Biohackers Intro (Attempt 1)

They always imagined that we'd replace our body with mere machinery, as if something so simple could match the complexities of chemistry. Such prostheses were useful for amputees until we could regrow them, but for everyone else they were far too high maintenance, as their strength was also their weakness: their hardness means they're not easily damaged, but they're not easily repaired either, while the fluidity of the body is what allows it to rapidly renew itself. If hardness were strength, I'm sure we'd all have evolved an exoskeleton.
No, there will be a time when this will change, once they smooth the kinks out of nanorobots, but for now there's no problem with our body's hardware: it's its software that really needs tweaking. Our computers don't need to replace our body but interface with it in such a way that our every chemical can be directed. When biocomputers were released, it took a while for the general public to catch on, but a few curious souls, calling themselves biohackers, ventured to explore the range of possibilities. We would become the pioneers for the rest to follow once they were comfortable to do so, but they would not be until they saw from us that it was really safe.
But there were setbacks. Most of us had standards of what kind of research we adhered to in our experimentations, but because we were so adventurous, little by little we often ended up going too far. The rest of us scoffed at anyone who failed: they gave us a bad name, and so we reprimanded them for being irresponsible. But at some point or other, I'm sure we all had our mistakes, even if we kept it a secret, and if at all, only anonymously asked for help in our search for a way to repair them and our bodies. But many of us also became famous as success stories as well: people that beat cancer with the newest research that doctors hadn't caught up with yet, people with superhuman athletic performance, or people who spliced the senses of animals into their genome.
While we had more than our share of addicts only looking to extract a high from their biochemistry, most of us were interested in becoming better people, in engineering the transhuman as psychonauts or athletes, and almost all of us pursued immortality — because there's no way to become stronger without first ceasing to become weaker, and in case we made a mistake, being stronger would insure us from the worst.
But we pooled all data on our every experiments, and the more information we gathered the safer it became and the more people joined us, causing the database to grow exponentially. Soon it became more a matter of finding out which alterations were most useful rather than which ones were safe.