“Accelerating” Human Experiments
Venture capitalists are investors in thousands of biotech startups, working in genetics, disease treatment, development of new drugs, stem cells and other areas. These startups face regulatory burdens from bodies like the FDA, while trailing the funding power of big pharma. This has driven venture capitalists to seek roads around regulatory bodies through off-shore clinical trials, FDA-free “Network State” zones in the global south, and political maneuvering to gut regulatory bodies. Their backing of Trump’s second term is significantly motivated by their biotech ambitions, and their model of medical development – as for AI and crypto – is accelerationism.
Startups like a16z-backed Formation Bio are promising accelerated development through clinical trials. They state “Our trials are run in-house by our top tier clinical operations functions, including patient recruitment, site management, and study monitoring…. By taking a radically more efficient approach across the drug development lifecycle, we are moving faster than ever before toward bringing treatments to patients.”
Another firm focusing on biotech is Founder’s Fund, a Peter Thiel venture capital firm. Founder’s Fund is a key investor in Neuralink, aiming to bring experimental brain-computer implants to humans. Neuralink came under fire in allegations that its animal trials resulted in excessive suffering and death. Neuralink’s ambitions to rapidly implant brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) resulted in “gruesome” animal subjects testing, leading to the euthanasia of up to a dozen primates in one trial. While Neuralink’s CEO, Elon Musk, publicly denied claims that the animals died due to the implants, investigations suggest otherwise. In 2022, Neuralink came “under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths.” The investigation focused on “violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals.” In 2023, regulators stated it found no compliance breaches. Yet, since Neuralink’s inception, the company has been responsible for the deaths of over 1,500 animal subjects and “current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research,” some citing “a lack of preparation by a testing staff working in a pressure-cooker environment.” This raises significant concerns about the application of venture capitalist’s self-professed accelerationist ideology to medical testing.
Founder’s Fund is also an investor in Synthego, “the first and only provider of Full Stack Genome Engineering solutions”; “pioneering products and services to accelerate CRISPR-based cell and gene therapy development.” A major theme of venture capital medical development is genetic and genome engineering; this is particularly concerning in light of eugenicist ideologies present in their conspiracy.
While many of these startups involve legitimate areas of inquiry, there are obvious ethical concerns about how venture capitalists are approaching medical development. Amassing enough capital to invest in life-altering scientific research should not lend venture capitalists authority over the medical establishment or its ethical mandates. They are not doctors, are trying to dismantle the FDA, and show a consistent disregard for human life, as well as willingness to go to extreme lengths to perform unregulated clinical trials. The implications of their accelerationist ideology for human trials is deeply troubling.
Venture Capital Evades FDA
In 2017, venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel financially supported an experimental herpes vaccine in St. Kitts, outside of US regulations. This off-shore experiment was performed without regulatory boundaries and little oversight; further, “the government of St. Kitts and Nevis says it was never notified of the trial, which experimented with live viruses on humans”. The trial was internationally condemned; “‘What they’re doing is patently unethical,’ said Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkin Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division. ‘There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.’”
The year prior, Peter Thiel tried to get a16z puppet Balaji Srinivasan appointed as head of the FDA under Trump’s first term. Srinivasan, evangelist of the Network State project, advocates for a “FDA-free society” and advances “the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference.”
In 2019, Pronomos Capital was founded, with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale. Pronomos has funded a number of Network State sites - “new cities” and unregulated zones - with a primary goal to secure locations where they can host clinical trials without FDA or other regulatory oversight. Read more about the Network State here.
In Roatàn, Honduras, the Pronomos-backed Network State of Próspera has become a key site of venture capital clinical trials. They have adopted a permanent longevity and biohacking hub within Pròspera called Vitalia City. Vitalia began as an extended “pop-up” city with conferences, summits and community gatherings centered around gene editing and unregulated medical experimentation. Patri Friedman, a part-time resident of Pròspera and partner at Pronomos Capital, flaunted his chip implant to a Vitalia City audience- an implant under the skin to unlock his Tesla vehicle and share his personal contact information by tapping other people’s smartphones.
Inside the Pròspera and Vitalia City compound are three different medical clinics: Minicircle, GARM and Symbiont Labs. These clinics operate with impunity in order to bring “human enhancement” and AI-driven “solutions” to the natural aging process, referred to as “radical life extension.” Vitalia claims regulations and FDA measures are “a result of bad initiatives.” Vitalia’s experiments and goals for medical innovation include “pushing the boundaries of radical life extension through breakthrough therapies and future innovations like body replacement, cryonics”... and improving “quality of life by enhancing humans with cybernetics, implants, neurotechnology, advanced regeneration, (and) AI-driven healthcare”.
Their model is embedded in a libertarian, free-market view that is reliant upon “crypto cities” and blockchain technology to “accelerate” the speed of medical trials while also offering “on-the-ground (implants) through Symbiont Labs and a bio 3D printer,” provided through Life SI, an Argentinian-based 3D bioprinting company that seeks to “humanize technology.”
Since the current libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, took office in 2023, he has gutted the government, regulatory bodies and economic system, plunging the country into deep poverty while welcoming Network State projects Aleph and Forma City – likely sites of future medical trials.
The Honduran medical community has denounced Minicircle in Próspera, expressing that these trials “could have serious consequences for Honduran residents who agree to participate in these experiments, since they work with elements that require extreme care, such as stem cells, and could also cause environmental damage to the island if the waste is dumped into the water or another environment.” Even though the Pròspera trials are under investigation, these Network State clinics remain in operation and continue to spread throughout the globe; Pròspera has announced that they are extending their model to multiple sites in Africa. Worldcoin, the Sam Altman project, is famous for collecting the biometrics of Kenyans, scanning their eyeballs in return for small amounts of cryptocurrency.
Another venture capital vehicle for medical development is Zuzalu. Ethereum CEO, Vitalik Buterin, merged the crypto conference model with Network State enthusiasts for this long-term, residency-based “pop-up” city in Montenegro, starting in March of 2023. This two-month city brought in people like Bryan Johnson, the aging-obsessed billionaire of the “Don’t Die” movement. It became a catalyst for a flourishing “longevity” community with dozens of global conferences and “pop-up” cities. Their goal, according to Laurence Ion (co-creator of Zuzalu), is to “make death optional.”
The success of Zuzalu has paved the way for more pop-up cities including “Zu-Villages”, “Edge Cities” and summits, hosted in the Georgian mountains, Dublin, Thailand, Berlin, California, Argentina and many more regions. These events integrate longevity, biohacking, human augmentation, and virtual reality for their quest to extend their own lives beyond current human capabilities. Like the Montenegro pop-up city, Zu-Villages and Edge Cities are funded by Ethereum grants and utilize crypto currency as their preferred financial system. Decentralization, for them, is the key to solving economic and regulatory barriers to biotech innovation.
Implications for Human Rights
The history of biological and medical experimentation abounds with instances of abominable acts of cruelty inflicted on humans in the name of progress. The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”, conducted over 40 years, did not get informed consent from study participants, who were not offered treatment even after it became widely available. According to Tuskegee University, “Between the start of the study in 1932 and 1947, the date when penicillin was determined as a cure for the disease, dozens of men had died and their wives, children and untold number of others had been infected.”
The case of Henrietta Lacks also stands out in history: “Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 when doctors removed cells from her tumor without her knowledge or permission. Those cells — now known as HeLa cells — had remarkable properties that allowed them to be endlessly reproduced, and they have since been used for a variety of scientific breakthroughs, including research about the human genome and the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines… Lacks' descendants have argued that she and other Black women were ‘preyed on’ by a group of white doctors in the 1950s and that her family was never compensated for the use of her genetic material, which made such profitable scientific advancements possible.”
Considering the fascist nature of the venture capital conspiracy, we must also consider the Nazi medical experiments, documented here by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Returning to a time of degeneration of ethics and morals in the treatment of human subjects is not a path humanity can risk. In this environment of global war, rising fascism, border and migration crisis – and venture capital’s participation in it all – these efforts in unregulated human testing require serious investigation.