Support truly
independent journalism
A man who is on a quest to live forever claims that he has now slowed down the ageing process to the degree that he can celebrate his birthday every 19 months.
Bryan Johnson, 46, has spent an estimated $2m a year on his quest after selling his company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800m in 2013.
Acknowledging that the maximum human lifespan is around 120 years, he aims to ultimately reverse his age to become 18 again.
Johnson claims to have been successful with a record for the fastest recorded anti-aging in history, reducing his “epigenetic” age by 5.1 years in just seven months.
Many experts are sceptical about the methods Johnson has tried.
He says he has adopted a holistic, whole-body approach to stopping the aging process and follows a 1,977-calorie vegan diet as well as taking various supplements and medicines in his quest.
The tech entrepreneur has also undergone more invasive procedures including MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies and is publicly sharing his statistics online to let others know what can be achieved in this area.
Taking to Instagram on 18 June, he wrote that his latest experiment involved having what is known as follistatin gene therapy in Septemeber 2023, which he claims has increased the lifespan of mice by 30 per cent.
In layman’s terms, the therapy involves increasing the body’s production of follistatin, a protein involved in muscle growth, inflammation, and fertility.
Johnson claims that now he has had the treatment, he has reduced his rate of ageing to a “personal best” of 0.64, meaning that he only ages by a year every 19 months.
“My muscle mass is up by 7 per cent (already in the 99th percentile),” he wrote before adding: “My follistatin levels increased by 160 per cent (2 weeks post-injection).”
However, he stressed that more conventional ways to live a healthy life are still crucial in his approach.
“Sleep, diet, and exercise remain foundational,” he explained. “These next-generation therapies further bolster our chances of being the first generation that has the choice of saying yes to continuous tomorrows.”
Johnson previously opened up to The Independent about his previous, self-confessed unhealthy lifestyle, which he decided to change after being left feeling “very unwell in life”.
“I would routinely commit self-destructive behaviours, and specifically in the evening at seven o’clock, I would try to soothe my stress by eating food,” Johnson recalled. “And that caused me to gain a lot of weight, and that caused me to not sleep very well, which then caused me to not feel very well in life.”
“I basically removed myself from taking care of myself and built a system in place that takes better care of me than I could of myself,” he said.
“The data is compelling that if you do these things and you do these things well, you can slow your rate of ageing,” he told us. “That you can have dramatic effects on your body. It really is just basically saying it’s worth it to do the basic things we’re all told. And if you do them in a rigorous way, you can expect to have meaningful results in the speed at which you age and your overall health… In this phase of the project, it really is about slowing the rate of ageing.”
Bryan, who has a team of 30 doctors and admits he is a “crazy guy trying not to die”, said he “loves” the process but admits that “a lot of it is very painful.”
“I enjoy the discipline. I enjoy what the project asks of me. It asks the ability to endure pain,” he said. “I treat my body as LeBron James would. This is my primary thing.”
