r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 08 '26

Society Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who wants to live forever, diagnosed with incurable autoimmune disease

https://www.techspot.com/news/113035-bryan-johnson-millionaire-biohacker-who-wants-live-forever.html
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u/TheHoleintheHeart Jul 08 '26

I’d be curious if he what he’s been doing to himself had anything to do with this or if it would’ve happened anyway?

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u/go3dprintyourself Jul 08 '26

Iirc he had an immune diagnosis many years before starting anything. Possibly related? 

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u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

My teacher told us that the number one risk factor for developing an autoimmune disease is having an autoimmune disease. Once you develop one, your odds are developing another are wayyyyyyy higher than the general population. Some people are just prone to them I guess. Sounds like he's one of those.

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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

Supposedly a good chunk of the human population has a significantly increased risk of developing autoimmune disorders and this has (supposedly, someone check me) been tied directly to a mutation that helped these peoples' ancestors survive the bubonic plague.

You survived the plague, but your bloodline will have overactive/trigger-happy immune systems.

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u/Short_Stay_9283 Jul 08 '26

Interesting. There is a similar link to hemochromatosis as well. I'm no scientist, but my understanding is the build up of iron people's blood prevented the plague from latching on. So some huge percentage of survivors (like 30% or something) had hemochromatosis. Modern day treatments for hemochromatosis involve donating blood, because the release helps fight the buildup of iron, WHICH IS SUPER INTERESTING because it probably means that bloodletting and leaches ACTUALLY made a pretty decent number of people feel better at the time.

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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

That really is amazing.

I find following this stuff really engaging.

Going back to the plague/AI disorders. The people who had this mutation survived the plague, and accepted long term pre-dispositions towards "jumpy" immune systems.

Ironically, the bloodlines that didn't develop that mutation (or receive it through merging bloodlines) are better off TODAY.

Why? Because the version of the plague that was wrecking us has since evolved to... not be as deadly.

Yersinia pestis is what causes the bubonic plague. It's actually not in the best interest of that bacteria to kill its hosts as often or quickly as it was doing in the ~1350s. If you kill your hosts too quickly, you may not have enough time to incubate and spread to a new host. Additionally, you may well run out of hosts all together before either allowing their populations to regenerate, or before you're able to evolve the ability to use other organisms as hosts.

So, today we still have Yersinia pestis but we're not really in need of the "jumpy" immune systems some of us developed in order to survive it.

The next step will be watching/hoping the bloodlines with jumpy immune systems begin to reliably tone down how aggressive their system is. If things go this direction, these people will be significantly better off than the rest of us, but only if they can reel their systems in a bit.

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u/griffibo Jul 08 '26

The death of 30-50% of the species is a pretty strong selection event. Not sure evolution cares if our immune system is reactive as long as we live long enough to breed.

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u/FrankBattaglia Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Not sure evolution cares if our immune system is reactive as long as we live long enough to breed.

It does not. That's the whole idea behind the Selfish Gene.

What's even trippier is evolution doesn't even care whether you live long enough to breed; it just cares that more of the next generation will share your genes. E.g., if all males in a line fanatically defended their sisters, it might mean most of those males die early, but if that means the defended sister gets to have more total children than they would have had individually, it's still a winning strategy, evolutionarily speaking. See e.g. colony insects, which have evolved most of the organisms never reproducing at all so that a select few can have thousands or millions of children. Evolution selects for better workers using the genes of the queen which benefit from better workers.

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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 08 '26

Yeah, I was just talking to my uncle about that last night like there’s no selective pressure for us to not like lose the ability to read without reading glasses in our 50s or late 40s or for our backs to fail or our knees or shoulders that need to be replaced or dementia or basically any sickness that shows up past the age of 40

I am actually surprised that extreme bad vision wasn’t sorted out sooner I guess in an ancient times like you could still be like a farmer or like do you need to work maybe but like you know people have really bad vision like how did they succeed long enough in life to find a mate

I think I heard somewhere that now it’s reversing and becoming more common because so easy to get glasses that it’s no longer any hindrance really

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u/TheAdoptedImmortal Jul 08 '26

Most people don't begin to lose their eyesight until well after their reproductive years. Because vision loss before having children is relatively uncommon, there's very little evolutionary pressure for our eyes to improve in that regard.

Evolution doesn't produce "better" traits simply because they would be beneficial. A trait is only strongly selected for if it significantly affects an individual's ability to survive long enough to reproduce or to successfully pass on their genes. Since our current vision is generally sufficient for that, there's little selective pressure driving the evolution of better eyesight.

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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 08 '26

There are lots of children that wear glasses and some that wear really thick glasses so they’re certainly is a pretty big chunk of people like I know people in my life and I don’t know that many people who basically could do almost nothing without their glasses so it is surprising now we’re talking about Eurovision getting really bad after your 30 years old or four years old I understand, but there are plenty of seven-year-olds and 10-year-olds and 18-year-olds who can barely see

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u/ancientestKnollys Jul 09 '26

Bad eyesight in children has massively increased in the modern era, due to screen use, reading, writing and not being outdoors so much. None of these were much of an issue for most of human history.

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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 09 '26

I understand about nearsightedness, but farsightedness to my understanding is just the shape of your eye, and thus would have been prevalent even before modern times

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u/jedi2155 Jul 09 '26

Going by another posters comment, if having good eyesight in your later years meant better chances that your partner/children/family will survive to reproduce, then that is a positive forcing function towards better eyes. If you get blind as you age, and no one is able to protect family, then RIP family and genes.

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u/FrankBattaglia Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

We define bad vision by how well you can read letters at a given distance. For the vast majority of human history, nobody needed to read at any distance. If your vision was sufficient to distinguish a leopard from a person, you were fine.

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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 09 '26

No, I would say there would still be huge problems. If you couldn’t notice that that was a snake and not a stick.

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u/tekniklee Jul 08 '26

Most people didn’t live past 30ish

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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 08 '26

Really that’s only because so many people died in childhood like if you lived to be 18 years old, you had a good chance to live even in like 10,000 years ago to be 50 or 60

You often hear people saying you know people died at 30 and that’s really only true especially if you’re talking about just like the last 500 years or thousand years that’s really only true because like a third or more of people would die before they were adults once you’re an adult you live much longer. It’s the childhood that was the real killer back then

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u/WarpedHaiku Jul 08 '26

It does care about it to a small degree (at least the debilitating ones). If you die from complications caused by lupus, or end up bedbound due to ME... You're not gonna be there to confer a survival advantage to your descendents.

Even end of life diseases like Alzheimers face a little bit of evolutionary pressure to remove them, because of the negative impact they have on their children who have already reproduced which then has a knockon effect to the grandchildren who haven't.

The issue is when something provides a benefit early in life before reproduction when evolutionary pressure is strongest, but a negative impact later when it's weaker.

It's easy to imagine a mutation that makes the immune system more trigger happy and better at saving you from viruses early in life, at the cost of making it more likely to cause immune problems later in life.

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u/Myelinsheath333 Jul 08 '26

Im curious if certain types of modern day cancers are also an adaptation to a similar historic stressor that no longer exists/is easily treatable today. Maybe having a higher rate of hyper fast dividing cells made wounds easier to heal in populations that were heavily predisposed to getting hurt? Idk

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u/griffibo Jul 08 '26

Not sure the pathophysiology fits in that direction. Some cancers are directly linked to viruses. Cervical cancer: HPV for example. Wipe out the virus, wipe out the cancer. EBV is pretty insidious and could be linked to cancers. Hard to say because everyone has it!

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u/Adventurous_Ad7442 Jul 08 '26

Certain types of stomach cancer is caused by a virus.

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u/sevencatts Jul 09 '26

which ones?

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u/Adventurous_Ad7442 Jul 09 '26

Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG)

Edit - this is the condition not the cancer.

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u/africandsilverflask Jul 09 '26

Now that is interesting.

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u/psychopyro3 Jul 08 '26

“For primitive beings like us, life seems to have only one single purpose: gaining time... To achieve that aim, the mass of the cells... has only two solutions. Be immortal, or to reproduce.”

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u/Princess_Slagathor Jul 08 '26

I just want to live long enough to see single cell organisms turn into humans again.

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u/Frosti11icus Jul 08 '26

Why? Because the version of the plague that was wrecking us has since evolved to... not be as deadly.

It hasn't evolved to be less deadly, we just have germ theory and antibiotics to treat it now.

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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

I'm not an expert but I have listened to experts claim it has literally become less deadly.

What you've said is still true additional context.

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u/Adventurous_Ad7442 Jul 08 '26

I've never heard of "plague theory".

My family has a lot of autoimmune disorders. And the women live to be old!!

Edit - I've never had covid but I'm very careful.

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u/mukino Jul 08 '26

It’s not called Plague Theory but there has been some research around the idea that plague survival contributes to autoimmune rates in modern day.

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u/Adventurous_Ad7442 Jul 08 '26

Thanks for the article.

My 36 year old daughter was diagnosed with Hashimoto's when she was 12. My dad and have Graves disease. I have MS.

Eta - my ancestors are from Eastern Europe.

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u/mukino Jul 08 '26

Damn, sorry to hear that. Wishing you and your family the best.

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u/animalkrack3r Jul 09 '26

The post is correct about the evolutionary connection between plague survival and modern autoimmune disease risk. However, the claims regarding hemochromatosis providing plague resistance and the justification for historical bloodletting are speculative and not supported by mainstream scientific consensus.

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u/WorldEndingDiarrhea Jul 08 '26

Gosh that’s so weird because yersinia literally loves iron. The way they make lab-safe variants is by taking out yersinia’s iron scrounging pathways. This became a problem years ago when a post doc had hemochromatosis and unknowingly “rescued” the pathogenesis of the “non virulent” strain when it started growing in his body. He died in the hospital.

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u/Ggfd8675 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Thank you for bringing this up. I wish this could be higher than that comment, because I’m reading the case reports on this and a related study. Everything is indicating that hemochromatosis would make Y. pestis much worse. I believe the original commenter has it totally backwards. Yet another reminder not to trust info from Reddit threads, no matter how confidently presented. 

That case is very sad. They weren’t able to determine how he infected himself but he was dead within a week of symptoms, and 13 hours after going to the ER. The hemochromatosis was undiagnosed until autopsy. 

Edit: ok it looks like the theory is a particular kind of hemochromatosis will bind up iron, starving the Yersinia. So that’s how it could be protective, if you had that particular mutation.  https://www.aaas.org/membership/scientia/hemochromatosis-and-plague

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u/WorldEndingDiarrhea Jul 08 '26

Hemochromatosis binding up iron is a pretty wild theory but maybe it’s true! It’s very hard to make inferences about evolutionary biology, a lot of it is post-hoc fact fitting which is you know pretty “ehhhh” as far as science goes.

Yeah the post doc’s death was awful :( He apparently didn’t tell them what lab he worked in but that said I don’t know if it would have made a difference. He was so sick :(

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u/carlitospig Jul 08 '26

This I did not know. Fascinating.

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u/SIGMA920 Jul 08 '26

A lot of old practices were based in them working but that's specifically because it had some aspect that we know today. Not eating "unclean" meats like pork for example in the middle east was a sanitary thing rather than a religious thing. Alcohol was safer to drink than water for much of history so naturally it became a cultural practice.

Lots of little things like that are still technically useful now.

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u/UnOGThrowaway420 Jul 08 '26

The alcohol was safer than water thing is a myth, FYI.

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u/SIGMA920 Jul 08 '26

As I understand, it's a matter of when and where you're talking about. It's basically not a constant. But I could be wrong on that.

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u/UnOGThrowaway420 Jul 08 '26

Okay, I need you to think about this for a second. Alcohol is made with water. The same water that would be contaminated in this situation. The miniscule amount of alcohol present in those drinks isn't going to kill deadly waterborne illness. It takes 2 seconds of logical thought to see that this entire concept is flawed.

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u/SIGMA920 Jul 08 '26

From what I've heard about it it's the process of making it that would be the cause of any health benefits (Similar to pasteurization for milk.). I'm no expert on it through.

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u/aerdvarkk Jul 08 '26

Feel Better On Your Way To Death. Good slogan, too bad most people at the time couldn't read.

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u/patientpartner09 Jul 08 '26

My mil has hemochromatosis and has to donate like monthly. Very interesting!

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u/Helenium_autumnale Jul 08 '26

Wow, I've never heard that before--truly interesting!

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u/Lifesucksgod Jul 08 '26

Don’t forget general high blood pressure and bloodletting

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u/Scary_Woodpecker_110 Jul 08 '26

Yikes I have an overactive immune system & my mother has hemochromatosis & an overactive immune system. My wife has allergies so that’s nice for our children…..

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u/PolloMagnifico Jul 08 '26

I have mild hemochromatosis and I about lost my mind when my doctor prescribed me "bloodletting".

I also have high hemoglobin cuz I'm a smoker so I can give out the double red donations used in trauma. Hopefully the extra iron in my blood helps out.

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u/Totally_a_Banana Jul 08 '26

I thought it made sense to use it to lower blood pressure or something, but that also makes a ton of sense!

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u/stormrunner89 Jul 08 '26

People are really good at noticing patterns, I could easily imagine someone working in a swamp then later that day noticing a leech but also feeling weirdly better than usual. Then when they felt worse again they tried letting a leech feed on them on purpose and felt better again, leading them to decide the leech was removing something bad in their blood.

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u/Mackadamma Jul 08 '26

Yes and no ! The evolutionary selection for the hemochromatosis gene in Europe is a big deal, but it was actually a shield against tuberculosis and typhoid fever, where iron-starved immune cells could starve out those specific bugs.

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the bubonic plague actually loves iron and needs massive amounts of it to replicate and become super virulent. So having hemochromatosis would actually make someone a perfect target for the plague, rather than protecting them.

But you are right regarding bloodletting making people with hemochromatosis feel better though! They got a good health boost from it because it was the only way to dump their toxic iron overload. It's just that doing the same thing to an actual plague patient was a definitive death sentence, since Plague was already giving you internal bleeding.

But yes, all this is truly fascinating !

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u/IcemanJEC Jul 08 '26

That is quite *IRONIC* if you ask me.

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u/Miserable-Drink-4995 Jul 09 '26

Wow, people really did have too much blood back then huh

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u/_learned_foot_ Jul 09 '26

Bloodletting is still done with leeches, the thing is we often have better solutions for the same problem when in a first world large hospital. Many still carry medically acceptable leeches for the right use.

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u/Totakai Jul 09 '26

Ooo I don't have an official diagnosis but started donating when my hemoglobin hit 19 (the blood bank mentioned drs usually don't stress until it hits 20 but they were all woah at the 19). They warned usually you're woozy after donating but man I felt great. I've noticed I start feeling bad if I go too long without donating so I try to often.

It's funny how the cure is just removing blood and how fake it sounds.

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

Yes, I have a gene called HLA-B27 that causes my immune system to overreact to certain bacteria in my mucosal barriers.

On the other hand, the method it uses to detect those bacteria isn’t specific enough. It homes in on a small part of the target bacteria which unfortunately is also similar to parts of my ligaments.

I, having been a former college athlete and national champion, am now completely housebound at 34. My medication’s list price is $120,000 / year. All it does is keep me from being in indescribable pain - they haven’t solved the crippling fatigue from my body spending all its energy trying to eat itself.

Personally, id take a few more tummy aches a year instead of this.

(Edit: for any other patients looking for support -

r/thritis
r/ankylosingspondylitis
r/autoinflammatory
r/psoriaticarthritis )

(Edit 2: I have now remembered that it's actually virus components that it reacts to not bacteria - but same idea. Edit 3: ok it's viruses and bacteria, goddamn this shit is complicated)

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u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

What a fucking nightmare. And paying double my salary to live like that, too. I'm so sorry my friend. No treatments?

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26

I’m fortunate to have insurance so a large part of the treatment is covered.

There are treatments, but the gold standard of figuring out which one works is simple guess-and-check. Given that some of the treatments take years to reach full effect, it takes many years still to see what, if anything, will work.

There are more aggressive treatments in the pipeline, but very experimental right now - probably 10-20 years before we know for sure if they’ll work.

Thank you for the kind words :)

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u/hyperlite135 Jul 08 '26

May I ask what led you to find this diagnoses?

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26

It was a long road, but to shorten the story it took a rheumatologist. The typical presentation is chronic aching pain that gets better with anti-inflammatory medications (e.g. NSAIDs, steroids) but returns after the medications wear off. Other manifestations include skin conditions and rashes that don't resolve with moisturizers, antifungals, or antibiotics.

The longer story involves childhood abuse and neglect, helicopters, lots of crazy parties, and a succession of women that I really should not have been dating.

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u/jbenze Jul 08 '26

Hey autoimmune buddy! I have a severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis (which now they thing may have been Stills Disease and I had it as a kid which explains a lot). I'm seronegative so nothing show on blood tests and in the years it took ti diagnose, it destroyed all my joints. I had both hips, both knees, both elbows and my right shoulder replaced in my 20's and then the drugs killed my liver so I had a transplant in 2019. Thankfully insurance pays for most of it but some of the meds are $7000 a week without it. I totally get how you feel: neverending pain, complete exhaustion all the time, brain fog, all the other stuff you learned to just ignore over the years.

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u/littlest_lemon Jul 08 '26

How were you finally diagnosed, being seronegative? My blood tests all come back negative for specifics but my inflammation markers are high and my joints are very clearly eating themselves

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u/jbenze Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I was in the same boat in the beginning. My family also doesn’t like to talk about history but an uncle on my mother’s side died from complications of RA and one of my aunts had it. In my father’s side, my grandfather and an uncle had it.

I had a coworker suggest I see a rheumatologist when I was limping around and explained my symptoms. She listed and said the symptoms matched RA so she started treating with the lighter meds like plaquenil. She kept ordering x-rays, CT Scans and MRIs that showed damage progressing.

About a year in, I couldn’t put weight on my legs anymore, I went to an orthopedist, they took the first hip out and confirmed it was textbook RA. I’m in a medical journal for I think my second hip and they brought classes my med students in to see it.

I had a ton of joint issues as a kid and a teenager and doctors just told me I was fat and had osteoarthritis in my hands. I lost 170lbs in my 20s and that’s when I started noticing the other RA symptoms in my hands and feet.

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u/littlest_lemon Jul 08 '26

Oh wow thank you for sharing. I have a feeling I am going to be in a similar boat when they open up my hip later this summer for a labrum repair. 

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u/jbenze Jul 08 '26

Yeah, that might be the key to your diagnosis. Good luck!

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u/littlest_lemon Jul 08 '26

thank you! I have hEDS so it could be osteoarthritis from that but i have a very strong family history of RA/PsA so we'll see

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u/jbenze Jul 08 '26

Yeah or a fun combo of the two!

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26

Wishing you all the deep breaths, moments of muscles unclenching, nights of being able to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep all night, being able to actually get a deep stretch, and thoughtful / caring doctors <3

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u/jbenze Jul 08 '26

Same to you! I can't remember the last time I had a normal night of sleep and I would bet you don't either.

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u/Ill_News_2998 Jul 08 '26

I don’t know if you have any interest in Minecraft, but you should look up GoodTimesWithScar. He was also a college athlete that has a similar, if not the same, genetic mutation.

I know it’s random, you may not care. But as someone with my own chronic health issues I love to find people that also have my own issues and have found a way to get through life. Helps me feel less alone over the pain.

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26

Hey, thanks for sharing this. I had never heard of GoodTimesWithScar before. I started watching him especially this video where he does a day in the life.

I've kind of been grappling with the "what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life" question and this video is giving me some inspiration that maybe there are still things I can do. Different than before maybe, but he's really accomplished a lot in spite of his limitations.

Thank you, friend, this helped me.

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u/Princess_Slagathor Jul 08 '26

I'm gonna be honest with ya, that doesn't sound fun at all.

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u/sameBoatz Jul 08 '26

I’ve been really intrigued by the “bored immune system” theory of autoimmune disorders.

Which one of the ideas that come out of it is to introduce parasites that we can easily treat with modern medicine and let that bake for a bit to “recalibrate” the immune system. Then cure the parasite infection using modern medicine. It may be a bunch of BS, but again it is an intriguing idea.

Is that something you’ve talked about with your doctors or researched?

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u/PeachPassionBrute Jul 08 '26

I wonder how similar my own experience is to that…I’m lucky enough that I seem to have my condition mostly under control and there seem to be some obvious dietary/behavioral triggers. But I went from being a hobbyist athlete that worked out multiple times a day to having my body eating away at itself, and I am dramatically weaker than I was before. My cardio is abysmal and I experience fatigue all the time.

I’ve had a lifetime of IBS and then later Gout, so for a while I kind of expected to see some form of rheumatism (which my mom already had) and here we are.

I think it’s hard to express how much my fitness and athleticism was my life’s work. It was something I was and am still very passionate about but it’s all been taken from me. So many years of my life spent pursuing growth and improvement and it’s just gone, and I still can’t find any form of consistent exercise that doesn’t ultimately end up causing debilitating pain. When I had my first dramatic flare up, my knees were swollen like balloons, my feet and ankles so swollen that my lower leg just looked like a tube with little nubs on the end. My fingers so puffed up I had trouble holding things.

I was in so much pain I was screaming and crying just to get out of bed. I went from 2 hour squat workouts to relying on a cane to walk. I spent a month incapable of doing much of anything other than laying in bed wasting away.

And then I got laid off.

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u/pomybara Jul 08 '26

I wish I was farther along in my emotional journey to be able to offer some words of encouragement.

I can tell you that I empathize deeply with the loss of identity around athleticism, the mind-melting / screaming pain, the need for a cane and laying in bed watching impotently as the hours of my life tick by.

I wish that comfort finds you and that the Next Treatment to Try actually works this time. <3

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u/nickstatus Jul 08 '26

I should consider myself fortunate I don't have that. I don't actually know what I have because I lost insurance during the year I had to wait for an appointment with a specialist. Primary doc called it "lupus-esque", but I lack many of those symptoms, particularly sensitivity to sunlight. I just randomly feel like I got hit by a bus for several days every once in a while. Usually accompanied by a rash and terrible joint pain.

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u/Allronix1 Jul 09 '26

Oooh, A subreddit relevant to my interests.

Autoimmune all over the fucking place in my family tree. So far, escaping the effects that hit the rest of the relatives by exercising religiously and trying to watch diet.

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u/Kortok2012 Jul 08 '26

It’s also theorized it could simply be that we have nearly eradicated the big everyday stuff like parasites and plagues, so our immune system has nothing to do but find things to be mad about.

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u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

I mean this makes the most sense. We evolved with intestinal parasites since the first intestine was invented. Who can say how many ways parasites, bacteria, and viruses have affected our evolution and our bodies. Removing such a major and constant factor has to have unpredictable consequences.

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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

Running with this idea - biology has a remarkable ability to capitalize on opportunities when available, while reigning itself in when things become scarce or difficult.

Easy examples to look at are insect/plant interactions. When an insect develops an ability to consume a new plant it tends to decimate the populations of that plant for some time until... either the plant develops a protection, OR the insect develops behavior that allows a more mutualistic relationship.

I could imagine that happening with most of the microbes that make up our gut fauna, for example.

Hell, if we can have microbial gut fauna, why couldn't we have larger forms of life?

We're all terrified of parasites but I truly wouldn't be surprised if certain types of parasites actually have more mutualistic relationships with our species than we're aware of today.

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u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

I'm certain you're right. Given time, everything would achieve homeostasis, like nature always does, but modern technology throws a wrench in the gears of evolution.

Mutualism might be a stretch, a lot of people have died of parasites. Probably more than have died of autoimmune disorders, which would make autoimmune more like an unfortunate but necessary side effect of a life saving drug. I wouldn't be surprised if genetically modified parasites or a harmless lab grown species becomes recommended medicine for health maintenance here in the coming decades, on par with getting a vaccine.

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u/Shazam1269 Jul 08 '26

Genetically modified parasites grown in a lab, and then spreading across the globe sounds like a nice start to a gritty sci fi horror book/movie.

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u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

Oh yeah I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's an idea someone will proudly announce.

The Last of Us but it's butthole worms.

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u/Shazam1269 Jul 08 '26

Isn't Parasitism defined by the fact it’s beneficial to one partner and harmful to the other? If they both benefit, is the "parasite" no longer a parasite?

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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Yes, but imagine your spouse calls you a parasite then divorces you and kicks you out of the house.

Then after having lived without you for a few months she realizes you were the one keeping the place clean, taking out the garbage etc.

Focusing on the cost alone makes everything look like a parasite. (sometimes) Life has hidden benefits that diminish, offset, or even outweigh the downsides.

On top of that, life takes a long time to change. In theory, while one population is in the beginning stages of entering an increasingly mutualistic relationship, that doesn't mean the rest of the species is following suit. It needs to be selected for and reinforced.

One example, humans as a whole seem to have a parasite relationship with water systems. If you were an alien and saw some of our rivers you would be convinced, humans are a parasite.

But then you watch for a while and realize, there's a whole subsection of that species that isn't (yet) genetically separated, that are acting in a mutualistic way which has the potential to grow into something beautiful if fostered.

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u/r_search12013 Jul 08 '26

iirc there's a worm you can swallow every two weeks or so to "get rid of" morbus crohn .. it's directly descended from observing that that's a "normal parasite to have" .. white science definitely doesn't respect our mutualistic relationships with a lot of our environment :S

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u/the_misadventurist Jul 08 '26

I have no idea if this is true, but I just really enjoyed reading that sentence.

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u/LavishnessOk3439 Jul 08 '26

Yup, they can cure these things by giving you a parasite

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u/TheChickening Jul 08 '26

That is the general "why we have so many autoimmune diseases in general" thesis. But what they said is true. Europeans with that gene that helped them survive the plague do have more autoimmune diseases than the rest. Because it makes the immune system stronger, so it's also more prone to be out of control.

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u/Kortok2012 Jul 08 '26

We supercharged the immune system, then took away all its targets. Like Vietnam Marine veteran

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u/skipthesmallstuff Jul 08 '26

That is fascinating actually and can’t wait to tell me mom she’s once again the reason the family is still standing. Taking the weight for the rest of us.

26

u/Omjorc Jul 08 '26

Huh, sounds like why such a larger percentage of people with sickle cell anemia have African heritage, because Malaria either can't infect or at least has a difficult time infecting that shape of blood cell. If you're in a Malaria-prone area your chances of survival are actually higher if you have that disorder, so a lot more people do.

24

u/mittenknittin Jul 08 '26

AIUI having ONE copy of the gene that causes sickle cell is protective against malaria because of the slightly wonky blood cell shape, but having two copies give you full blown sickle cell disease. So the gene survives because it's beneficial, except when you're unlucky enough to get two copies.

1

u/10000Didgeridoos Jul 08 '26

Not necessarily beneficial. For example the sub saharan African diaspora with that genetic trait living in the US for example are never exposed to malaria here, but they retain and pass the gene on for no actual benefit to their offspring anymore. It's only a potential health problem now.

If you have the genes for it and still live in an area with endemic malaria, then it could be beneficial. Here? No.

4

u/mittenknittin Jul 08 '26

on an evolutionary timescale, the few hundred years that sub-Saharan Africans have been in the US is a mere blip. The sickle cell gene persisted where it did because it was a net benefit for the survival of offspring there. Give it several thousand years in areas where there is no malaria and it may become much less common because it no longer conveys a benefit over people who don't have it, and is a net negative for the survival of offspring.

1

u/PeachPassionBrute Jul 08 '26

Give it a little more time and malaria should be pretty well established in the US. And that’s not a joke.

10

u/Pace_Salsa_Comment Jul 08 '26

There's also the Hygiene Hypothesis. Helminthiasis or the like has been a pretty much universal throughout human existence, and our immune systems evolved under those conditions. My understanding is that without the constant immunomodulation from parasitic excretions our immune systems have adapted to over millions of years of evolution, our immune systems can overreact to conditions it would have otherwise ignored, causing or excsperating allergies and autoimmune diseases.

7

u/Hopeful_Chair_7129 Jul 08 '26

I was actually on a tapeworm rabbit hole the other day and apparently parasites actually might be related to autoimmune diseases becoming more prevalent. Our bodies sort of developed around having parasites normally and our immune systems aren’t used to not having to deal with it. So it’s all hyped up with nothing to do.

2

u/Adventurous_Ad7442 Jul 08 '26

Did you think that you had a tapeworm?

1

u/Hopeful_Chair_7129 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Nah there was some article about a lady that had like 100 of them or something

Edit

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8jrzemdyko

15

u/Uncool444 Jul 08 '26

I read about a study where they got a bunch of crackheads and prostitutes who didn't have AIDS despite being extremely high risk and looked for what they had in common. A lot of them had a mutated protein on the surface of blood cells that hampered plague's ability to enter the cell, and so was selected for in parts of Europe during the many waves of black plague that permanently altered the population. The theory is that plague and HIV use the same route to enter cells. So parts of the population have a natural resistance, if not immunity, to AIDS.

17

u/CariniFluff Jul 08 '26

I'll take it...I guess.

We all wouldn't be here without our trusty insane immune systems.

10

u/lboy100 Jul 08 '26

We all wouldn't be here without our advancements in medicine

0

u/Same-Suggestion-1936 Jul 08 '26

Eh, without modern medicine you would likely still live long enough to reproduce. I didn't need emergency medical intervention till my late 20s (granted I'm also discounting stuff like vaccines where I don't know where I'd be without those) but that's plenty of time to knock some chick up and keep the human race going

There are remote places in the world without anything close to a doctor, and the nearest one is at least a few days journey so you wouldn't go unless you're dying, people reproduce fine there. Not like those places get TV or anything, sex is gonna be a top past time

1

u/sevencatts Jul 09 '26

20-30% mortality under 5 wirhout modern medicine, so big chance that they wouldn't live long enough to reproduce

1

u/Same-Suggestion-1936 Jul 10 '26

Yeah but they specifically said "we all wouldn't be here" when humans lived a while without modern medicine without going extinct.

More of us are here because of modern medicine. But most of us also would still be here without it. There isn't a world we'd all be dead without modern medicine. That would need to be an extinction event which would more likely have nothing to do with medicine at all, like an asteroid or massive volcanic eruption, or nuclear war and even then we'd probably scrape through that last one

6

u/SSGASSHAT Jul 08 '26

I mean, I guess it beats dying, but let's not pretend this is something to be grateful for. Evolution is a drunk bitch and every good thing she does has a shit stain following it.

2

u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

The only thing guaranteed in life is change.

Oscillation with a choice for what works is what propels everything forward.

You can fight the oscillation. You can condemn it. You can dread it.

Or you can accept it and appreciate the immense beauty we have an opportunity to enjoy.

I appreciate the beauty of the perspective you've shared in your comment, but I do hope it doesn't follow you for long.

1

u/SSGASSHAT Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Thanks for the advice, Yoda. I'm sick of this counterfeit enlightenment going around on the internet. I'm sick of people going "life is fine, just be grateful." No, fuck you! Life is not fine. It is not something to be grateful for. It is a shitty, 80 year slog of work, bodily functions, and chemicals making you feel a certain way. And that's ignoring how fucking unnecessarily hard we make it for ourselves, and how nature loves to fuck with itself.

What does complaining do to help? Well, it keeps people from delusional thinking, which is the main problem nowadays. People think things are gonna improve. They're not. Don't hope for it.

0

u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

You speak like you no longer want to exist.

1

u/SSGASSHAT Jul 08 '26

I never did. That was my parent's decision that I got stuck with. I was just fine being a single cell in a sac in my mom's body that was going to get flushed out at some point before 2019.

None of us want to exist. It was forced on us. And now we have to exist only to die. And half of our existence is suffering, a quarter is boredom, and the remaining quarter is the actual good shit. Worth the misery? I don't think so.

1

u/mread531 Jul 08 '26

I mean you potentially wouldn’t be here without it I guess lol

6

u/UnkleBourbon42069 Jul 08 '26

Kind of like sickle cell and malaria?

3

u/Oil_Shock_2026 Jul 08 '26

F me, so when I developed full blown Double Hit Lymphoma (DLBCL) back in 2018, it was probably due to a nameless ancestor with the genetic mutation that allowed them to survive successive waves of the bubonic plague.

It also explains my mom's immune system attacking her biliary ducts and her developing Primary Biliary Cirrhosis.

It also explains my mom's great grandparents surviving the Typhus and Cholera epidemics in Eastern Europe (Western Romania) around the time of WWI while the mortality rate in their village was so high that they had a horse drawn lime cart taking the dead to the lime lined and layered mass grave every morning.

My mom's side of the family always had immune systems that allowed them to survive plagues that killed off a lot of people in their village. Chalk it up to one or many gene mutations.

2

u/carlitospig Jul 08 '26

That is correct.

2

u/Kickedhard Jul 08 '26

As someone who collects them at a rate that future generations need to study, I concur from my own little world.

2

u/dontsitdowngirl Jul 08 '26

woah interesting fact

2

u/EremiticFerret Jul 08 '26

Would this mean it is largely found in those with Eurasian decent? So African, South American and Pacific Islanders would be less likely to have it as it was never as big there? (which I may be totally wrong about, now that I think on it)

2

u/trustedoctopus Jul 08 '26

You’re also at a super increased risk of developing an autoimmune disease if you have childhood trauma, CPTSD, suppressed or repressed trauma that isn’t dealt with over a long period of time (years). Ask me how I know. :)

But the tl;dr for anyone curious is that chronic stress especially on a developing immune system will cause not just nervous system dysregulation but also some pretty gnarly chronic inflammation that will cause your body to attack itself over time.

Also this isn’t an advertisement for therapy btw (though i encourage everyone to go) because i don’t know that any amount of therapy could’ve prevented my own disorder, even if i was seeing someone every single day. my mom also has an immune disorder that was late developing and completely different from mine. we have like no genetic inheritability between them.

1

u/an_agreeing_dothraki Jul 08 '26

oh if you want to sleep well at night, consider that we're talking about the same mechanism as food and seasonal allergies. really think things through.

1

u/possiblylallorona Jul 08 '26

Interesting. I’m a genealogy nerd and studying my own family line, we had the usual child deaths before vaccines and germ theory,

But those who made it to adulthood lived from 60-80 years, even in the 1500s.

So that brings me back to myself and my autoimmune disease, can I blame my plague-proof ancestors? lol

1

u/SpookiestSzn Jul 08 '26

Quite a monkeys paw

1

u/r_search12013 Jul 08 '26

wow, thank you .. I've been a severely allergic kid, then eventually psoriasis and arthritis came along in my 20s .. and now with 40 someone explains to me, WHY that's happening ..

I'm quite unsure whether this could be proven rigurously, but it is quite true that there are some types of infection I hardly have to worry about while being very prone to others

1

u/fondledbydolphins Jul 08 '26

I'm not sure but I think there are a few avenues you can take to see if you do have the mutation relevant to the ERAP2 gene.

  • Your primary care physician may be able to order a test, not sure if insurance would cover it or not
  • There are personal tests you can order online
  • (not sure how accurate this is) but I'm seeing that there are some third party companies that will somehow analyze your genetic info from another company like a 23andme test, to see if you have the mutation. Do you really want another private company owning your genetic data, though?

1

u/r_search12013 Jul 08 '26

I think that one has actually been tested on me and was negative .. but there must be quite a few markers like that

I was more about: how would one go about rigurously proving that these hyperactive immune systems are an effect of the plague .. I suspect judging the hyperactive immune system of someone who directly survived the plague would be hard after all those centuries, unless you're already going for a genetic marker, which I'd like to rigurously discover with that kind of study though, not put in

1

u/kwillzen Jul 08 '26

But instances of autoimmune disease have been rising at a pretty fast rate. Genetics wouldn't be changing that fast. It's more likely to be environmental triggers.

1

u/Muted_Quantity5786 Jul 08 '26

That is interesting. Never heard that before but it makes sense.

1

u/No-Project-2353 Jul 08 '26

It makes sense, like I know a person who had cancer but after they were treated they healed back very quickly. So like if you have a really good healing ability you also have higher risk of developing cancer.

1

u/SissyCouture Jul 08 '26

We are all Wolverine

1

u/The_Chaos_Pope Jul 08 '26

Yep.

I haven't died of the plague but my immune system hates my brain and my skin. Oh, and also pollen.

1

u/Commercial-Air8955 Jul 09 '26

Sickle cell is another trait that persists in humans, because it protects against malaria. It would've been a good thing to have in many areas of the world in the past (and probably still so in many places), but now it's still quite prevelant in areas of the world where malaria is no longer an issue, and people with the trait live about 20 years less on average than people without it. It also comes with a whole host of other issues that can be deadly.

1

u/LesbianBait Jul 09 '26

Ayyooo specifically allergies and asthma. Turns out having your body over react to literally everything (including plague) does keep you alive at times.

-3

u/Practical-Injury-622 Jul 08 '26

Did the dolphins use their fins or bottle nose to do the fondling