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/SpadesHeart Jul 08 '26

It's also impossible to gauge the efficacy of literally anything he's doing because he's doing so many things at the same time. If he has positive results, which of the several thousand things he's taking caused it?

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u/einstyle Jul 08 '26

Yep, it's a case study at best and completely without control.

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u/IcedThunder Jul 08 '26

But there is still data. And he does have meticulous records and scientist and doctors monitoring him.

I feel it's the kind of thing where one day maybe 20 or so years later, a doctor is going to be having a difficult patient and look into things and find his data and a lightbulb may click.

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u/SpadesHeart Jul 08 '26

Sure, but to test the efficacy of literally anything they would have to break out every single intervention he took into a separate trial and arguably interventions he took in conjunction with any other intervention he took. It becomes an exponential problem. He's throwing so much stuff at the wall that it's impossible to gauge the effectiveness of anything, and all of the extra complexity compounds. If it was already based on very deep research that's fine, but anything experimental he's doing is basically impossible to study on him without the waters being murky.

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u/BonerTurds Jul 08 '26

It’s not useful data. Imagine you have a locked door in front of you and a bucket of keys. You try all of the keys until the door unlocks. You throw the key back into the bucket of keys and mix it up. How do you know which key worked? To make matters even more confusing, the door lock was on a timer to unlock itself anyway so you don’t even know if the key was the thing that made it unlock.

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u/SpadesHeart Jul 09 '26

And it's possible that the door requires two keys, or even three keys. Maybe even more than that. 

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u/AltruisticPossible84 Jul 09 '26

Love this analogy! Not sure if it applies in this situation, but I can think of a lot of situations in which I may borrow this!

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u/BonerTurds Jul 09 '26

I think it does. You’re trying a bunch of fixes to achieve something but you try it in a way where there’s no way to know which try worked, if any of them. The only addition I’d make is now you’re trying to teach your friend next door how to open his/her door with the information you gathered.

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u/unktrial Jul 08 '26

There's so much half-baked pseudoscience going on that the only thing we can learn isn't very useful: injecting a lot of weird stuff in the body makes the immune system go haywire.

Any other experimental information is lost in a sea of confounding factors.

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u/alfredcneiman Jul 08 '26

It’s psychosis. He wants himself to live forever and doesn’t do any due diligence to actualize that desire. What he doesn’t understand is that he is a symptom of a greater disorder. He’s a rich nerd who has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Maybe some of the things he has tried on himself work, but it doesn’t follow any tried and true scientific method. It’s abject vanity and he has earned all of the mockery he’s gotten. Despite his diagnosis he has all of the resources to live relatively comfortably. What has he actually achieved here, for himself and other people?

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u/LegitosaurusRex Jul 08 '26

He does some stuff temporarily, or introduces it to his routine and monitors all his vitals over a period of time. He had a video about how saunas improved a bunch of his stats.

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u/SpadesHeart Jul 08 '26

Yes, but that's almost useless information you see. Because he's still technically doing other stuff while he's doing the sauna. How do we know it's the sauna or not the sauna plus vitamin a through z at the same time that has positive efficacy, there's literally no way to tell. 

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u/LegitosaurusRex Jul 08 '26

Sure, it’s not something worthy of publication, but I think it’s still a useful barometer, and maybe an indication that an actual study could be warranted. He also found he needed a snack before and after to prevent some downsides.