Fast-forward to last year, when rationalist Aaron Silverbook came across Hillman's original work with the genetically modified bacteria. Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and Aella's business manager, decided to recreate Hillman's work3. First, he applied for funding from FTX. He got it, but then FTX collapsed. Then, he applied for funding from alternative rationalist funding source Manifund, got that, and failed to recreate Hillman's work. However, Aaron declared mission success anyways in that he negotiated with Oragenics to acquire a sample of BCS3L-1, one of Hillman's later strains4, in exchange for $50k and promise of royalties, although he didn't get any intellectual property rights .
Aaron then went on an intellectual journey where he tried to figure out what exactly to do with this genetically modified bacteria. After all, he was faced with basically the same daunting FDA journey as Hillman, but without Hillman's scientific background or financial resources. After talking to a bunch of people, including me, he eventually decided on a very rationalist, very Bay Area, very strange approach:
1. Sell the genetically modified bacteria as-is for a one time payment of $20,000 in a libertarian charter city in Honduras
2. Give a bunch of rationalist-adjacent celebrities free samples of the GMO bacteria as-is in exchange for positive press, including Scott Alexander, Aella (the porn star/escort/s*x researcher who he's the business manager for), Richard Hanania, Cremieux, and Bryan Caplan
3. Take preorders for $200 a piece from the general public
It's worth noting that, regardless of what I think of this plan (i.e. it's bad and maybe unethical), I'm pretty sure this plan is also illegal. While Lantern claims to be marketing this probiotic as a cosmetic, it is meant to prevent and cure tooth decay. According to the WHO, tooth decay is a disease. A product meant to cure and prevent a disease is a drug, and legally needs to go through the drug approval process. But, you know, whatever.
...
Now, given that information, think about the wisdom of infecting your mouth with a bacteria that is designed to continually produce mutacin-1140. You are continually producing an antibiotic in your mouth that:
1. Can be dangerous
2. Goes everywhere that blood goes
3. Is not inactivated by stomach acid
4. Kills other bacteria very effectively
At the very least, this is a great way to give yourself the digestive equivalent of continually taking antibiotics (i.e. diarrhea and indigestion). This also might be a good way to give yourself a hypersensitivity reaction like that poor rat. It's hard to say, because making a safety equivalence between taking an IV antibiotic one time at a high dose and taking an antibiotic orally at a low dose for potentially decades is really difficult. This is why the FDA requires safety studies.
What I can say for sure is that this would be exceptionally dangerous for infants and immunocompromised people. Infants have died from hospital-grade probiotics before, and immunocompromised people have gotten seriously sick. That's from normal, “healthy” probiotics. How do you think your infant (who does not yet have a fully colonized microbiome) will respond if you infect them with a bacterium that nukes all other bacteria in their system? Better hope you don't kiss your baby or share food or drinks with them!
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If Lumina had the good sense of Hillman (who, to be clear, I don't think is a scientific saint either), they at least would have sold the version of the GMO bacteria that had a self-destruct button, AJ2M, which I think was the last strain Hillman created. That one was designed to [editor's note: removed a possibly incorrect claim] require an exogenous amino acid, d-alanine, to function. If the d-alanine stopped being provided, the bacteria died, assuming it didn't acquire any mutations in the meantime that let it keep surviving.
But Lumina didn't do that, even though I and, I assume others, told them to do that. They sold the earlier version of the probiotic without a kill-switch, which means that the cat is out of the bag and is probably giving overly credulous rationalists diarrhea as we speak.
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