Biohacking

Bryan Johnson · @bryan_johnson · view on X

I’m going to try and achieve immortality by 2039. One year of time passes and I remain the same biological age. I invite you to join me. The search for the fountain of youth is the oldest story ever told. It’s been the dream of dreamers for millennia but always painfully out of reach. For the first time in the history of life on earth, in just the past 24 months, the window has opened for a conscious being to realistically strive for this goal. It is an absolutely insane moment. We currently do not know how 2039 immortality will be achieved. There are new, promising therapies that can turn back the clock decades, but they’re buggy. Sometimes they mistakenly cause cancer. We gotta fix that. But we know immortality is possible because nature has already solved it. This isn’t a physics problem like trying to travel faster than the speed of light, it’s a biological engineering problem that evolution has cracked multiple times. The freshwater hydra constantly regenerates its own cells and doesn’t succumb to senescence. It is effectively ageless. The "immortal jellyfish" (Turritopsis dohrnii) can revert its cells back to a youthful state and restart its life cycle indefinitely. Lobsters produce an especially active form of an enzyme called telomerase that preserves their telomeres and keeps their DNA from degrading as they age. We need to port the software to humans. 2039 is a reasonable target because of the accelerated, AI-driven rate of innovation. AI is morphing from assistant to scientist.  It is powering current researchers with previously unimagined capabilities to enhance discovery and development. That, coupled with enhanced biomarker measurement, creates a closed-loop system of improvement that will speed things up dramatically. This is what I’ve been doing for six years. As crude as longevity technology is today, the improvements I’ve personally seen are stunning. I started as a worn-down, inflamed, aged 42 year old who’d broken himself on the rocks of American food slop and entrepreneurship martyrdom. Six years later, my body largely operates at elite 18 year old levels. That includes my cardiovascular system, fertility, strength, and hormones. Not all is well though. I have mild to moderate hearing loss in my left ear that we can’t fix and my brain is anatomically age 42 (I’m 48). Still, unreal results. My team and I did this by following the scientific method. We measured the biological age of every organ. We referenced the best scientific evidence on how to slow aging and rejuvenate.  We methodically completed these protocols and measured again. Rinse and repeat. We could do so much more and faster if we had better measurement and better therapies. Both of which are cooking all over the world right now. To speed things up now, I’m currently having thousands of Bryan Johnson organ clones built in a dish. This will allow me to test drugs and other molecules against my biology to accelerate learning and save my body from potential mishaps. Yes, we’ll make mistakes. Hopefully they won’t be fatal. And of course there’s always bad luck to contend with. But I trust in fate and I believe that destiny is going to grant the human race the pleasure of achieving the ultimate: immortality. While immortality would certainly be cool, the real (secret) objective is to focus our collective attention on a positive goal. Something that helps us feel hope and excitement for the future. I personally love the idea of having a child-like mind, 18-year-old physical vibrancy, and a lifetime of wisdom. This 2039 goal is as much about AI as it is about us humans. It’s about how we survive giving birth to superintelligence. It’s kind of a big deal. We haven’t done it before. A lot can go wrong. I figure that one of the best ways to improve the probability that we build safe AI, and don’t kill each other in the meantime, is to transform our shared aspirations from yolo to don’t die. Right now, we are a suicidal species. We do all kinds of really primitive shit. We unnecessarily kill ourselves with what we eat and how we live our lives. Companies make profits from killing other people with their products. We trash the only home we have. We celebrate these things as virtue.  It’s really fucked up and backward. Soon enough we’ll realize just how infantile we are right now. The 2039 goal points us in the right direction. To say yes to life and no to death. Defiance even. If you’re interested in doing this with me, I’ll continue to share everything I do for free. I’m also going to build this out in Blueprint. We’ll help you do exactly what I’m doing, at a fraction of the cost and effort, alongside an aligned and motivated community. I think this is the coolest goal imaginable. I find it hard to believe that of all the people who’ve lived, it’s us who get the opportunity to have this moment. I pray that we have the courage to appreciate the sacredness of our existence. I pray that we will be brave enough to defend her amidst the onslaught of all the forces that would try to end her. We don’t know, but we may be the only intelligent life to exist in our corner of the galaxy. I pray we will be warriors, caretakers and stewards of existence and honor the gift that has been bestowed on us.

Bryan Johnson · @bryan_johnson · view on X

“Have any of your therapies gone wrong?” In starting Project Blueprint, I had one question: are we the first generation who won’t die? To begin, my team and I evaluated all the scientific literature on longevity and aging, stack ranking the best performing health therapies with the most compelling evidence. Caloric restriction was among the early selections. My daily calorie consumption dropped from 2,500 to 1,950. As a result, I got really lean and lost a lot of fat—especially in my face. My biomarkers were improving, but I looked gaunt. People thought I was on the brink of death. As Blueprint grew into a global movement, the scrutiny increased. Facial fat, we discovered, is pretty important for how people perceive youth. It didn’t matter how good my biomarkers were if I didn’t have face fat. So, we started "Project Baby Face," to explore whether we can restore lost volume. We selected a first therapy: injecting a fat-derived extracellular matrix to restore volume by stimulating my body’s natural fat growth. It’s possible to use one's own body fat for this but the problem was I didn’t have enough fat on my body to extract, so I used a donor. Immediately following the injections, my face began to blow up. And then it got worse, and worse, and worse until I couldn’t even see. It was a severe allergic reaction. Thirty minutes after the treatment, I was scheduled to meet with @ashleevance of Bloomberg to talk about Blueprint. I called him and said, “Hey, so that you’re not alarmed, you may not recognize me today. I think I’m ok. I hope I’m ok. If I’m not ok, are you by chance trained to perform any life-saving actions?” Seven days later my face was back to normal and we were back in the trenches reformulating plans for our next attempt. Building a product is one thing; being the product is a whole different thing.