A well-known eccentric tech mogul with a zeal for looking younger has taken the drastic step of swapping blood plasma with his father and young son.
Bryan Johnson is a world-famous biohacker who has become notorious for spending millions of dollars every year on a cadre of doctors and medical procedures that purport to carry the fountain of youth.
Mr Johnson, who has received blood transfusions from a healthy, anonymous donor in the past, has now accepted plasma donation from his 70-year-old father Richard and 17-year-old son Talmage.
The trio underwent the transfusions at a Dallas clinic in which the senior father and teen son have a liter of their blood removed and converted via a machine into its piece parts— one batch of liquid plasma and then a batch of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.
That collection is then fed into Mr Johnson’s veins with the goal of rejuvenating and repairing cellular damages wrough by the aging process by replacing old blood in an old body with new blood from a young donor.
Bryan Johnson, founder and chief executive officer of Kernel Holding SA, during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021
Johnson maintains a strict diet and exercise regime that keeps his body fat hovering around 6 per cent
Johnson, the American tech tycoon worth nearly half a billion dollars, has become the de facto posterchild of drasic measures to prevent age-related decline.
Johnson and his doctors claim that in two years he has reduced his overall biological age by more than five years and now has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity and fitness of an 18-year-old.
Most recently, he has been undergoing plasma swapping. Before doing so with his father and son, Johnson had been undergoing plasma transfusions from a young, healthy, anonymous donor who he had carefully screened by making sure the person had an ideal body mass index, lived a healthy lifestyle, and was free of diseases.
After plasma was extracted from Talmage, the process was repeated with Richard, who had some of his blood drained and infused with some of Bryan’s blood.
The science behind plasma transfusion as a cure for aging is far from settled and has its roots in experimentation with mice.
In 2005, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley made the shocking discovery that conjoining young and old mice changed their cellular ages.
Once they conjoined an old mouse and a young mouse so that they share blood and organs, they examined the mice for five weeks. The muscles of the old mice had healed about as quickly as those of the young mice while the old mice had grown new liver cells at a youthful rate.
A later study would show that transferring blood from an older mouse into a younger one would actually speed up the aging process.
Talmage gets the shortest end of the stick, while Bryan wins by getting blood that, based on somewhat limited conclusive study, will rejuvenate him from the inside out.
Richard, meanwhile, probably comes out the biggest winner, as he gets a blood transfusion from one of the healthiest humans on earth. Richard and Bryan have had a frought relationship, and the former sees the transfusion procedure as a familial renewal and a deepening of his bond with his son.
Richard told Bloomberg: ‘Yeah, I won the lottery. There has to be a benefit in getting this much volume of him.’
When Bryan’s plasma was removed from his veins, he remarked on the yellow-gold hue indicative of healthy blood.
He said: ‘Hey, look at that. This is how you can tell if I’m a fraud or not. The color is nice. It’s pristine.’
As part of what he calls Project Blueprint, Johnson lives according to a regime that looks more like a full-time job.
He has had his pelvic floor blasted with electromagnetic pulses to improve his muscle tone in hard-to-reach places, and wears glasses that block out blue light for two hours before he goes to sleep at the same time every day.
He claims to take in an exact 1,977 calories a day, ensuring his body fat levels remain between 5 and 6 percent.
Project Blueprint has also helped Johnson’s father Richard, an attorney, who has shaved off 50 lbs and feels sharper and more energetic.
Johnson says his aim is to ensure that his brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, hair, penis and rectum are functioning as they were when he was 18.
He has said that his aim is to ensure that his brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, hair, penis and rectum are functioning as they were when he was 18.
His lifestyle and obsessive commitment to trying to undermine the effects of time have garnered significant criticism, with some medical experts saying this is just a manifestation of his anxiety around mortality.
