The Continuation

An Update [May/3/2026], Companion to The Paradise Engineering Manifesto and The Correction

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Opening

A project is continued by those willing to hold its standard, not by those willing to use its name.

Many readers will be arriving here from Scott Alexander's 2024 profile of The Far Out Initiative on Astral Codex Ten — the article that, more than any other public document, brought the project to the attention of the circles whose judgment compounds. We are grateful for it. We also owe its readers something: a public account of where the work has gone in the two years since, what was wrong with the program that article described, and what has replaced it.

This document is that account. It is the third in a sequence. The Paradise Engineering Manifesto stated the work as it now stands. The Correction stated the discipline by which we arrived at it. The Continuation states the standing — what the project is, who holds it, what it costs to hold, and what was required to bring it to the place from which it now proceeds.

It is published because the public record, on a matter this serious, must be complete.

I. What Brought You Here

For readers new to the project, the shape of the original story is this.

In 2019, a team at University College London identified the molecular basis of an unusual case: a Scottish woman, Jo Cameron, who appeared to have lived her entire life without significant physical pain, anxiety, depression, or grief. Her case was not garden-variety congenital pain insensitivity. She suffered no CIP-like self-injury, retained normal autonomic function, and lived a recognizably full emotional life — minus the negative valence almost everyone else takes for given. The molecular finding pointed to two simple genetic differences: a less active variant of the FAAH gene and an 8-kilobase microdeletion in a nearby pseudogene the researchers named FAAH-OUT. Anandamide — the brain's principal endocannabinoid, sometimes called the "bliss molecule" — was elevated. Several downstream pathways were perturbed. The researchers concluded they had identified a candidate molecular signature for what one might call a phenotype of suffering immunity.

The Far Out Initiative was founded in 2023 by Joshua Michael Sparks, in conversation with the philosopher David Pearce, around the conviction that the Cameron finding deserved a serious research program — one explicitly oriented toward the abolition of involuntary suffering in humans and animals, governed by structural commitments to universal access and open architecture rather than by commercial capture. Pearce's lifelong argument that suffering is a biological phenomenon requiring a biological solution is the philosophical taproot of the project. The Cameron finding looked like the first concrete biological handhold worth a serious institutional response.

What followed, in 2023 and 2024, was an attempt to build that response on the most direct path the molecular finding seemed to permit: pharmacological and gene-editing approaches aimed at reproducing the Cameron molecular signature in adult humans and in livestock animals. This is the program Scott described. It is the program this document, together with The Correction, retires.

II. The Standard

Before describing what was wrong with that program, the standard under which the description is made must be named.

The epigraph above is the standard. It is not a methodological caution. It is a moral diagnosis.

Dostoevsky's warning is that the man who lies to himself does not merely misjudge facts. He undoes himself. He arrives at a place where he cannot tell the difference between what is true in him and what he has decided to believe about himself, and from there he cannot tell the difference between what is true in others and what he has decided to use them for. The lie metastasizes. By the time the world contradicts him plainly, he has already lost the faculty that would let him hear the contradiction.

This is the failure mode that structures every temptation in the domain TFOI works in. The promise of relief from suffering is urgent enough to license almost any plausible-looking shortcut. The promise of being the one who delivered the relief is flattering enough to corrupt the judgment of credentialed people who know better. Where urgency meets flattery, the lie begins. The lie is comfortable. It promises that the shortcut is sufficient, that the developmental objection raised by the literature is somebody else's pessimism, that the runway will hold, that the institutional momentum is wisdom rather than inertia.

The standard requires that the lie be exposed, in writing, in public, when the exposure costs more than the concealment. The Correction is the document in which we did that. This section names why we did.

III. Three Documents, Briefly

For readers who have not yet seen them, three documents constitute the public and semi-public record.

The Paradise Engineering Manifesto is TFOI's founding statement of the work as it now stands. It articulates the philosophical architecture — the Viable Trajectories Model of valence, the four-circuit platform, the phasic/chronic dissociation principle, the staged thesis we call the Dostoevsky Machine — and the Doorholder Covenant, the set of structural commitments (universal access, suffering-weighted queue, no coercion, open architecture, independent oversight) that govern what TFOI may and may not do with the powers the work develops. It is published as an X article and held standing at farout.bio as the call the project answers to.

The Correction is TFOI's account of why the original strategy was inadequate and what we learned by killing it. It is the technical and moral autopsy of the program described in the ACX article. It opens under the Dostoevsky epigraph above, and it earns the epigraph by meeting its standard against TFOI's own past self.

The Research Program is the technical and strategic memo for prospective collaborators and funders: original contributions, the staged research roadmap, the preclinical data plan, the recruitment architecture, the falsification criteria, and the dual-stream funding architecture across philanthropic and venture capital. It is available to qualified partners under NDA. Inquiries to founder@faroutinitiative.com.

This document — The Continuation — is the third public companion. It assumes the others can be read in their entirety by anyone who wishes to verify the technical claims it summarizes here. The summary is offered for the reader who wishes the load-bearing arguments in compressed form before deciding whether the full chain rewards the click.

IV. The Old Program, in Full View

What was wrong with the program ACX described is what The Correction says was wrong with it. We restate the strongest arguments here so the reader who does not click through still encounters the load-bearing case. Each rests on four overlapping failures.

The pharmacological assumption. That systemic elevation of anandamide, achieved through pharmacological inhibition of FAAH or genetic silencing of FAAH and FAAH-OUT, would meaningfully reproduce the Cameron analgesia and affective profile. This is refuted by the published clinical record. Pfizer's PF-04457845 was a potent, selective, irreversible FAAH inhibitor. It elevated anandamide in human subjects by an order of magnitude. It produced no clinically meaningful analgesia in osteoarthritis pain. The trial is published, dated, indexed. The result was not a setback to be worked around; it was a refutation of the premise that systemic elevation of anandamide is sufficient to reproduce the analgesic profile of the FAAH-OUT microdeletion. Successor compounds have not overturned the finding. A program built on the premise that they will is building on sand the literature has already named as sand.

The developmental assumption. That the Cameron phenotype is something an adult intervention can install. It is not. As the Correction states the matter:

Jo Cameron did not acquire her phenotype at thirty-five. She did not become who she is after a late intervention in her blood chemistry. Her genotype was present across embryogenesis, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Every sensitive window of her neural development unfolded under altered endocannabinoid regulation… A developing brain is not a smaller adult brain. It is a brain being written.

The endocannabinoid system is itself a developmental system; its perturbation in adolescence and adulthood produces effects categorically different from its perturbation during the windows in which the system is being assembled. The neuroepigenetic literature on early-life experience shows that developmental conditions produce durable changes in HPA-axis calibration, sensory-affective network architecture, and long-term behavioral trajectories. These are not transient perturbations of adult function — they are programming events. Adult serum-side intervention was always trying to do something impossible: recreate a history-dependent central nervous system phenotype without recreating the history that shaped it. That is not a small oversight. It is a category error.

The replication assumption. That the original Cameron case generalized cleanly. Scott raised this question himself in the ACX article, citing the Twitter user @the_megabase, who searched the UK Biobank for individuals carrying the same FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations and found several with no unusual pain resistance. He noted, correctly, the long history of single-gene candidate associations in psychiatry and pain research that have failed to replicate. The right response to that finding was to take it seriously — to defer interventional ambition until the replication question was resolved. The wrong response was to defer the question to the in-tray of objections to be answered later, while pursuing intervention strategies whose validity depended on its eventual answer being favorable. The wrong response is what the old program made.

The delivery assumption. That minicircle plasmid technology, delivered through a partner clinic in a charter-city setting, would suffice to install the desired molecular changes. This was conceded on TFOI's own page in April 2024, in language preserved above this update: "delivery-related issues that could likely prevent the occurrence of the desired effect." The concession was made before the rest of the program was reexamined. The reexamination, when it came, found that the delivery problem was not a technical detail to be solved upstream of an otherwise sound program. It was a symptom of the deeper error. As the Correction puts it: The original strategy was, in effect, trying to recreate architecture by manipulating plumbing. No delivery mechanism can fix that. The assumption has to be killed, and a different program built in its place.

The whole edifice, examined honestly, was a structure of plausible-looking reasoning whose load-bearing assumptions were inadequate to the biological reality the work was meant to address — at least insofar as those assumptions concerned adult human intervention through systemic means. It was not malicious. It was, at the root, the failure mode the epigraph describes — a series of reasonings that were locally comfortable and cumulatively wrong, each of which would have been exposed by reading the literature with the rigor the work required, and each of which was instead set aside in favor of momentum.

There is a further dimension the Correction names that is worth surfacing here, because it converts the technical critique into a Covenant matter. The old strategy, followed to its logical conclusion, would not have produced flourishing. It would have produced sedation. A population whose affective responsiveness has been pharmacologically dampened is not a liberated population. It is a sedated one. Continuing down that path would have placed the project in structural tension with its own ethics before it produced its first human intervention. The Correction was therefore not only a scientific revision. It was a realignment of the technology with the ethics the project had always intended to instantiate.

The Correction makes the full case in detail, with citations. The Continuation is the public confirmation that the killing of the old program was not partial, not strategic, not a rebrand. It was total. The old program is gone.

V. The Architecture That Survived the Autopsy

What survived is the question. Human and animal suffering are produced by identifiable architectures; those architectures are in principle modifiable; the modification is owed to those who suffer; and the work must be governed by structural constraints that prevent the modification from becoming a new instrument of inequality, capture, or coercion. That recognition is the project. It survived because it was never the part that was wrong.

What also survived is the Doorholder Covenant — anti-monopoly, open-architecture, suffering-weighted access, independent oversight, no coercion, structural rather than aspirational. A scientific program can be wrong and the Covenant can still be right. That is what happened.

What was built in place of the old program is the architecture of valence engineering. Briefly, for the new reader: suffering, in this framework, is not best modeled as a quantity of aversive sensation to be reduced by global pharmacological dampening. It is the collapse of perceived viable futures — a state in which the predictive systems of the brain can no longer locate trajectories worth pursuing. The architecture that produces and sustains this collapse is anatomically specific, distributed across a small number of identifiable circuits, each responsible for a distinct contribution to chronic affective suffering: the lateral habenula, central to agentic defeat; the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, central to sustained anxiety; the CGRP-expressing parabrachial neurons, central to the affective component of pain; and the dorsal anterior insula, central to the structure of nondual and ecstatic states.

The strategic pivot, as the Correction states it: We moved from a chemistry-of-relief model to a control-architecture model of valence.

The intervention surface follows from the model. The technical platform is optical focused ultrasound paired with functional ultrasound imaging through sonolucent cranial windows — a combination that permits both targeted neuromodulation and real-time imaging of the affected circuits. The design constraint we call phasic/chronic dissociation requires that adaptive responses to genuine threat be preserved while chronic baseline limbic hyperactivation is reduced. The principle is not to abolish the alarm but to stop the alarm from screaming continuously when there is no fire. Focused-ultrasound-mediated blood-brain barrier opening provides the eventual route by which molecular targets — including the ones from the old program — re-enter the work as components of a localized, circuit-specific toolkit rather than as global serum levers. As the Correction puts it: Use the machine to put the molecules in the right place. The molecules we once hoped to raise globally do not disappear from the program. They return — but they return in their proper form, deployed to specific circuits at specific times, guided by real-time measurement of the neural state being modified.

The intervention surface fits the grain of the problem. That is the test the original strategy could not pass.

There is a further generalization the new architecture supports, and it is worth naming. The four-circuit map of chronic suffering is the first and most ethically urgent application of a broader theoretical claim: that many of the limits the human nervous system imposes on experience and capacity reflect not the absence of substrate but the presence of inherited gating over substrate. Brains evolved under tradeoffs that are often no longer ours. They contain capacities that are normally inaccessible because the organism gates access for reasons of energy, stability, action-selection, threat management, or developmental closure. Some of those gates are wise and should remain shut. Some are inheritances whose ancestral logic no longer serves the lives we now lead. Some of the conditions we treat as fixed traits — chronic anxiety, chronic dysphoria, certain forms of perceptual or cognitive constraint — may be better understood as inhibitory calibrations than as deficits. The Research Program develops this into a five-type taxonomy of candidate gates (perceptual compression, plasticity closure, salience and arousal gating, self-model and autobiographical binding, retrieval suppression), each with its own functions, risks, and intervention logic. The taxonomy matters because it prevents sloppy talk about "inhibition" as a single thing, and because it locates the suffering work inside a research program with broader scientific reach. The keyring matters because the doors do not all open the same way.

This architecture was built from first principles, against the path of least resistance, in conditions in which continuing the old program would have been cheaper, easier, and more rewarded. It was built because the old program was wrong and the Covenant required honesty about the wrongness. The Manifesto develops the full architecture, the Covenant, and the philosophical framework. It is what TFOI is now. It is what The Continuation continues.

VI. What Continuation Means

Continuation means the work proceeds under the discipline it was founded under, by the people willing to keep faith with both the science and the Covenant.

The current nucleus is small and named. Joshua Michael Sparks, Founder and CEO. Adam Summerfield, PhD, Chief Technology Officer. Manu Herrán, President. Winslow Strong, Board Member. A small cast of more peripheral advisors. The senior team that executes the full Stage 0 research program — across acoustics, optical focused ultrasound, functional ultrasound imaging, clinical neurosurgery, neurophenomenology, molecular delivery, and governance — is mapped in The Research Program and is being assembled under the Covenant's constraints.

Earlier configurations of the project, including the team structure described in the ACX article, are no longer current. The reasons are partly the inevitable consequences of killing a program in public — not every contributor remains when the work they joined is the work being killed — and partly the season such transitions impose on the institution that survives them. The Continuation exists in part because that season is over and the new shape of the work deserves to be on the public record under its proper name. The carrying that brought the project through the season is not the subject of this document; the work is. But the carrying is the precondition of the work, and the public record is incomplete without the acknowledgment that without it, there would be nothing to continue.

A team this size, at this stage, is a deliberate choice. Stage 0 is foundation, not buildout. The foundation requires concentration. The Manifesto is the standing call. The Correction is the standing discipline. The Research Program is the standing roadmap. The Covenant is the standing constraint. The team is the present holders of all four.

VII. The Cost of Continuation

The Covenant requires that the cost of the work be visible.

TFOI is raising $100,000 through this Manifund campaign — the Manifund-tier expression of the Stage 0 philanthropic floor described in The Research Program. The figure corresponds to approximately twelve months of founder-led continuity at sustainable burn, during which the larger Stage 0 philanthropic and venture rounds, sized in the memo and pursued with named partners under NDA, are brought to closure.

What this funding does, concretely, in the next twelve months: it sustains the founder's full-time leadership of the program. It funds the continued production of the public documents the Covenant requires — further companion pieces, the public Proof / Promise / Unknown ledger, the operationalization of the Covenant's structural commitments into licensing, governance, and access architectures. It funds partnership development with the acoustics, OFUS, fUSI, neurosurgical, neurophenomenological, and governance candidates whose conversion from target to commitment is what Stage 0 ultimately delivers. It funds the legal, accounting, and operational infrastructure without which a public benefit company cannot hold the standard the Covenant requires.

The Stage 0 work itself proceeds along two parallel research lanes, both governed by the Covenant. Lane A is clinical valence engineering — the translational path toward refractory suffering-related conditions, including treatment-resistant depression, severe chronic pain, and chronic anxiety, with surgical-candidate mapping as the near-term wedge. Lane B is gate and capacity mapping — construct definitions, reversible neurophenomenological mapping, the science of contemplative and awakening-relevant states, and the production of open field-level assets for a serious science of consciousness transformation. The lanes share the platform but serve different evaluators, which is why the funding architecture is dual-stream by design. The Research Program develops both in detail.

This is bridge capital. It is catalytic, not terminal. Donors at this level should understand the grant as the instrument by which the work is sustained through the window in which the larger architecture is brought into being, and by which the public record of regrantor support signals — to the partners now in conversation — that the project is taken seriously by people whose judgment compounds.

The number is not large for the work it sustains. It is named because the Covenant requires that the cost be named. Concealment of cost is the first concealment. The Covenant does not permit it.

VIII. The Watch

The Manifesto, The Correction, and The Continuation together constitute a public watch on the work.

A watch is not a defense. It is a record kept in advance. The record exists so that future readers — donors, regrantors, scientists, journalists, collaborators, skeptics — encountering this domain at any later moment have the means to evaluate what they read against what was said before. The receipts are filed. The standard is named. The autopsy is complete. The architecture that replaced the old one is documented, falsifiable, and bound by the Covenant.

If the work continues honestly, the watch will be uneventful. If the work is contested, the watch will have been the contestation's first witness. Either way, the record stands.

Closing

The Far Out Initiative is the project that says the architectures of human and animal suffering are real, biological, and in principle modifiable, and that the modification is owed to those who suffer, under structural constraints that prevent the modification from becoming a new instrument of inequality, capture, or coercion.

That sentence is the work. The architecture serves it. The Correction protects it. The Covenant binds it. The Continuation extends it.

The standard is Dostoevsky's. Above all, don't lie to yourself. The Far Out Initiative is the project that, having pursued an open hypothesis under the provisional commitment any serious research requires, met the moment when the hypothesis failed by killing it in writing rather than by defending it in motion — and published the killing, in public, when concealment would have been cheaper at every level than disclosure.

The work continues. The cost is named. The watch is kept.

To the readers arriving here from Astral Codex Ten: thank you for following the project this far. The story Scott told in 2024 is no longer the whole story, and could not have been. The story now is in The Manifesto, The Correction, and this document. We invite you to read all three.

Contact: founder@faroutinitiative.com · Signal: (302) 278-6748 · @FarOutBio

The Paradise Engineering Manifesto · also at farout.bio The Correction The Research Program: by request under NDA at founder@faroutinitiative.com

[Update as of 26th April 2024: based on our internal considerations and consultations with external experts, we have decided to make adjustments to the parts of our general roadmap. We intend to start with the adaptive low-suffering genome bounty, gathering and analyzing extensive data from multiple subjects with unique resistance to psychological and physical pain, particularly those whose phenomenologies resemble that of Jo Cameron, and including some of the individuals who already contacted us. This robust step - reasonable under multiple potential future trajectories - will help us avoid single points of failure, further informing the design of the planned interventions. That being said, we continue to predict that FAAH(-OUT) mutations will constitute one of the central areas of interest, requiring further in-depth considerations. Furthermore, we decided to pause investigating the use of minicircles in the human intervention project, having identified delivery-related issues that could likely prevent the occurrence of the desired effect; we are already considering the utilization of other, more suitable methods of gene editing. We continue expressing informed optimism about the significance of our project and the tractability of the updated plan, maintaining a high degree of organizational flexibility and responsiveness to the incoming input.]

Solving suffering for the good of all

The Far Out Initiative (TFOI) is a Public Benefit Biotechnology Company focused on developing technological solutions to the problem of involuntary suffering in human and non-human animals. We endeavor to accelerate the rate at which new and old scientific discoveries are translated into scalable altruistic interventions that can be rapidly implemented and disseminated through market-based strategies.

The good news

In 2019, scientists discovered a woman with a new form of congenital pain insensitivity that left her virtually immune to physical and psychological pain. Unlike other forms of congenital pain insensitivity, her condition left her blissfully unaffected by fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, and grief. She is also free of the frequent injuries and early childhood self-mutilation behaviors that make other forms of congenital pain insensitivity so dangerous. Her pain-sensing neurons work, but she does not generate intrinsically unpleasant experiential qualities in response to the signals they send her brain. Unlike other forms of congenital pain insensitivity known immediately due to their disastrous consequences, her syndrome remained unknown to her until she was well into her sixth decade of life.

The path

On May 24th, 2023, University College London released its landmark paper investigating the molecular basis of this strange new pain insensitivity syndrome titled "Molecular Basis of FAAH-Out Associated Pain Insensitivity," in which it was revealed that this "Feel Good Syndrome" was caused by two simple genetic mutations affecting the FAAH Platform: a less active SNP of the FAAH gene and an 8KB micro-deletion at the beginning of the FAAH-OUT pseudo-gene, which lead to a drastic increase in anandamide (“the bliss molecule"). These two generic differences had a downstream impact on many genes, but only a handful of these changes were identified as relevant to physical and psychological suffering. Chief among them were the downregulation of ACKR3 - an endogenous opioid scavenger - and the upregulation of BDNF - a nerve growth factor known to impact depression and anxiety. This "Feel Good Syndrome" could be replicated in humans and livestock animals using gene editing. Moreover, it could plausibly be reproduced pharmacologically using existing inhibitors of FAAH (which substantially boost anandamide and BDNF) and ACKR3. These facts formed the basis of TFOI’s suffering abolitionist research program we are now pursuing.

The Ananda lines

The Far Out Initiative has already taken the early steps necessary to pursue our Ananda Lines research program - a plan to produce lines of gene-edited ("precision bred") livestock animals with the profound resistance to physical and psychological suffering that comes with this newly discovered pain insensitivity syndrome. Factory farming is an atrocity of inconceivable magnitude, and the suffering that it produces must be urgently addressed. The edits we are researching do not require us to introduce species-foreign genes. The lines of livestock animals produced through these edits would not be classified as GMOs according to the new and more scientifically informed regulatory paradigm emerging globally and already in place in the UK, Brazil, and several other countries. Instead, Ananda Lines livestock animals would be classified as "precision bred." With this classification difference comes the possibility of entering the meat market and replacing meat produced from tormented animals with much more consumer-friendly and ethical meat produced from animals with a profound resistance to physical and psychological suffering.

The Metta Project

The Metta Project is our human-directed research effort intended to accelerate the arrival of the post-suffering era.

We will collaborate with minicircle.io to develop a safe, inflammation-free, and reversible intervention to silence FAAH and FAAH-OUT in humans. This holds the promise of a general treatment for human physical and psychological suffering, which will have an especially high altruistic impact in treating the worst physical and psychological pain conditions, and enabling suffering-free drug withdrawal. Upon successfully completing this research program, we plan to establish an early revenue stream by offering wealthy early adopters access to a reversible anti-suffering genetic intervention in the Minicircle Gene Therapy Clinic, currently running clinical trials in a charter city on the island of Roatan in the Caribbean. The majority of this funding will go toward the development of our farmed animal research program, as well as to offering the genetic intervention free or at a drastically reduced cost to persons who suffer from chronic and acute physical and psychological pain conditions, and toward shooting a short documentary on their journey from a life of hellish pain to being beyond the reach of suffering, boosting the profile of TFOI and suffering abolitionism.

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

The Far Out Initiative team spans a diverse range of skills. Our Director of Bioethics, David Pearce, is a famous British transhumanist philosopher and the author of The Hedonistic Imperative. Michael Sparks, the Initiative’s Founder and leading contributor, is a self-taught polymath and a member of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. Marcin Kowrygo, the current Senior Advisor, expected to assume the CEO role in early 2024, has a background in biomedical and cognitive neuroscience, was involved in many projects at the science-technology-society interface, has over 8 years of experience in the rationalist and EA(-adjacent) circles, and currently serves both as a Strategic Advisor at the Qualia Research Institute and as an Independent Contractor of Emergence Benefactors. Aatu Konskensilta, TFOI’s President, is a self-taught polymath with special interests in decision theory, artificial intelligence, programming, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. Dr. Adam Summerfield, TFOI’s CTO, earned a PhD in biogerontology, and has gained expert-level knowledge in biotechnology and genetic intervention techniques in the course of his education. Sergio Tarrero, TFOI’s Director of Media, co-founded the world’s first transhumanist party, Alianza Futurista, in Spain, and has a background in film and a BSc in physics.

We have already established our legal presence and ensured that there are no major legal roadblocks to the required research. We have also formed a collaborative partnership with minicircle.io, the inventors of the world’s first reversible plasmid-based genetic intervention technology, which will allow us to immediately pursue the development and safe human testing of techniques to silence FAAH and FAAH-OUT. This is expected to take place in their Caribbean-based clinic, staffed by three US medical doctors. Last but not least, we recognize that the existing literature indicates a high tractability of interventions at the intersection of biotechnology’s modern toolkit, Cameron Syndrome, and its potential, increasingly adaptive iterations.

Other ways I can learn about you

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kowrygo/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/faroutinitiative

https://independent.academia.edu/AatuKoskensilta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)

How much money do you need?

While we would cordially welcome any support from the ACX Grants, given the funding available during this round, we would like to suggest three different tiers: Basic: $37,000, Medium: $67,000, and Advanced: $97,000. We expect each month of sustained activity to cost us ~$7,000. $3,000/month would go to Michael Sparks, working full-time on the theoretical underpinnings, content, and organizational oversight. The remaining $4,000/month would be allocated according to the team’s best judgment, covering essential maintenance expenses, such as basic accounting, legal work, software, extending the runway if absolutely necessary - and extra ones, such as the contractor work and collaborative human-directed research with minicircle.io. I (Marcin Kowrygo) have decided not to ask for any funding until Michael Sparks and TFOI can acquire, respectively, basic personal and organizational runways, meaning I will not be earning any money unless we secure, starting from this point, at least $50,000 total from various sources, including the potential ACX Grant. We are very open to feedback regarding both the research aspect and the way we allocate the available funding to realize our mission.

Links to any supporting documents or information

Orienting resources

Jo Cameron’s story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M2sqkB09s

Molecular basis of FAAH-OUT associated pain insensitivity:

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/146/9/3851/7169317

The Genetic Literacy Project's global survey of the liberality of regulations concerning gene-edited livestock animals:

https://crispr-gene-editing-regs-tracker.geneticliteracyproject.org/

The recent legislation passed in the UK allowing for gene-edited or "precision bred" livestock animals to enter the meat market:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9557/

The study that established that FAAH inhibitors prevent and reverse opioid tolerance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7280000/

The genetic engineering platform and clinic with which we will be collaborating in our human-directed research and intervention efforts:

https://minicircle.io/

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

We assign a very high probability (in the range above 90%) of delivering added value to our mission & vision through the continued literature review and content production, in line with our past track record, with the whitepaper and wiki soon to be released. While the practical implementation is inherently more challenging, we are still confident in our capacity of succeeding at the level of our early collaborative human-directed research with minicircle.io, as well as in terms of pursuing the Ananda lines research program to reduce the suffering of non-human animals.