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/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/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 :(