After last month’s presidential debate, most Americans were worried about the political fallout, but in some corners of Silicon Valley, a different concern was emerging: Can we biohack President Biden’s brain?
Stopping and even reversing the effects of aging has become an obsession for a growing community, primarily those who work in the technology and biotech industries, and some in the movement say Biden’s performance could have been improved with short-term hacks, ranging from the mundane (microdoses of mood-boosting lithium) to the unconventional (brain-stimulating nicotine patches) to the downright illegal (microdoses of methamphetamine to enhance focus).
It may be too late for Biden, as his chances of continuing in the presidential race seem to shrink with each passing day.
But the debacle has revitalized a field on the fringes of science and medicine, propelling it towards becoming more mainstream.
Brian Johnson, a former tech CEO who claims to have biohacked himself to be the slowest-aging human on the planet, said he has received interest from lawmakers and other “high-ranking officials, not just Biden.”
“Sometimes you get a pretty scary diagnosis,” said Johnson, who made his fortune selling Venmo owner Braintree to PayPal. “Sometimes people try to get ahead of it, but certainly I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me.”
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Johnson declined to provide details about who he spoke to specifically or what specific advice he gave to people in the “court system” – presumably the Supreme Court – but he did offer some general ideas.
Johnson said Biden could follow the same strategy he used with his 71-year-old father, whose legal career was extended out of fear of cognitive decline.
In addition to a strict sleep schedule and restricted diet, Johnson said the biggest impact came after he donated blood for a plasma transfusion for his father. Before the treatment, his father was aging at the rate of a 71-year-old, according to an array of biomarkers that Johnson uses to measure the rate of aging. Afterwards, his father’s aging rate slowed to that of a 46-year-old. The effect lasted for six months, Johnson said.
Other treatments on a more intermediate timescale include the use of peptides such as Cerebrolysin, a drug used in post-concussion treatment, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
“These are all things Biden can do right now,” Johnson said.
After the debate, people in the anti-aging community wondered aloud what could have been done to help Biden before the debate, said Allison Duetman, president and CEO of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit research organization that focuses on anti-aging technologies. “People were wondering why the administration hadn’t been more aggressive,” Duetman said. The big question in the field was, “How could it get so bad when there are all these tools available for this situation?”
“The solution is not to say, ‘Oh, we have gerontocracy, let’s get rid of these old people.’ That’s not going to happen. It’s too hard, and they’re too stubborn,” says Lawrence Iong, an advocate of anti-aging research and co-founder of VitaDAO, a decentralized organization that funds early-stage research in the field. “The best way is to make them younger.”
Part of the problem, according to Ion and others in the industry, is that anti-aging research is too restrictive and risk-averse. People should have the right to try untested drugs that might have an effect on aging. “That’s like saying, let’s put a four mph speed limit and nobody will die in a car accident,” Ion says. “But of course people will die because they can’t get to the hospitals, they can’t get food to the cities… Medical patriarchy is at its worst.”
