[throwaway4666]

You have put a lot of thought in your post and I actually agree with most of it but I just want to interject about a few things:

-Darwin, Mendel etc. are seen as foundational because we as humans need plucky heroes in our narrative of history. But they are anything but. Natural selection did not spontaneously arise as an idea when Darwin put it into written words. Early farmers, herders and semi-nomadic gatherers knew all about artificial selection (which is just natural selection speeded up and driven by humans) and have been doing it for thousands of years, so the knowledge was definitely out there. There are also quite a few ancient texts conjecturing that "man came from apes and the more primitive lifeforms" etc. Of course this is not proper wording for a modern educated scientist, but again, the ideas were there. Only, Darwin was the first person with a name (and what's more, a Western and English name) to notice it, and so he became a legend. Anonymous accounts don't.

-Likewise, there's absolutely no way the Odin guy was the first to come up with the idea of fecal transplants. He's just the first public figure that you've heard of who did, because he's flashy and fancy and trendy and lives in a fancy and trendy place where all the fancy and trendy people congregate. Even excluding the studies suggesting it prior to his stunts, people knew for a while that farm kids eating soil (dirt) from time to time turned out to be suspiciously healthy for their gut.

So I maintain my previous assumption, that biohacking is largely a grift that attempts to repackage previously obtained knowledge from more obscure and less widely acknowledged (read: non-American, non-Western, etc.) sources and fashion it into a cool-looking product to swindle rich people out of their money.

The scientific world doesn't need biohackers, stunt-pullers and other grifters, it needs to acknowledge the humble and the lesser-known and the anonymous common knowledge.