The seedy underbelly of the medical world is no stranger to the American public. Big Pharma notoriously dramatizes its virtues (curing and relieving pain, diseases, and itches) and understates its potential sins (pain, hair loss, addiction, and death) in the form of obnoxiously loud, prime-time commercials that depict life as if the weather truly is dictated by your physical and mental health. Most evilly, perhaps, its players viciously compete with one another, keeping secrets and claiming copyrights as they claw their way to the top of the financial food chain.

Public perception of these pharmaceutical companies recently hit a crossroads with the introduction of vaccines, promising an end in sight to the partially self-inflicted plague that has sent the world into a deep synchronized depression. Are they ungodly corporations corrupted to a point of valuing a couple extra (billion) bucks over human life? Or are they virtuous saviors of humanity who will delay our demise?

But why think in this binary? We can be grateful for a solution and still spit at their deceit. After all, if saving humanity was ever their driving intent, wouldn’t they share their strategies? The answer seems to be a fat no. Luckily, some hackers of the physical world (university funded researchers) are on the case.

Stanford scientists pooled together the remnants of otherwise used Moderna vaccines on the verge of expiration and reverse engineered them. “None of the residual ‘dregs’ that we used for this work came from vaccines that could have been otherwise administered,” they explained to Vice. “Think of the thin layer of milk coating a carton that had been fully used and emptied yesterday and sitting on the kitchen counter—if we sequenced that, we’d get a full picture of the cow genome even though the small quantity of milk would be of no use.” They posted the mRNA sequence to GitHub. “We don’t find a microchip or any traces of Satan’s DNA in the vaccines,” tweets one of the Stanford scientists, assuaging the fears of the growing population of American conspiracists.

For those hoping to skip the lines or scrape together some side money by DIYing the vaccine, this sequence and the similarly done Pfizer one—compare ingredients lists here—make that all the more possible. For those whose roommates have PhDs and an abundance of free time, at least.

It’s worth noting that President Biden is considering a suspension of intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines after facing pressure from activists, non-profits, labor unions, and many countries in the World Trade Association (not the wealthier ones). Even if the vaccine hasn’t been fully democratized to the point we can all make our own in basements and backyards, these scientists see the publishing of this code as a step in the right direction. The availability of the research allows for “a substantial economy of scale and educational value,” meaning intelligent third parties can explain to us what exactly we are putting into our bodies. And, hopefully, movement towards making the vaccine more globally equitable.