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Biohacker seeking immortality afflicted with incurable 'stomach eating' disease
- therealdkz 3mo ago[dead]
- hoppp 3mo agoNow this news is everywhere and people seem to be mocking him, but he is a good guy.
- twothreeone 3mo ago[flagged]
- ksd482 3mo agoThat was unkind and unnecessary. Please keep these kinds of comments out of HN.
- garciasn 3mo agoHe’s unfathomably rich and unfathomably stupid; doing insane shit to his body and actively recommending others do the same and that’s why he’s being mocked. “Good guy” or not, he’s paying the price for playing with fire.
- theplumber 3mo agoAt least he walks the walk. I won’t say he is stupid. You see stupid people(a big chunk of the human population) looking for immortality in more stupid things so I would place him way above these folks
- Paradigm2020 3mo agoCan easily find videos online documenting that he doesn't actually release all data as he claims and that the supplements he sells have serious flaws.
- hoppp 3mo agoThere is no proof that his autoimmune disease was caused by him "playing with fire", it's more likely to be genetic.
- garciasn 3mo agoI didn’t say they were related. I said he’s doing insane shit to himself because he has the money to do so. But it’s that he recommends others do the same and that’s stupid.
- dpoloncsak 3mo agoFwiw, people mocked him long before this news broke. People aren't hating on him as a result of his diagnosis, just found a new (and admittedly ironic) point to pick at.
- bglazer 3mo agoHe's hubristic and selfish. None of his "research" is going to benefit anyone (himself included), making this essentially a huge waste of time and resources. Bryan will die just like all the rest of us, despite being very rich and self-obsessed. He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people. Instead he's acting like just another huckster promising a fountain of youth. He does this using bombastic terms and taboo methods (e.g. using his son as a blood boy), in a way that's calculated to direct enormous public attention towards himself. The science he advocates for is sketchy at best and the results of all his "experiments" will tell us nothing because we can't reproduce his methods (his program allegedly costs >$1M per year), nothing is blinded or controlled, and N=1. He's a bad person who uses bad methods to glorify himself and now he probably gave himself an autoimmune disease. He deserves to be mocked.
- Simon_O_Rourke 3mo agoWell said, he got what was coming to him too.
- neonstatic 3mo ago> He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people There we go again. There's always that one guy in the crowd, who knows better what you should be spending your money on. Also, that guy has the moral right to tell you. He is a really good person, you know! So you should listen! You should also thank him. > He deserves to be mocked. Just look how good this guy is.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoI mean, you never know for sure. It's all just PR and messaging. Especially from a tech CEO with money. The thing that I struggle to reconcile is how much he's been involving his teenage son in this experimentation. That's a pretty gigantic red flag for me, I guess.
- grumdan 3mo ago> but he is a good guy That definitely doesn't seem to be the case, especially if you look beyond his bio-hacking endeavors. His treatment of employees and ex-partners seems pretty horrible: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-blueprint-confidentiality-agreements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-...
- everyone 3mo agoBeing good and wealthy are mutually exclusive.
- neonstatic 3mo agoI hope you are writing this from a really poor place, like a Brazilian favela. People there must be really good. Why would you not live with them? I am certain you are not some hypocrite, who lives in an affluent, evil place. That would really disappoint me, because I really want to believe you are not full of BS.
- elzbardico 3mo agoSome of worst evilest motherfuckers I knew were dirty poor, and some of them were filthy rich. Evil Motherfuckerness seems to be uniformly distributed across the social strata.
- neonstatic 3mo agoI agree. I think it has nothing to do with how much a person has and everything with who they choose to be. Unfortunately, stupid communist ideas are very popular on this website. Say "eat the rich" and they will clap.
- tavavex 3mo agoA single amoral poor person doesn't matter because they can't do anything to you short of physical violence. A single amoral ultra-wealthy person can and will make sure everyone plays by their rules, they are unstoppable forces in society. Not every evil person ends up being rich, but the incentives in our society basically ensure that past a certain point of extreme wealth we're selecting for the most ruthless and self-centered people who know how to play the game. Even an initially good person that managed to climb the ranks on merit or real innovation eventually has to make the choice between ethics and getting more money, and we know which way they tend to go. HN is/was a bastion of venture capital and big tech. This is literally Y Combinator. Maybe reflect on why the tides may be slightly shifting away from idealist absolutism even in a place like this. You'll probably find genuine grievances and criticism instead of Red Scare cardboard cutouts that you'd look so good taking down.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rglover 3mo agoThis is heartbreaking to see (from the doc about this guy, he seemed to genuinely believe this was a good idea). A good warning about the limits of control humans have over things (and why brute-forcing it can often lead to bad outcomes).
- theplumber 3mo agoI wonder if the methods he used are any better than all sorts of incantations or ancient “cures”…a worthy goal that proved money can’t solve the ultimate disease…yet!
- Jemm 3mo agoI completely support people who want to be guinea pigs for health science.
- copperx 3mo agoWhat he's doing is not science.
- pixel_popping 3mo agoIt literally is, and in many circles (illicit drugs, bodybuilding, cosmestic...) it's thanks to those community that we have early-on data. Go look for information about latest psychedelic derivatives, user reviews is the only thing we have accessible, it is Science, a doctor is aware of side-effects because of reporting, user reporting (assuming relatively trusted) is genuinely useful for the world. It's also useful because most AI models are able to talk about what the community is saying about drugs and the model can correlate that with many other things and it does enhance diagnostic and it's quite useful to train medical models. See a relatively "new" example is about Vapes, there has been deaths and so-on due to people experimenting with illicit ones, without those reports, we will never have in future Science book and AI models that some chemicals are dangerous to inhale or whatever (it's a shitty example but you get my point)
- rtkwe 3mo agoIt's not good data for any particular procedure because he's doing so many at the same time so you can't really use the data to support any particular procedure in a rigorous way.
- pixel_popping 3mo ago[flagged]
- Clent 3mo agoIf creating research data means one is performing science, the word means nothing.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804049
- LoganDark 3mo agoI thought the article was talking about his blood transfusions to explain any part of how he ended up with this disease but no, he just has it (for some reason) as a result of something that happened at some point.
- Melatonic 3mo agoHe donates blood or ?
- rtkwe 3mo agoNo he takes blood transfusions from his son along with a lot of other questionable procedures and supplements. No one really knows why he developed this problem and it's pretty common but in association with so many exotic medical procedures it's spawned a lot of assumptions about the cause.
- Melatonic 3mo agoYeah that's what I thought. Which is pretty weird. Funnily enough donating blood actually can have big benefits for health - they did a study on Firemen who have massively higher PFAS blood levels (exposure to fire fighting foams). Turns out by regularly donating blood it forces the body to make new blood which was the only reliable way to dilute the "forever chemicals".
- LoganDark 3mo agoIs the solution really just to give away the PFAS to blood recipients?
- rtkwe 3mo agoI mean as a solution for high PFAS levels simply drawing blood and throwing it away would also work just fine too. Also the levels in the blood the recipient receives would be diluted by their own blood too unless they were getting a lot of PFAS'd blood often.
- cannonpr 3mo agoTo add some context, this is a relatively common form of gastritis impacting depending on location 3-5% of the population called Autoimmune Gastritis. Now his biohacking might be related it might not, the issue with the guy is that he does too many interventions at the same time so it’s hard to really tell what’s going on. He also has a core belief of equating looking younger with his interventions working, to his defence he also runs more rigorous analysis on his body. Overall he isn’t the most interesting bio hacker out there, but he is the loudest.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoWhenever I look up diseases and it reports a statistic such as "3-5%" I often feel like either I must not be interpreting it correctly, or it is so region-biased as to not be useful for how I'm consuming the data. Because it's hard to reconcile that apparently in the ballpark of 1 in 20 people have this?
- Melatonic 3mo agoLot of these are a spectrum. 3 to 5% might have a mild form that's aggravated by super spicy food or something but otherwise not very noticeable. And then maybe a percentage of those people have a more debilitating version ?
- somenameforme 3mo agoIt seems extremely common as people age. Your body just starts to break down as we get older and this is one, amongst many, ways that this manifests. A quick search suggests it shows up in about 50% of people over 70. [1] [1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11879357/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11879357/
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo agoIs is a case that 1 in 20 people have this, or more like 1 in 20 will eventually get this?
- trilogic 3mo agoThere is nothing more valuable than doing what you believe and love in the life. Especially when doing no harm, furthermore trying to solve a great problem with great benefits for society. Is incredible but understandable, that many don´t get it.
- jmcgough 3mo agoHe's going about this in the least scientific way, though. When n=1 and he has a million confounding variables, it reads more like fear of his own mortality than a meaningful research project. And this is a business for him now, he sells supplements through his Blueprint program.
- trilogic 3mo agoWhat he did is filtering through all the noise and getting straight to the point, doing what he believes no one else has done and leading by example. We can argue about ethical and non conventional ways ofc that need to be optimized. The noise like this post comments will always be there, but doesn´t really matter actually :). Then being jealous or "skeptic" because he made some money out of it, it is nonsense. An example: most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day (an easy one is vit D). How is that bad, Informing and providing them with the solution? (ignorance at it´s finest). Reminds me of how ancient people was burning a "witch" cause knew how to heal with herbs.
- jmcgough 3mo ago> most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day The most common cause of death globally is cardiovascular disease. The people buying supplements from him are buying his longevity supplements which likely have limited benefits to anyone.
- nullsanity 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nemo136 3mo agoHis idea would be cool if not for the lindy effect: each one of his "tests" has a somewhat low probability of extending his life by a few months / years. However each of his tests, as they are new, also has a smaller probability of having ruin effect: killing him or leaving him disabled in the process. Multiplying the treatments increases significantly the downside risks (1 failure is enough) while the positive will not compound (you will need many of them to work to see a significant effect).
- arjie 3mo agoIt seems like a high-prevalence low-impact disease. Considering how much he self-scans it’s no surprise he found one of these. The cancers that he could get as a result are not particularly dangerous and lifespan is barely affected by it. Seems interesting but not consequential.
- bena 3mo agoHilariously, his self-scans did not catch this. It's also not cancer. AIG makes him more susceptible to certain cancers, but he does not have cancer yet. And looking at what he's done compared to the symptoms, it's possible he's been inadvertently self-medicating his condition for a bit. He's currently blaming his lifestyle before his "biohacking" for his condition.
- arjie 3mo agoI was writing quickly and miswrote. I meant “the cancer that this condition increases the risk of”. Let me correct it.
- culi 3mo agoSomeone should make a website showing the oldest living biohackers. Presenting it as a sort of leaderboard edit: I don't actually ethically endorse this. I was moreso poking fun at the morbidity of the biohacking influencer space which invites people to obsess over an influencer's health and inevitably turns into something gruesome when said influencer has a tragic health outcome.
- pixel_popping 3mo agoHonestly, great idea, hope someone interested reads this.
- Hoodedcrow 3mo agoThe best biohacker is some 100+ year-old Japanese lady who just eats healthy and avoids stress
- stronglikedan 3mo agoThe vast majority of people gotta get stressed to be able to buy food before retirement age. I wonder how old she was when she started the low-stress lifestyle.
- Hoodedcrow 3mo agoI didn't mean anything exact, more like a joking suggestion. But yeah, if we're talking seriously - seems like this boils down to a ton of luck (good genetics and a secure enough employment or opportunity).
- everyone 3mo agoThis is absolutely hilarious. lolollol .. aw life is good.
- chabes 3mo agoHaving a blood boy will not save you from inevitable death
- everyone 3mo agoHe hired real doctors right? Not like witch doctors or faith healers or something? I wonder was there an issue of them not being able to tell the boss no, no matter how screwy his ideas were? I know Putin is also doing a similar thing, he has a team of doctors who are supposed to keep him alive forever. But he certainly seems the sort of boss you cant disagree with or give bad news to (we can see that in how he commands the war) so maybe he will also hopefully die sooner than we think.
- elzbardico 3mo ago> I know Putin is also doing a similar thing, he has a team of doctors who are supposed to keep him alive forever. Oh really? have him told you so? Amazing. Did he give you more details about the treatments?
- Melatonic 3mo agoThese people always crack me up. They don't actually want to follow the science - they just want to take a bunch of pills (easy mode) and look good. If you really wanna live a long time you probably need to be carefully making tons of fermented food the way our grandparents did but with the advances of modern science and monitoring. And of course eat an otherwise healthy diet with moderate and varied amounts of exercise and low stress. And of course win the genetic + luck lottery. Doubt the guy would be having GI issues if he was eating his own homemade Natto everyday Edit: went to the guys site and the first product he's selling is a gut health pill that makes a lot of bold claims. Bullshit meter is off the charts
- Wurdan 3mo agoThe article suggests he eats a vegan diet and exercises daily, so it's not like he's just popping pills on the couch between McDonalds meals. He seems like a complete loon in every respect, but it seems a bit unfair to say he just wants to take pills and nothing else.
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- projektfu 3mo agoThis website is a little creepy.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ChiperSoft 3mo ago> As well as blood transfusions, Johnson follows a strict daily routine that includes monitoring his body fat, heart rate variability, blood, stool samples, and the number of erections he has per night. Every day he also takes two dozen medicines at 5 a.m This man is not mentally well...