We have mentioned Bryan Johnson before. For the uninformed, he is a 46-year-old tech centimillionaire from what’s left of Venice, California who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal---refrain from dying. There are others who aspire to a similar objective, but none like Johnson. Bryan is serious as a glioblastoma, if you’ll pardon the mention of one of his adversaries. He lives and breathes resistance to the alleged inevitable. He is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.” He’s not kidding.
If you’ve taken the trouble to become inordinately wealthy and every day is speck of heaven, you’d like to hang around for awhile. Tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are on that wagon, having invested early in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Rich elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, using everything from hyperbaric chambers to cryotherapy salons to “recovery sleepwear” to keep the ball rolling. But they are all pikers compared to Bryan Johnson and his 24/7 regimen. Johnson is not just interested in staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. Bryan is all about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is merely optional. He plans never to do it.
One of Johnson’s quests is to defeat his “rascal mind”---the part of all of us that wants to eat ice cream, drink beer with friends, try out that new motocross course. He’s not having any. The immediate goal is to transform his 46-year-old organs to look and act like those of an 18-year-old. The doctors at his Blueprint company have already rewarded him with the bones of a man 30 and the heart of a 37-year old, or so he claims. “Our experiments prove that a competent system is better at managing me than a human can.” He describes his intense diet and exercise regimen as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel, Johnson has his special green juice. Michelangelo lived a sparkling 88 years, impressive in his day, but Johnson is going for the whole megillah. Call him crazy, he just laughs.
The Plan What Am
Recently, a Time magazine reporter named Charlotte Alter showed up at Bryan Johnson’s door to take some notes. “I wasn’t really there to figure out if his elaborate strategies actually worked,” she said. “My own family history of cancer and personal fondness for pepperoni pizza put me on the short-term list. I wanted to spend three days trying to see what a life run by an algorithm would look like and whether the next evolution of being human would have any humanity at all. If living like Johnson meant you could actually live forever, would it even be worth it?”
When Johnson wakes up, usually around 5 a.m., his routine begins. First, he takes an erection-measuring device off his penis (he averages two hours and twelve minutes each night with some sort of erection---an eighteen-year-old averages three hours and fifteen minutes), weighs himself on a scale which uses “electrical impedance,” whatever that is, to measure his weight, BMI, hydration level, body fat and something called “pulse wave velocity,” which nobody but he understands. He claims to be in the top one percent of humans when it comes to ideal muscle fat, and who’s going to argue?
Next, he turns on his light-therapy lamp, which mimics sun exposure, to reset his circadian rhythm. After that it’s on to calculating his inner-ear temperature to monitor changes in his body, and popping two ferritin pills to boost his iron, along with some vitamin C. He washes his face, uses a face cream to discourage wrinkles and puts on a laser light mask for five minutes, with red and blue lights designed to stimulate collagen growth and control blemishes. Now it’s six a.m. and Bryan Johnson marches downstairs to start his day.
Here, the real fun begins. Johnson starts with some special exercises to increase grip strength, then starts an hour-long routine. He can leg-press an arresting 800 lbs, but most of his workout isn’t much more than you’d see from your everyday gym rat…a series of free weights, planks and stretches. He does this seven days a week, adding high-intensity workouts on three days, sometimes wearing a plastic mask which measures his VO2 Max, or the maximum rate of oxygen consumption during physical exercise. Bryan’s VO2 Max is in the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, he claims without seeming to boast. During this time, he sips on his Green Giant sludge and glugs down more pills.
After his workout, Johnson eats a meal of steamed vegetables and lentils that have been blended to resemble the color of a sea lion. He offers visitors some “nutty pudding,” a combination of macadamia nut-milk, ground macadamia and walnuts, chia seed, flaxseed, Brazil nuts, sunflower lecithin, Ceylon cinnamon, pomegranate juice and a partridge in a prune tree. It’s rust-colored and tastes a little dusty, but sacrifices have to be made in the interests of living forever.
Bryan Johnson insists it’s all about something bigger than getting ripped and maintaining a youthful glow. “Most people assume death is inevitable. We’re just trying to greatly prolong the time we have before we die. I don’t think there has ever been a time in history where Homo sapiens could say with a straight face that death may not be inevitable. Maybe now we can begin to make an argument.”
Au Contraire, Mon Ami!
We like Bryan Johnson’s gung-ho attitude, his willingness to sacrifice comfort and eclairs in the interest of health and a rosier future. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it. Personally, we like milk chocolate too much and we hate to pass a bakery with unimaginable hidden wonders. Then there’s the real bummer. Like the fraternity guy reluctant to take a shower because “what if I do and then my date doesn’t show up?”---we’d feel foolish to put in all that work and die anyway.
Dr. Pinchas Cohen, dean of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California opines that while living much longer is certainly possible, living forever is not. “There’s absolutely no technology right now that even suggests that we’re heading that way.”
“If you want immortality, you should go to a church,” suggests Dr. Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. “If I believed even a smidge that it would be possible, I’d be jumping up and down, It’s a pipedream.” Verdin isn’t merely dubious of Johnson’s claims that he can achieve immortality, he’s skeptical of any claims of age-reversal altogether. Verdin says, “We reached out to Bryan Johnson to collaborate on some research but we never heard back. I think if he wants to be taken seriously then he’s going to be challenged by colleagues.” For his part, Johnson says the Buck Institute never contacted him.
Civilization has seen few, if any major advances for which the pioneers weren’t ridiculed. Say Bryan Johnson is right---not so much about eternal life but moving the needle to something like 120 years. What would life be like for the first cadre of successful supercentenarians, watching all their friends and perhaps even their children die before them? Is a life without all the people you love worth living?
Johnson says the question reminds him of senior night at high school. “We say goodbye to all the friends we have been together with for years and probably won’t ever see again. At every stage of life, we move through these transitional states of relationships and new experiences and at every stage you could pose that question. Is it worth it to carry on? Most of us answer in the affirmative.”
“I think the question reflects Homo sapiens in the 21st century. The underlying assumption is that we all have roughly 70 years of life. That’s their starting frame---I’m going to die soon and I can’t do anything about it. My feeling is that I’m going to optimize this window of time---if you change the frame, none of the previous practiced thought patterns work. I realize, of course, that we can only do so much. Even though my mission in life is not to die, I still drive around L.A. every day. Driving is easily the most dangerous thing most of us do. What would be more beautiful irony than me getting hit by a bus and dying? How embarrassing is that?”
Food for thought. Speaking on that subject, Siobhan, let’s pass right by the Dunkin’ Donut store today.
Forever Young
“May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young.”---Bob Dylan
There is little argument that Dr. David Sinclair is the most prominent and serious longevity expert alive today. Sinclair is widely recognized for his extensive research on the biology of aging at Harvard Medical School, particularly focusing on the role of sirtuins in longevity. He is the author of the book “Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don’t.” Dr. Sinclair holds a position as a Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-directs the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, which is well-known for not employing nitwits.
David Sinclair believes that aging is a disease that can be cured. He believes that aging is not inevitable and that it can be slowed down and reversed. He believes in the basics---eating well, getting enough sleep, exercising, managing stress and avoiding smoking. He also believes that aging is caused by cells losing critical instructions, rather than just accumulating damage. Sinclair is an advocate of the plant-based diet with lots of polyphenols, such as berries, red wine, matcha, olives, beans, artichokes, chicory, red onion and spinach. He takes 1 mg of spermidine every morning to mimic the effects of fasting and promote cellular waste removal.
David Sinclair discovered genes call sirtuins that extend lifespan in organisms from yeasts to humans and he found sirtuin activators in red wine and elsewhere. Why do we age? Sinclair’s theory is that aging is caused by poor information transmission in cells, which can be fixed by greater sirtuin function. He says that we can take sirtuin activators every morning and eventually chemicals that will safely reprogram our genes to restore youthful vigor. Is aging merely a disease, as Sinclair believes? Fair question. One Charles Brenner says no. Brenner is inaugural A.E. Mann Family Foundation Chair at the Department of Diabetes & Cancer Metabolism, Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope in Duarte, California. Here’s what he says:
“There are three basic facts about aging that are not addressed in Sinclair’s book. First, all vertebrate animal species have a distribution of natural lifespans that are limited by their gene sets. Human longevity seems to top out at 120 years. Second, animal gene sets evolved to allow individuals to acquire food, avoid predation, find mates and successfully reproduce. Long-lived species like humans also provide a substantial investment in caretaking of offspring until they can obtain food, avoid predation and reproduce for themselves. The advantages conferred to youth by parents mean that genetic selections for parental health are extant in caretaking species. Such genetic selections for post-reproductive health are not extant in non-caretaking species.
Finally, for animals that can mate multiple times, longevity is an emergent property of the ability to continue to do all the things required to reproduce and promote success of offspring. Animal gene sets have been subject to genetic selections for guile, strength and famine-resistance but haven’t been directly selected for longevity because, as a rule, animals are able to successfully reproduce when they are relatively young.
Is aging a disease? It is not. Can it be modified by genes and environment. Certainly. Aging is very easy to accelerate---by smoking, obesity, infectious diseases, etc. It’s much more difficult to slow it down. Restricted access to food helps. Exercise helps. But nothing actually reverses aging. Early reports of sirtuins extending lifespan in invertebrates could not be independently replicated. Sinclair makes innumerable non-evidence based statements about the benefits of time-restricted eating, age reversal as evidenced only by changing biomarkers and even potential immortality by repeatable drug treatments. The latter statements are particularly shocking because one of the drugs used to lower biomarkers of aging was human growth hormone, which is clearly defined by genetics as a pro-aging molecule.”
Aw shit, Doctor B. How to pour on our parade! Here we were making plans for our 120th birthday party on the Moon and kicking the football around with our great great great great grandchildren. You get to be Champion Bummer at the big die-off dance. Please---leave now---you’re making us cry.
Where There’s Life, There’s Hope
Proven ingredients for Life-Extension Pie:
1.---Nutrition & Lifestyle. There’s evidence aplenty that boring stuff like eating properly, not smoking, restricting alcohol and eating a truckload of fruits and vegetables on a regular basis will get you 7 to 14 more years than people who do the opposite.
2.---Physical Activity. Globally, inactivity directly causes roughly 10% of all premature deaths from chronic diseases like coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and various cancers. Just over 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity is enough for most people. Not only does it make you stronger and fitter, it has been shown to reduce that rotten inflammation stuff and improve mood. And no, you can’t get any from Gina Hawkins.
3.---Boosting the immune system. However fit you are, alas, your immune system will get less effective as you age. Blame the thymus, that bow-tie shaped bastard in your throat, that starts to wither. The thymus is where all those nice T-cells gather ‘round the campfire at night and learn to fight infections. No campfire, no chance for the Ts to learn to recognize new infections or fight off cancer in geezers. You can help a tad, though, by making sure you take enough vitamins, especially A and D. A promising area of current research is looking at signals the body sends to help make more immune cells, particularly a molecule called IL-7. We may be able to soon produce drugs that contain this molecule. Also, don’t forget the spermidine, which triggers immune cells to clear out their internal garbage.
4.---Rejuvenating cells. Senescence is a toxic state that cells enter as we age. It wreaks havoc across the body, generating chronic low-grade inflammation and disease, essentially causing biological aging. In 2009, scientists showed that middle-aged mice lived longer and stayed healthier if they were given small amounts of rapamycin, which inhibits a key protein called mTOR that helps regulate cells’ response to nutrients, stress, hormones and damage. In the lab, drugs like rapamycin make senescent human cells look and behave like their younger selves. Everyone went nuts over rapamycin, including Bryan Johnson, who took it for five years, testing various protocols (5, 6 and 10 mg dose schedules, biweekly at one time). Eventually, he ditched the drug after getting skin and soft tissue infections, abnormal levels of fat in his blood, elevated blood sugar and a higher resting heart rate. Because rapamycin suppresses the immune system, side affects can include dangerous bacterial infections, pneumonia, cellulitis and pharyngitis according to Dr. Oliver Zolman, who works with Johnson. Perhaps an acceptable dose of rapamycin might someday be determined but for the time being newer drugs such as RTB101 that work in a similar way (and can even reduce COVID infection) will keep rapamycin on the bench.
5.---Clearing out old cells. Completely getting rid of senescent cells is another promising way forward. A growing number of lab studies in mice using senolytics show overall improvements in health in the critters and they’re definitely living longer. In a small clinical study, people with severe lung fibrosis reported better overall function, including in how fast they could walk after they’d been treated with senolytic drugs. Researchers are hopeful senolytics will lead to a cornucopia of new treatments.
Okay---get out there and battle. Take your spermidine medication, stay out of Bubba’s BARBQ and join up with Richard Rahall’s Offroad Bicycle Rangers. Don’t pay attention to that song which tells you to keep your skillet good and greasy all the time. Watch those riptides, keep your partners happy and always remember to check your PIE weekly. It could be a matter of 120 years of life or death.
Eighty-four years and counting…
