Bryan Johnson takes over a hundred supplements, eats a precisely calibrated vegan diet, wakes up at the same time every day, adheres to a protocol created by over thirty doctors, and undergoes routine blood draws, ultrasounds, and biological marker tests to determine whether his body is aging at the rate he is paying to stop. In just one year, he has spent over $2 million on this. He asserts that his chronological age is far older than his biological age. He makes the data publicly available.
The majority of individuals have the same reaction when they learn about Johnson: this is strange, most likely harmless, and possibly crazy. The reality that some of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced individuals are financing the underlying research that Johnson is testing on his own body is more difficult to ignore. The current funding for longevity research is not marginal. It’s organized, substantial, and getting more and more serious.
In 2013, Johnson paid $800 million to PayPal for his payment company, Braintree. After that, he spent years developing a brain-computer interface business before devoting nearly all of his attention to what he refers to as “Don’t Die”—a philosophy based on the notion that biological aging is a problem that needs to be solved rather than something that is inevitable.
His attempt to put that into effect is Project Blueprint. He cites findings based on clinical data rather than self-evaluation, such as lung capacity in the top percentile for his age group and cardiovascular function mapping to an 18-year-old. The scientific community is still debating, with varied degrees of patience, whether those metrics tell the complete story.
The billionaire network that surrounds longevity research is more subdued. According to reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has contributed $180 million to Retro Biosciences, a business that aims to increase the average lifespan of healthy humans by ten years. With salaries that would be hard for any academic institution to match, Jeff Bezos has supported Altos Labs, a cell-rejuvenation research company that has drawn some of the world’s finest qualified biologists.
In order to investigate the mechanisms of cellular aging, Larry Page founded Calico Labs through Alphabet in collaboration with the pharmaceutical firm AbbVie. The co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, has invested in Unity Biotechnology to remove senescent cells, which are old, malfunctioning cells that build up in tissue over time and hasten organ deterioration.
None of these businesses have created a product that prolongs human life. A number of them have yielded encouraging preliminary findings. They have a structural advantage over the majority of biotech businesses: their funders don’t require a return on their investment within a typical timeframe. They are able to wait. Additionally, they are wagering that science will eventually overtake finance.
In all of this, there is something worthwhile to sit with. The mistrust is justified since longevity science has a long history of making more promises than it has fulfilled, and many well-funded initiatives have been humbled by the discrepancy between lab results in mice and clinical outcomes in humans.
However, compared to earlier waves, the amount of money invested and the caliber of the researchers being hired are different. It’s actually uncertain if that difference leads to a medical breakthrough or an expensive lesson in the limits of what money can accomplish. That question cannot be answered by Bryan Johnson’s blood testing. However, they are causing more individuals to inquire about it.
