This heralded the beginning of Zayner’s bacterial makeover. He was clad in a Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt, jeans, and white socks and sandals. At his feet, James Baxter, Zayner’s one-eyed orange cat, rubbed its flank against its owner’s legs. The kitchen smelled like an outhouse in a busy campground.
Over the course of the next four days, Zayner would attempt to eradicate the trillions of microbes that lived on and inside his body — organisms that helped him digest food, produce vitamins and enzymes, and protected his body from other, more dangerous bacteria. Ruthlessly and methodically, he would try to render himself into a biological blank slate. Then, he would inoculate himself with a friend’s microbes — a procedure he refers to as a "microbiome transplant." Zayner imagines the collection of organisms that live on him — his microbiome — as a suit. As such, it can be worn, mended, and replaced. The suit he was living with, he said, was faulty, leaving him with severe gastrointestinal pain. A new suit could solve all that. "You kind of are who you are, to a certain extent," he said. "But with your bacteria, you can change that."
A full bacterial overhaul like this had never been documented before — in fact, it may have been the first time it had ever been attempted. There was no evidence to suggest it would work, though there was a real risk it could make Zayner life-threateningly sick. That didn’t bother him.
Zayner unwrapped a brand-new syringe and filled its barrel with the brownish liquid. He grabbed one half of a gelatin capsule, pushed the syringe’s plunger, and filled the capsule with the fecal slurry in inconsistent spurts. "Undigested portions of the meal are clogging it," he said. Frustrated, he removed the needle and pushed the plunger again, letting clumpy muck accumulate in the half capsule. But by the time he joined both ends of the pill, the gelatin casing had begun deteriorating in his gloved hands. "I think the liquid is dissolving these fucking capsules," he said.
For a brief moment, Zayner considered throwing his head back and swallowing the feces straight up, like a shooter from hell. But the thought disgusted him, and instead he opened a kitchen drawer and grabbed an inoculating loop, an instrument used by microbiologists to sample microorganisms. He dipped it into the large, poop-filled Ziploc bag on the counter. "We’re going to try this new technique — the ‘stuff and jam,’" he said. The unadulterated shit had a frosting-like texture and didn’t eat through the gelatin; the pill held up. Exhausted from his most recent dose of antibiotics, Zayner took a break. Tomorrow, in a hotel room near the San Francisco International Airport, he planned to start his transformation.
Zayner is a punk: his ears are adorned with a row of 10 piercings each, his body is covered in tattoos, and his dark mohawk is topped with a shock of bleached-blonde hair. The haircut, the piercings, and most of the tattoos he did himself. He doesn’t trust others with these tasks, he says. This is a running theme in Zayner’s life.
As a child, Zayner rarely saw doctors — his family, he says, was too poor to pay for visits. Then in college, he got health insurance and finally started going; gastrointestinal pain was making it hard for him to lead a normal life. He was pooping more than four times a day, and severe "attacks" forced him to isolate himself for hours. The doctors visits were expensive and ineffective, he says, and over time, Zayner grew suspicious of physicians. "I’ll take their advice if there’s something I can’t fix myself, but otherwise, if what they say goes against what I know, I’m not going to necessarily believe them or trust them, right?" he says.
That’s not to say Zayner is dubious of science — in fact, he’s a scientist himself. In 2013, he earned a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Chicago and subsequently served as a postdoc researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center for two years. But the space agency didn’t suit him. "NASA was not what I imagined it to be," he says. It was supposed to be a bastion of innovation, but the experiments he saw performed at NASA were underwhelming. "[There’s] very little work getting done, because people either don’t work, don’t care to work, or because the last time they did any science was 40 years ago," he says.
So in January 2016, Zayner left Ames and turned his attention to two of his own projects: an Indiegogo campaign aimed at providing people with CRISPR kits to alter bacterial DNA, and The ODIN, a business he started in grad school that sells scientific kits and instruments to people who’d like to do experiments at home. Today, The ODIN has four employees who work out of Zayner’s garage. Sustained by orders from schools and hobbyists, The ODIN is doing well, Zayner says: he expects the company’s revenue to reach somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 this year. On weekends he sometimes teaches free classes on genetic engineering in public lab spaces around San Francisco. In our conversations, Zayner stressed to me the importance of breaking science out of labs and classrooms and making it available to the wider public. "I don’t like titles," Zayner told me. "But I generally refer to myself as a biohacker.""I
Leaving the world of conventional science made Zayner happy — and working from home was easier on his gut. Zayner generally has to defecate two to three time before starting his workday, and also after every meal. He claims to have ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome, but he’s a bit hazy on the details of his diagnoses. When pressed, he admits that he doesn't remember what his physician told him in college — he could have IBS or inflammatory bowel disease. And a search through his medical records is inconclusive. "I don’t think I made it up or am remembering wrong, but who knows?" he wrote me in a text.
But his physical distress — and his frustration with the medical treatment he received — was very real. So at 35, Zayner decided to dive into one of science’s most foolhardy traditions: self-experimentation. Some of his predecessors have achieved great things. In 1984, Nobel winner Barry James Marshall ingested a species of bacteria to demonstrate their role in causing ulcers. He was, to his discomfort, proven correct. Other ventures have been less successful. In 1900, an American physician by the name of Jesse Lazear intentionally submitted himself to bites from yellow fever-infected mosquitoes in an effort to learn about the virus’ transmission. He died. Three decades later, Russian physician Alexander Bogdanov performed multiple blood transfusions on himself to deduce whether the procedure would keep him eternally young. It didn’t — the experiment killed him.
Across cultures, human feces are reviled. Shit stinks, yes, but that’s not actually why it’s gross — thanks to its bacterial load, it’s a disease vector that causes outbreaks of cholera, typhoid fever, and E. coli. But humans didn’t truly figure that out until the 19th century. So, for a long time, shit was actually used by some as medicine.
The Ebers Papyrus, a document from Ancient Egypt dating back to 1500 BC, contains more than 50 prescriptions for medicines in which shit is the active ingredient. In the 4th century, a well-known traditional Chinese doctor described using a suspension of human feces to help patients with food poisoning or severe diarrhea. And in the 17th century, an Italian anatomist named Fabricius ab Aquapendente was using shit to treat gastrointestinal diseases in veterinary medicine.
The first modern fecal matter transplant didn’t take place until the mid-20th century. In 1958, an American surgeon named Ben Eiseman performed enemas on four pseudomembranous colitis patients. Eiseman suspected that a treatment of antibiotics had killed off natural gut bacteria, leading to severe cases of diarrhea. So, instead of flushing their colons with water alone, he used shit from healthy patients. Perhaps, he figured, reintroducing normal intestinal bacteria into the guts of patients whose digestive system had been wiped out would heal them. "It seemed to work," Eiseman told author Mary Roach in a 2012 interview. "It made a small splash."
This post was written by: Raymond Jack
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