Editor's Note: I met Josiah Zayner a handful of years ago while working on Anatomy of Next: NEW WORLD. In an episode on making man Martian, we talked about bypassing elite institutions, democratizing science, and biological self-determination, or every individual’s right to his or her own body, which includes their DNA — and the right to change it. Back in 2020, Josiah saw a clear path to spinning out a Covid vaccine, and believed it could be done relatively fast. This bucked a major media narrative, even after Moderna designed its own vaccine in just two days. In any case, for sharing his work, but I think really for sharing this perspective, Josiah was deplatformed. This is something that happens to biohackers quite a lot.

I believe people like Josiah live on the frontier. They sometimes make mistakes, but they also advance our civilization. I also believe the practice of oligopoly speech platforms vanishing entire worlds of thought their social media managers don’t understand is incredibly dangerous. Josiah’s is a side of this conversation rarely heard, so I invited him to share his thoughts. Below, his pitch for every person’s right to self and science.

-SOLANA