Josie Zayner as an example. The 1517 portfolio founder and biohacking pioneer is a mad scientist, in a manner of speaking, but she’s also an “artist and provocateur,” Danielle said. One doesn’t livestream injecting oneself with a homemade Covid vaccine if one is not prepared to pay the price for being oneself

Let’s imagine that a radical life-extension startup succeeds at developing a product for our deeply flawed, often inaccessible healthcare market, and presumably protects the intellectual property for that product from diffusing into the wider world. What would that breakthrough mean for the rest of us?

When the pandemic hit, Cowen and Collison, the founder of Stripe, set up a separate grant programme to fund research. The pair had raised and spent millions before larger bodies managed to respond. One large grant went to Anne Wylie, who developed saliva tests for covid-19. Though Wylie was a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health, and... See more