The Scene
After last month’s presidential debates, most Americans fretted about the political implications. But in a certain corner of Silicon Valley, a different concern was raised: Can we biohack President Biden’s brain?
Stopping and even reversing the effects of aging has become an obsession with a growing community of people, many of whom work in the tech and biotech industries. Biden’s performance could have been better, several people in the movement said, with short-term hacks ranging from the mundane (small doses of mood-enhancing lithium) to the unconventional, (brain-stimulating nicotine patches), to the outright illegal, (concentration-enhancing microdoses of methamphetamine.)
It may be too late for Biden, whose chances of continuing on with the presidential race seem to shrink by the day.
But the fiasco has breathed new energy into a field that exists on the fringes of science and medicine, and has been pushing to become more mainstream.
Bryan Johnson, a former tech CEO who claims he has biohacked himself to become the slowest aging human on the planet, says he’s gotten incoming interest from lawmakers and others, “not just for Biden, but many higher governmental officials.”
“Sometimes it’s a situation where they’ve gotten a diagnosis that is very scary,” said Johnson, who made his fortune from selling Venmo owner Braintree to PayPal. “Sometimes they’re trying to get out in front of it. But yeah, quite a few people have contacted me.”
A White House spokesperson declined to comment. Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor has said that Biden is not suffering from any neurological issues that would affect his mental capacity.
Johnson declined to share details on exactly who he has spoken with and what kind of personalized advice he’s given to people “in the court system,” (possibly the Supreme Court) for instance, but he discussed some generic ideas.
Johnson said Biden could follow the same playbook he has used with his own 71-year-old father, who has extended his legal career after a scare with cognitive decline.
In addition to a strict sleep schedule and dietary restrictions, Johnson said one of the biggest impacts came after he donated blood to his father for a plasma transfusion. Before the procedure, his father was aging at the speed of a 71-year-old, according to a slew of biomarkers Johnson uses to determine the rate. Afterward, his aging had reduced to that of a 46-year-old. The effect has lasted for six months, he said.
Other therapies on a more intermediate time scale include the use of peptides such as Cerebrolysin, a drug used for post-concussion treatment, hyperbaric oxygen therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
“These are all things that Biden could do right now,” Johnson said.
Following the debate, people in the anti-aging community were wondering aloud what could have been done to help Biden ahead of that event, said Allison Duettmann, president and CEO of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit research institution focused on anti-aging technology. “People were wondering why the administration wasn’t more proactive about it,” she said. A big question in the field was “how could it be that bad with all the methods that are available for situations like this?”
“The solution is not to say, ‘oh, we have this gerontocracy. Let’s get rid of these old people.’ It’s not going to happen. That’s too hard and they are too entrenched,” said Laurence Ion, an advocate for anti-aging research who co-founded VitaDAO, a decentralized organization for funding early stage research in the area. “The best way is to just rejuvenate them.”
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 unproven drugs that might help with aging. “It’s like saying, let’s put the speed limit at four miles an hour, because then nobody dies from car crashes,” Ion said. “But then, of course, people will die because they can’t get to the hospital, they can’t get food into cities … medical paternalism is the worst.”
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Christine Peterson, who helped found the Foresight Institute in 1986, says she herself takes a bevy of experimental, off-label medications, tracking how they affect her sleep patterns using an Oura ring.
One of those is lithium supplements, she says, which helps with brain cognition. “If I were the surgeon general, I’d say Americans over the age of 50 should take low dose lithium,” she said.
She also recently purchased a supply of nicotine patches, she says. And many people in the anti-aging world are taking Rapamycin, she says, which helps suppress the immune system, which can go out of balance in older ages.
As a preventative measure because of dementia that runs in her family, she also takes Selegiline, originally used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Peterson gets some of her ideas from an anti-aging medicine newsletter, written by an anonymous author who goes by Desmolysium and claims to be an MD in residency. In a recent post, the author listed seven off-label drugs taken every day, two taken occasionally, two that are being experimented with and one that the person is “interested in.”
Anti-aging experts hope that longer term, the effects of aging on the brain could be something that one might handle the same way we handle knee surgery today.
Jean Hebert, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is looking at ways we might replace old brain tissue over time, according to a 2022 paper he published.
Reached by email, Hebert said “The debate was an all too illustrative example,” of the need for such research, but it will be a while until such therapies are feasible. “Other than eat well and exercise, there is very little, even experimentally, that I know of that makes a significant difference,” he wrote.
Reed’s view
Anti-aging medicine is a field that is poised to take off in the coming years. Right now, what we know amounts to speculation about what might help slow or reverse aging.
New artificial intelligence tools are speeding up drug development. We’ll likely reach a place where very small labs can develop drugs with a fraction of the resources needed today.
That’s both exciting and risky. The real cost of drug development is in clinical trials. If the cost and resources needed for trials does not come down, we’ll see new protocols developed outside the jurisdiction of governments. Those who want to live a lot longer will be willing to experiment with those drugs.