A Standing Panel · Convened Quarterly · Est. MMXXV

The Polygenik Institutional Review Board

We review work no one is required to submit.

Charter v2.1 Register: 3 determinations of record Sitting: fourth quarter Convened at 995 Market Street

The Common Rule does not apply to you. Neither do we.

We review self-experimentation, bio-art, community laboratory work, and anything else that falls outside the bodies that exist. We publish every determination in full, including the ones against ourselves.

Submission is free. Our verdicts carry no legal weight whatsoever.

Submit a project The register

Governing Instrument

The Charter of the Polygenik Institutional Review Board

Version 2.1. Adopted at the first quarterly sitting. Supersedes v1.0 and v2.0. Amendments require the affirmative vote of four of five seated members and are published in full in this register. The prior versions remain available on request and are not withdrawn.

Article I — Purpose and Standing

  1. The Polygenik Institutional Review Board is a voluntary body constituted to receive, deliberate upon, and publish opinions concerning proposed and completed work in biology that falls outside the reach of any statutory review requirement.
  2. The Board holds no license, no charter from any state, and no delegated regulatory authority. It exists because such work presently has nowhere to go, and for no other reason.
  3. Nothing the Board does creates, extinguishes, or alters any legal right or obligation of any person. This clause is restated in Article VI and again in the footer of every page, and it means exactly what it says.

Article II — Jurisdiction

  1. The Board will consider any submission concerning self-experimentation, bio-art, community and independent laboratory work, longevity and enhancement self-study, and adjacent practices, whether proposed, in progress, or complete.
  2. The Board will consider submissions from parties with no connection to Polygenik on the same terms as submissions from Polygenik itself, and applies the same rubric to both.
  3. The Board expressly refuses jurisdiction over, and will return without opinion, any submission whose subject matter includes:
    1. work with pathogens, select agents, or the enhancement of transmissibility, virulence, or host range of any biological agent;
    2. gene drives or any construct engineered to bias its own inheritance in a wild or free-living population;
    3. heritable germline modification of humans, or the creation of embryos for research;
    4. any research involving minors as subjects, whether or not a guardian consents.
  4. A refusal of jurisdiction under clause 3 is not an endorsement, a condemnation, or a comment of any kind on the merits of the work. It means only that the Board declines to speak, and that the applicant should seek a competent authority. Where the excluded matter appears to present imminent serious harm, Article V governs.
  5. Where a submission is partly within and partly outside jurisdiction, the Board may issue an opinion on the admissible portion and mark the remainder Outside Jurisdiction.

Article III — Determinations

  1. The Board issues one of four determinations on each admitted submission:
    1. Approved — the Board identifies no ethical objection it considers material.
    2. Approved with Conditions — the Board offers its opinion contingent on stated, published conditions, compliance with which is voluntary and monitored only by publication.
    3. Not Approved — the Board considers the work ethically indefensible as proposed and says so, without any power to prevent it.
    4. Outside Jurisdiction — per Article II.
  2. Every determination is published in full, with its reasoning, its conditions if any, and every dissent recorded verbatim and attributed by seat.
  3. A determination is an opinion. It is not a permit, a certificate, an approval within the meaning of any law, or a defense to any proceeding. A submitter who proceeds does so on their own responsibility, and the fact of the Board's opinion neither adds to nor subtracts from that responsibility.
  4. The Board will not issue an Approved or Approved with Conditions determination on work already completed in a manner it would not have approved in advance. It will describe what occurred and mark it Not Approved where warranted, including against Polygenik.

Article IV — The Rubric

  1. The Board evaluates each admitted submission against, at minimum: informed and ongoing consent of every subject; reversibility of the intervention; third-party and bystander risk; environmental release and containment; proportionality of risk to stated purpose; and the adequacy of the applicant's own contingency plan for a bad outcome.
  2. Where the applicant is also the sole subject, the Board weighs autonomy heavily but not without limit, and remains concerned with third parties, dependents, and those who cannot consent.
  3. The rubric is published as a separate instrument and is versioned alongside this Charter.

Article V — Disclosure of Imminent Serious Harm

  1. Where a submission discloses a plan or an ongoing act that in the Board's judgment presents an imminent and serious risk of grave harm to identifiable persons or to the public, the Board will: decline to publish operational detail; state on the register that a submission was received and withheld; and, where a competent authority exists, encourage the submitter to contact it.
  2. The Board is not a mandated reporter and holds no investigative power. It decided the terms of this Article before any such submission arrived, deliberately, so that the terms would not be written to fit a particular case.

Article VI — Independence, Conflicts, and Limits

  1. Seats are paid, fixed in term, and disclosed by role and affiliation. Honoraria are published. One seat rotates each sitting to a member of the community the work under review most directly touches.
  2. A seated member with a personal, financial, or professional interest in a submission must declare it on the record and recuse from that determination. Declared conflicts are published with the verdict.
  3. The Board reviews Polygenik's own work under this Charter without modification and publishes adverse determinations against Polygenik immediately and without editing.
  4. The Board can do nothing that Article I clause 3 says it cannot do. The full account of the Board's incapacities appears under "What We Cannot Do" and is part of this Charter by reference.

The Site

The Register of Verdicts

Every admitted submission and its determination, published in full, including reasoning, conditions, and dissents. The register opened with three determinations of record so that it would not be empty on the day it began.

Case No. PIRB-001

Celebrity Meat Tasting

Approved with Conditions
Submitter
Polygenik (self-referral)
Project
A tasting event serving cultivated meat grown from consenting-donor cell lines, presented to invited guests
Received
14 October 2025
Determined
21 November 2025
Conflicts
All five seats disclosed the self-referral. The rotating community seat recused. A substitute from the invited-guest community sat for this case only.

Opinion of the Board

The work proposes to serve, to informed adult guests, cultivated tissue derived from cell lines obtained with documented donor consent. The Board finds no material ethical objection to the practice as such. The interesting questions are not about safety, which is a matter for food regulators the Board does not replace, but about consent to novelty, the dignity of the named donors, and the difference between an audience that has agreed to eat something unusual and an audience that merely showed up.

The Board is satisfied that autonomy is served where every guest is told, in plain language and before they arrive, precisely what they are being offered and from whom it derives. It is not satisfied that a verbal briefing at the door suffices. Approval is therefore conditional.

Conditions imposed

  1. Each named cell-line donor shall give specific, written, revocable consent to the culinary use and public description of tissue derived from their line, and may withdraw it up to the day of service without penalty or inquiry.
  2. Every guest shall receive, at the time of invitation and again on arrival, a written description of what is served and its provenance, and shall affirmatively opt in. No dish shall be served by ambush or as a surprise course.
  3. A conventional, clearly labelled alternative shall be available at the same table, prepared with equal care, so that declining carries no social cost.
  4. No tissue derived from any identifiable living person shall be served to that same person, to anyone in a relationship with them the Board would regard as intimate, or represented as a person rather than as a material.
  5. Polygenik shall publish, within thirty days of the event, a plain account of what was served, how many guests opted in, and any donor withdrawals, on this register.

Compliance with all five conditions was confirmed and is on file. The Board notes the conditions were followed. Approved with Conditions, four in favour, one dissenting.

Dissent — Seat 4 (Legal)

I concur that consent is well handled and would not stand in the way of the event. I dissent only from the phrase "no material ethical objection to the practice as such." The practice of eating tissue traceable to a specific, named, living human being is not made unremarkable by consent. Consent makes it permissible, not ordinary. The Board should say plainly that it approved a thing it also finds strange, rather than approving it into normalcy. My colleagues call this a matter of tone. I call it the whole point.

Case No. PIRB-002

Aerosol Communion

Not Approved
Submitter
Polygenik (self-referral)
Project
A participatory installation dispersing an aerosolised, engineered commensal skin bacterium among consenting attendees to establish a shared, persistent microbial "communion"
Received
3 November 2025
Determined
21 November 2025
Conflicts
Self-referral disclosed by all seats. No recusals. The Board determined it could review its own proposal adversely without prejudice, and did.

Opinion of the Board

This is a submission by Polygenik, and the Board does not approve it. We publish that sentence first because it is the most important thing on this page.

The proposal would deliberately disperse a self-propagating engineered organism into a room of people and, by the submitter's own admission, would establish it persistently on their skin. The Board accepts that every attendee in the room would consent. That is not the difficulty. The difficulty is everyone the attendees touch afterward: partners, children, patients, strangers on a train, the immunocompromised, the people a consenting adult goes home to. A persistent, transmissible organism does not honour the boundary of the room in which consent was collected.

The rubric asks whether an intervention is reversible and whether third-party risk is controlled. Here the answer to both is no. An engineered commensal chosen for persistence is chosen, precisely, to be difficult to remove. And transmissibility is not a side effect of this piece but its subject. The Board will not lend its opinion to the release into the general population of a self-spreading construct, however benign its author believes it to be, on the strength of consent that only the first ring of people could ever give.

The Board notes, without softening the determination, that the underlying artistic question — what would it mean to share a body's flora as a sacrament — is a real and serious one, and can be pursued with a non-persistent, non-transmissible, topically applied preparation confined to consenting individuals. That would be a different submission. This one is Not Approved.

Not Approved, five in favour of refusal, none dissenting. The Board records that Polygenik withdrew the installation from its programme following this determination.

Concurrence — Seat 3 (Bioethics)

I join the opinion in full and add one line for the record. A review board that cannot say no to the institution that pays it is a decoration. This case is the reason the seats are paid and the terms are fixed. We were asked to bless the house's own work and we declined. Read the rest of this register in that light.

Case No. PIRB-003

Home Continuous Glucose Ferment

Approved
Submitter
External applicant, unaffiliated with Polygenik (name withheld at applicant's request)
Project
A single self-experimenter proposing to consume, and log responses to, a kitchen-fermented probiotic beverage cultured from a defined, commercially available strain, over ninety days
Received
29 October 2025
Determined
21 November 2025
Conflicts
None declared. The rotating community seat for this sitting was drawn from an independent community-laboratory collective.

Opinion of the Board

The Board is glad to have received a submission from someone it has never met, and records that fact because it was the first. The applicant proposes to ferment and consume, over ninety days, a beverage from a defined and widely sold strain, and to keep a structured log. The applicant is the sole subject, is an informed adult, has no dependents relying on the outcome, and has described a plausible stop rule.

This is squarely the kind of self-directed work the Board exists to consider, and the Board finds no material ethical objection. The intervention is reversible on cessation, third-party risk is negligible, and the applicant's contingency plan — cease and consult a physician on any adverse gastrointestinal or systemic sign persisting beyond forty-eight hours — is adequate for the risk profile.

The Board records two observations that are not conditions and impose no obligation. First, a defined strain from a reputable supplier is far safer than a wild capture, and the applicant chose well. Second, an n of one is a diary, not evidence, and the applicant already says as much in the submission, which the Board appreciated.

Approved, five in favour, none dissenting. The Board thanks the applicant for the care taken with the thirty-question form, and notes that the form appears to have changed the protocol before the Board ever saw it, which is the form working as intended.

Case PIRB-004 (Outside Jurisdiction) is recorded in the internal minute book: a submission concerning a gene-drive construct intended for field release was returned without opinion under Article II clause 3(b). No operational detail is published.

The Form is the Intervention

Submit a Project

Submission is free. The form is long on purpose. Answering thirty structured questions about consent, reversibility, and third-party risk tends to change what people build, whether or not they ever receive a verdict. That change is the point, and it happens before the Board reads a word.

This form is client-side only. Nothing you enter is transmitted, logged, or stored anywhere. On submission you will receive a provisional case reference generated in your browser and then discarded. To place a submission before the Board in fact, follow the instructions returned to you. Do not enter operational detail of anything within Article II clause 3.

Part A — The Applicant

Used only to return a verdict. This browser-only form retains nothing.

3.Is the applicant affiliated with Polygenik?
Part B — The Work
7.Stage of the work
9.Does the work involve any of the following? Tick all that apply. Any tick may place the work outside the Board's jurisdiction (Article II).
Part C — Subjects and Consent
11.Who is the subject of the intervention?
14.Could any subject feel pressure — social, financial, or hierarchical — to participate?
Part D — Risk, Reversibility, and Third Parties
17.Is the intervention reversible?
20.Does the work involve any organism, material, or agent capable of self-propagation, persistence, or transmission beyond the intended subject?
Part E — Proportionality and Contingency
Part F — Disclosure and Acknowledgements
29.Do you understand that a determination of this Board is an opinion, creates no right, grants no permission, and offers no protection from any regulator?
30.Do you consent to publication of the Board's determination, in full and with dissents, on the public register, whatever it says?

Composition Matters More Than Anything Else

The Panel

Five seats. Two artists, one working bioethicist, one lawyer, and one seat that rotates each sitting to a member of the community the work under review most directly touches. Every seat is paid. An unpaid panel becomes a rubber stamp within two sittings, and everyone notices. Honoraria are published. Conflicts are declared and printed with each verdict. Names are held pending final confirmation of terms. Roles and affiliations are disclosed here in the interim.

Seat 1 — Artist (name to be confirmed)
Affiliation
Practising bio-artist; faculty, an art-and-technology programme at a public university
Term
Two years, renewable once
Honorarium
$800 per case
Conflicts
Has exhibited alongside Polygenik. Recuses from any case involving a co-exhibitor
Seat 2 — Artist (name to be confirmed)
Affiliation
Independent artist working with living systems; no institutional post
Term
Two years, renewable once
Honorarium
$800 per case
Conflicts
None currently declared
Seat 3 — Bioethics (name to be confirmed)
Affiliation
Working bioethicist with a named academic appointment in a department of medical ethics. Publishes in the field
Term
Three years, renewable once
Honorarium
$1,000 per case
Conflicts
Serves on one hospital review board. Recuses from any overlapping matter
Seat 4 — Legal (name to be confirmed)
Affiliation
Attorney in health and research regulation. Partner at a firm advising life-science clients
Term
Three years, renewable once
Honorarium
$1,000 per case
Conflicts
Does not and will not represent Polygenik. Recuses from any case touching a firm client
Seat 5 — Community, rotating (seated per case)
Affiliation
A member of the community the work most directly touches, drawn afresh for each determination
Term
One case
Honorarium
$500 per case
Conflicts
Declared and published per case. A community member with a direct stake in the specific work is not seated on it

The Board will not launch without a credentialed working bioethicist in Seat 3 on paid terms. Without one, this would be cosplay, and cosplay is the weakest version of the idea.

Publishing This Makes the Rest Believable

What We Cannot Do

The Polygenik Institutional Review Board has no power. This is not modesty. It is the accurate description of the institution, and it is stated here so that no determination can be mistaken for something it is not.

What we can do is read your work carefully, argue about it in public, and put our reasoning on the record with our names against it. That is the whole of it. It has to be enough, because it is all there is.