the profits of large corporations with some of the least scrupulous marketing in the world.
* Gene therapies as they currently stand, do modify the genes in a limited subset of your cells - but with the risk of those being replaced by cells with the original genome over time, possible autoimmune rejection, and still some extensive complex work being done with expensive reagents in an expensive lab to modify cells outside the body and then put them back in.
And when we looked at gene editing vectors at the time, they were unable to carry much genetic code into cells either, and the zinc finger nucleases and TALENS systems were limited in their scope. CRISPR, which in 2012 made a stride in the right direction, still has serious problems of accuracy and how much genetic information can be edited at once.
Nonetheless, molecules are like Lego bricks, in that for how simple they are, there are a ridiculously large number of ways they can be arranged. Many scientists find this irritating when it comes to determining exactly which way this or that sequence functions to produce a specific protein and how that protein folds and does its job. I have been told multiple times that the sheer combinatorial mathematics make this a really daunting problem. However, I view this as a problem mainly caused by insufficient interdisciplinary thinking and willingness to get down to first principles for tool development; we could be using pre-existing tools as inspiration but not as the pace-setters or limit-definers for the best we can hope to do. When you design tools for all the lessons we can actually now learn across the whole gamut of studies, sciences and approaches, from quantum physics, computing and biology to nutrition and the microbiome, and from AI and cybersecurity to virology and immunology, each of the modular components and areas of expertise can balance out the difficulties of the others.
Vulpine Labs is not just a company aiming to develop some sort of amazing future-tech, we're developing what should already be possible in terms of raw data and materials, and we are aiming to intercept the expected computing capacity of home gaming PCs at the time we release v.1.0 for most aspects of the computing. It's telling of how much the advent of Big Data and various technological advancements over the last few decades have overwhelmed many people we have spoken to, that they find our ideas incredulously hard to imagine. But personal incredulity is a fallacy.
MORE DETAILS OF OUR INTENTIONS
Our plan is to develop a system wherein you input a sample of your DNA, the system can read the DNA and produce from the code therein, a model of your entire body which is accurate to what your DNA encodes. You'll then be able to adjust that model based on any zoom level, from the genes to the jeans, and see what is necessary genetically to make an arbitrary change occur and unfold safely, and what the results are of arbitrary changes to the genes.
Then, it's time to package it all together into a custom-designed gene editing vector for your body, optimised to ensure the fastest-yet-safest means of introducing the changes to your body. You'll be able to test and tweak the vector and its processes, using viral and nanotechnological structures to make the perfect vehicle for your changes. Following which, if all is well with it, you can export this vector and the changes within it to a device which will assemble the real thing with actual biomolecules - in particular, ones it finds in your own cell samples where possible. This reduces and maybe eliminates the need for expensive supplies of reagents. The vector will be designed to go to all cells in the body, and adjust their DNA so they all match. No replacing modified cells with unmodified, and no mistaking modified self for non-self cells in the immune system's checks.
The resultant system and processes should be modular (we will offer individual modules stand-alone to researchers and institutions along with contracts to work with us to support and/or train them, and improve our systems for their needs), and capable of solving myriad problems. These could range from cancer susceptibility to autoimmune disorders, and from adaptation to space travel, to redesigning our bodies for self-customisation purposes, be that to eliminate dysphoria or just to be different.
Our software will be called the GUESS Unified Editing Suite and SDK, which is essentially an IDE for DNA, and is named the GUESS to remind us all there may be some situations in which there is yet insufficient data for it to rely on fully, and so it will have to take its best guess - especially in the early days. Our hardware will be called the Geneticiser. Together, they will do for gene editing what the RepRap did for 3D printing and what the Personal Computer and the internet did for information sharing and processing.
Together, we will accelerate evolution beyond natural selection, and outpace viral outbreaks with genetically encoded vaccines that anyone with the Geneticiser can 'print'. Vaccine distribution at the speed of the internet. We will make our device and software fully open source and available in as many places as possible.
The Evolution Revolution will be Geneticised.
THE CURRENT STATE OF OUR WORK
While we are very much still working out the minutiae of how it will work, we have great confidence that the way forward is to create our gene editing vectors in a sample of cells removed form the body first, using low powered, hollow lasers overlapped in a specific manner, and then to put our completed gene editing vector into the body, programmed to rapidly spread to all the body's cells before activating.
As for patents, what we have done is established our prior art and used a defensive publication to 'open patent' this all from the start. You can see it here. https://laberation.pubpub.org/pub/geneticiser
As a user, you wouldn't so much be operating on one cell, as constructing a virus-like carrier of specified genetic changes, which only works with the intended recipient. Like a virus, it would replicate itself and apply itself to many different cells. The trick to it is to code the software tools to be good enough to use them to successfully figure out how to design such a virus-like gene editing vector to work with all the cell types in the intended recipient's body, and to not trigger immune responses.
The only cells we would work with 'directly' would be the samples taken from the body of the individual in order to:
A. Have a sample of the recipient's DNA to read
B. Have a sample of cells from the recipient's body to construct the first of their new vector in, so that it:
- 1. Does not have unusual conditions around it compared to when it reaches its target - this is important for improving compatibility
- 2. Has all the ingredients needed without having to add externally supplied reagents (which can be expensive).
This approach will likely require a lot of work and refinement, but I still feel confident in it being possible.
Any specifics of challenges of the biology of the body and what can be done with the genome are questions to use the GUESS systems and science in general to answer. They won't be something we should try to answer definitively right now before we have the tools to work out those changes and methods of applying them with. HOWEVER, the sooner we have such tools and the longer we use them for, the more we can optimise the potential complexities and change-densities of the gene editing vectors we design and the processes and change sets they carry.
Furthermore, anything you call 'impossible' to do, most likely you will sooner or later be proven wrong. As Arthur C Clarke has said, "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
And yes, some things will be easier to do, but let's not make any complacency about it either. We are well aware there are many things in our tools to get right, to ensure that we don't trip over what 'should be simple'.
There will always be the potential for any technology to be misused. Just take a look at the terrible things people can do with fire, for example, or the wheel. But I don't think many are arguing we should never have learned to use flames to scare off predators, cook, keep warm and forge metals just because of the risks of arson, industrial pollution, the internal combustion engine and wildfires. Nor are many arguing that we should never have invented the wheel just because of traffic accidents, strip mining and mechanised warfare.
I am under no illusions about the great potential for misuse of the technologies I am developing. I know some people will do terrible things with it. But if we allow the spectre of that to hang over our heads as we decide our ways forward, we'll never make any progress towards all the great and wonderful things that can and will be done with it. In life, societal outcomes are partly determined by the expectations that we set, the examples we set of how to think about them. If we live in fear of our own creations, they will only be used by those we should fear. But if we recognise not only that there is potential for good to happen, but that this potential far outweighs the negative possibilities, the future outcomes will be, to some degree, proportionate to that. Of course this only works when there is indeed a potential positive use - but I would argue that solving genetic diseases, bringing about morphological freedom and the ability to adapt intelligent life to other environments than those we live in now, are such a revolutionary change that has such value to everybody, that fears of misuse even extended to the worst of society still do not even slightly quench my hope. And perhaps nor should they yours.
The body is the fundamental property or domain of the living being(s)* whose body it is. Speciation is, I would argue, a very good thing to do with a hitherto relatively homogeneous intelligent species population of 8 billion. Don't let success masquerade as invincibility. If all 8 billion people are the same and all living on the one planet they are adapted to, what happens when that planet's conditions are suddenly out of whack? Climate change may be something they can just about find a way to cope with, albeit with a loss, but what about something more immediate? Say, an asteroid or a major supervolcanic event? In such occasions, you need diverse options for Terran intelligent life to survive, both in terms of locations where we live (not putting all our eggs in one basket), and in terms of species that go in different directions of adaptation. I would say that family-making plans are not something you will need to worry about your exact species so much with anyway if you have the gene editing tech to modify yourselves to be more compatible with each other, or even to do some IVF. There are also plenty of orphans to adopt and give their own say on who they want to be.
It's important to remember that access to GUESS and Geneticiser tech shouldn't be a one-time-only thing. Once it's here and sufficiently advanced, it's something you should be able to use as often as you need. And so should your kids be able to use it as they get older. Like the internet didn't just vanish after bulletin boards and email.
That's because we're not just developing this as some proprietary flash in the pan. It's all open source, so even if Vulpine Labs was to vanish, the tech and the ability to use it will not. That's also why we are not kidding ourselves by claiming we could regulate the tech against every bad actor, any more than an ISP can stop every nasty use of the internet. But we can say that we will diligently do what we actually and reasonably can do to make sure that our contributions, from the tech's initial development to its continued support, training and improvement, are of the best quality possible, thanks to our experience as first movers on it.
*Plural systems obviously share them but that's beside the point
ESTIMATIONS AND MILESTONES
Alright, so first one must appreciate that we did not underestimate the magnitude of work required here for the actual technical development itself of the tools. What we underestimated slightly perhaps was the difficulty of persuading people with money to part with it for our cause, and to join with us based on more than just a fleeting enthusiasm, but actually to make it their passion. That's been a really tough challenge and it has shaped what timescales we've actually taken so far. So too have the frauds, liars and those who have joined us only to evaporate at the first sign of actual work to get stuck into. The amount of time we have sunk into that... that's something we were not taught how to deal with at school or college or university.
So it's in that context that progress has been slow so far. What seemed obvious to me, did not to a whole lot of investors. We went through an absurd number of rewrites of our business plan, only to be told investors don't even want to see a business plan document any more because who has the time for those, only to be told they do want to see basically everything that goes into one anyway. You can't do right for doing wrong as a startup founder. What I do ask of them all who are reading this is to be patient and to state what's bothering you and how we can fix it without losing our purpose, so we can learn and improve for you. Thankfully, lately some have actually been doing that.
In terms of milestones...
We've gotten through most stages of the initial designing of the framework of the system, and we flesh it out more whenever we can. The design process has been somewhat organic, as it has taken so long that new technologies which we expected to eventually happen, are now available and so we've been adjusting here and there to fit how they actually work. We have something approaching half of the INITIATOR SET module coded - a module of the GUESS software system, this module is for processing the variables in translation from mRNA to protein. We started with this one because it's actually got more scientific value by itself in terms of filling gaps in bioinformatics, than some of the rest of the system has, but it's also quite doable with our approach to software systems design.
We have all our servers set up and running - we've had those since 2016 and we keep them up to date. Our IT has gone from strength to strength and has really shown the resilience of some of the early choices we made. We stick to open source wherever reasonably possible, to be true to our purpose. Our CIO recently solved a server problem that had eluded many attempts to fix it, and so got our collaborative document editing up and running without need for Google.
What's coming next is to really increase our funding so we can afford to pay people and upgrade our equipment. We want to get our developers on the task full time, and we want to hire many more of them. We also want to get the whole GUESS, not just half of one module out of 27, to version 1.0 completion. This will take a few years maybe, depending on how many issues we encounter.
We also want to establish a lab and buy equipment suited to the tasks required for the prototyping of the Geneticiser.
Most of all, we want to emphasise that in 15 years of efforts so far, what has held us back has not been scientific limitations, but rather financial limitations and limitations of people's imagination or comprehension of the feasibility of our work. These can be overcome. These are not hard and fast barriers. But we do need to be able to pay our team properly so that we can fully document our designs and systems and properly explain them. What we have so far in our documentation is far from complete. It's mostly works in progress. It's a lot to ask people to fund a work in progress, but that doesn't stop a whole bunch of projects from successfully doing so out there.
Right now, we're running a WeFunder campaign. https://wefunder.com/vulpine.labs.inc is the main link, and we also need you to read this link too for legal reasons according to WeFunder. https://help.wefunder.com/testing-the-waters-legal-disclosure
With the right backing, this will help us get this whole thing moving at the pace it deserves. Frankly, the importance of this project is beyond money and it ought to have governments and companies falling over each other to fund it and provide other resources if they all actually understood it fully, but I'm guessing the fact that that hasn't happened means they have some combination of not thinking the same way I do and not really knowing much about it or its implications. Hopefully, this thread and places where I re-use the text from it with mild edits elsewhere, might help a bit with the underlying societal awareness of us and what we are about, and maybe somewhat dispel some of the weird myths that a few have tried to share about us. Perhaps the least plausible of which, and one of the most recent, is that I'm somehow rich. If I was, I wouldn't be doing a WeFunder campaign and also running a Patreon donation page ( https://patreon.com/vulpinedesigns ) to keep us afloat in the meantime because WeFunder takes a while to build up.
WRAPPING UP WITH A FEW FAQs
I hope my candour here is understood how it is honestly intended. As experience has taught me many times, one can never take the correct reading of one's intent online for granted. So I apologise pre-emptively if my language hasn't quite carried the perfect tone you'd hope to see. To paraphrase the doctor from Star Trek, I'm a genetic editing systems engineer, not a social expert.
To you all, I invite you to ask questions. To get you started, here are some I have answered before.
"Can I be a guinea pig for your system?"
No. If you want to speed its progress up, we need help developing it or there will be no system to test on anyone or anything.
"Can you do this, that or the other very specific medical or cosmetic thing to someone's body with this system though?"
Maybe? That's something we would know far better once it's built.
"Surely only the rich will be able to afford to use this?"
The system is open source and we are doing what we can to keep the costs not only as low as possible, but the system designed to not require some of the most expensive things usually required in genetic science, by working smarter rather than more expensively. That means some things can now be handled by software, and some things don't need reagents when you do more clever work with your lasers, quantum physics and mathematics. Our money will be made from our support contracts, co-development with clients to create bespoke extensions, hosting the online (cloud) version, and training, among other services.
"Won't you just take the money and run?"
If I was going to do that, I wouldn't have stayed in touch with our earliest investors to keep them appraised of our progress. If I was going to do that, I wouldn't have made this project so complicated. There are far simpler and more efficient ways to get money from people.
"Why is the project so complicated? Can't you just simplify it down to something much more similar to existing tools and methods?"
That's like asking NASA why they couldn't start the moonshot project off by just making a boat or a balloon, and indefinitely put off the development of Apollo while they tweak the perfect new boat or balloon or boat-launched balloon. That's not how you get to the Moon.
"Where are your citations and thorough scientific documents?"
The system we are developing is of such broad scope as we are still compiling its documentation in some of its modules while we are further along with the development of others.
https://gitlab.vulpinedesigns.com/explore should give you our raw material, and https://laberation.pubpub.org should give you a few examples of more refined documentation we have made, though even those are not static - we know there are gaps, we are actively researching the best ways to fill them.
Finally, our website is https://vulpine-labs.com
Our Youtube is https://www.youtube.com/@vulpinelabs - check out our intro videos and our demo of INITIATOR SET!
Our Mastodon is @[email protected]
Our LinkedIn is https://linkedin.com/company/vulpine-labs-inc/
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And you can ask me in DMs for Signal, Telegram, Discord, Mattermost, Matrix, VRChat, Steam, Second Life, Open Simulator, DeviantArt, FurAffinity, Google Talk, Project Z, Mighty Networks, Zoom, Skype, IRC, emails, phone calls, letters and/or establishing a carrier pigeon route. I really hope nobody takes me up on that last one because I have no way to adequately care for or return a carrier pigeon.
