In 2019, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson began experimenting on himself by taking daily injections of rapamycin. This immunosuppressive drug is typically used to prevent organ rejection after a transplant, but the 48-year-old tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist had a different goal: to prolong his life.
He tested several protocols, experimenting with weekly, biweekly and other schedules. He tried doses of 5 milligrams as well as doses of 6 and 10 mg. But in September 2024, Johnson decided to end his personal trial with rapamycin: the benefits did not outweigh the harms, as Johnson pointed out. in an article on the social media platform. He suffered from intermittent skin infections, elevated glucose levels and abnormalities in his blood lipid levels, as well as an accelerated resting heart rate. “With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected rapamycin, and as dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it completely,” he wrote.
Johnson, who sold his mobile payments business Braintree to financial technology company PayPal in 2013 for $800 million, often tinkers with his daily medication regimen, peptides in the form of supplements and injections and other medical interventions aimed at prolonging life. He’s part of a growing group of tech entrepreneurs who are seeking extra years by hacking their own bodies and sharing their exploits widely through social media and other channels.
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Johnson’s Blueprint protocol – a self-published guide to his life changes and medical choices – has been adapted over time. He and his team said Nature that “the new goal of our protocol is to tackle chronic diseases that current medicine accepts as manageable but not treatable, and to make them treatable through advanced diagnostics and next-generation personalized therapies.”
As with Johnson and rapamycin, it is not uncommon for these biohacking influencers to suddenly stop using a product that they previously thought would help them prolong their lives. For years, supplements called exogenous ketones — which increase blood ketone levels, lower blood sugar and are believed to improve cognition — have been widely adopted in Silicon Valley circles. The compounds were sold as a top-notch cognitive aid and executive booster.
However, in March, entrepreneur Tim Ferriss and venture capitalist Kevin Rose used his popular podcast to warn listeners about taking supplements containing a compound called 1,3-butanediol. Emerging data from animal models, Ferriss said, indicate that this could give mice a condition similar to fatty liver disease. “Treat it like ethanol,” he warned, “like you would drink moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.” The animal results have not been confirmed by human studies and some manufacturers dispute the characterization.
This supplement joins a long list of life-extending hacks that tech leaders have clung to despite questions about their effectiveness and safety. In 2019 and again in 2024, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns against ‘young plasma’ infusionsin which people receive blood transfusions of young individuals. These infusions are touted as an anti-aging therapy — and are something Johnson regularly incorporates into her wellness regimen, courtesy of her son.
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel told Bloomberg News in 2014 that he takes human growth hormone in the hope of living 120 years, despite the Mayo Clinic, a renowned American medical center, warning of significant risks and saying there is little evidence the drug helps healthy adults regain their youth or energy. Thiel did not respond Naturewonders if he’s still taking the hormone or what he thinks of the Mayo Clinic’s advice.
Hoping to improve cognition, some Silicon Valley tech leaders have touted methylene blue, a compound with a long history as a textile dye and which has been approved for limited medical use, primarily to treat a rare blood disease. And they promote nicotine pouches — marketed as an alternative to smoking — as a way to optimize focus and energy, despite well-documented concerns about addiction.
These wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of emerging science to the public, turning preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks combining supplements, other compounds, protocols, and therapies, well in advance of FDA approval. “This is a trickle-down effect due to the nature of the platforms they use to distribute their content,” says Margje Camps, a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who studies health influencers.
But this growing phenomenon comes with a danger: Researchers who study aging and longevity caution that these biohacks haven’t been clinically tested, meaning it’s unclear whether they work or could harm humans.
There are no proven medical interventions that extend human life by targeting aging itself, says Andrew Steele, an independent longevity researcher based in Berlin and author of the book. Ageless (2022). “There are probably things on our radar that could work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans.”
Biological basis
Nir Barzilai, president of the Academy of Geroscience and a genetics researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is torn about the impact of biohackers. Take Johnson’s tinkering with various supplements and medications, which is usually based on some sort of evidence: “If you ask, ‘Is he taking something that doesn’t make sense?’ I would say no, these things are based on biology but not clinical evidence,” says Barzilai.
Neither Steele nor Barzilai are cynics. Both say that some of the protocols being tested and touted by Silicon Valley elites could have a significant impact on lifespan and health span – the period during which people are not affected by chronic diseases and disabilities related to aging. But the evidence is not there yet.
It is this gap that worries researchers the most. Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist who founded the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle, calls it “a signal-to-noise problem.”
In the limited data available on these interventions, he says, “there is a signal, but there is a lot of noise.” This makes it difficult for the public to separate the two.
Faye Mythen, entrepreneur and founder of Reborne Longevity, a preventive medicine and longevity clinic in London, calls DIYers with outsized social media followings a “shadow phase two” problem, referring to the regulated middle stage of pharmaceutical drug trials. “You have all these tech founders and famous people with a lot of money running ghost experiments on themselves, and it’s going directly to the population,” she says. “These protocols become some sort of accepted benchmark, which they are not. You have to do clinical trials on thousands and thousands of people, with very carefully controlled benchmarks, to have acceptable data.”
Mythen’s company typically analyzes clients’ biomarkers, cell biology and genetics to predict future risks, then offers tailored treatments to help people prevent potential problems. But she says her clients now regularly come to the clinic citing Johnson and his Blueprint protocol.
“People ask for the “Blueprint” or the name of a specific molecule before having a single biomarker measured,” Mythen explains.
Other researchers who Nature spoke to report similar experiences: Steele says his wife, a doctor interested in longevity, gave a lecture in Munich, Germany. “The first question he was asked was about Bryan Johnson.”
Evidence from the trials
It’s nothing new for influencers to tout wellness products: billionaire entrepreneur Kim Kardashian, for example, has promoted a line of detox teas and red light therapy over the years. But the most recent generation of “tech brothers” (all these Nature analyzed were men), life hackers offer something different because they are interested in scientific details, both in their decisions and in the way they publicize their choices. By referencing nerdy concepts like lipid panels, mTOR inhibitor dose volumes, and biological ages, they use scientific terminology to promote interventions even in the absence of definitive research—a distinction most people may not make.
“It’s become normal for people to assume they need a supplement,” Camps says. “It’s become a common thing. ‘Everyone uses these, I sure need them.'” Some longevity influencers also sell supplements under their own brands on their websites and through their social media platforms, meaning they have commercial interests in the products they talk about, a relationship that isn’t always obvious to followers.
Among the existing scientific knowledge regarding longevity products, very little work has been done in humans. Take rapamycin, which Johnson has stopped using, but others still discuss it online. Research has shown that the immunosuppressant could extend the lifespan of mice by 23 to 60 percent by inhibiting the mTOR pathway, a cascade of chemical reactions that regulates cell growth and is involved in aging. This study and others show potentially beneficial results for lifespan. “It works in all animals where it has been tested,” according to Kaeberlein. However, it is more difficult to demonstrate lifespan extension in humans due to the timescales involved and the risks associated with drugs such as rapamycin.
When asked if there was any evidence that mTOR inhibitors have health benefits or life-extending properties in humans, researchers who spoke to Nature has often cited a study published more than a decade ago, in 2014. It tested a rapamycin analog called everolimus and found that the drug improved responses to influenza vaccination in more than 200 adults aged 65 and older. A follow-up phase II trial conducted in 2018 found that the drug reduced respiratory tract infections in older adults over a one-year period. In 2023, Kaeberlein and his team reported the results of a survey of 333 people who had taken rapamycin off-label, primarily for anti-aging purposes. The researchers found that “rapamycin users generally reported perceived improvements in their quality of life.” But the team says the study is limited because it relies on self-reports and scientists can’t rule out the possibility that the survey lacked representation of people who experienced negative effects and stopped taking the drug.
Another source of evidence for effects on longevity in humans comes from drugs that have already received regulatory approval for use in chronic diseases related to aging, Barzilai says. He cites four FDA-approved drugs or drug classes that he says show reasonable evidence for slowing age-related diseases. He’s particularly excited about metformin, a cheap, decades-old diabetes drug that he and his colleagues are currently testing for its ability to delay the development or progression of age-related chronic diseases. a test called TAME. Another class of weight loss drugs is known as GLP-1 receptor agonists – like Ozempic – which appear to affect the characteristics of aging independent of weight loss. The last two classes of drugs are SGLT2 inhibitors, which cause the body to excrete more glucose in urine than usual, and which appear to have cardiovascular and renal benefits; and bisphosphonates, which improve bone health.
Despite this promise, Barzilai, like other gerontologists, fears that anecdotal accounts from a few rich and famous tech titans may do more harm than good. “Science is not working n = 1,” Barzillai said.
Johnson and his Blueprint science team said Nature that although randomized controlled trials remain the gold standard for evaluating single therapies or interventions, “we consider n-of-1 as the next frontier.” These single-person assessments allow for more detailed measurements than are practical in a clinical trial. “We have already generated signals that go beyond the published literature and constitute the first observations in humans,” they say.
Funding large-scale trials to test anti-aging interventions in humans might be within reach for some influencers, but whether they would choose to spend their money that way is another question. A properly conducted rapamycin trial in healthy adults would cost between $50 million and $100 million, Steele estimates — a minor fraction of the net worth of some of the extremely wealthy people at the forefront of the social media longevity scene. “It’s both a wellness fad and potentially the biggest revolution in the history of medicine,” he says. “And I haven’t yet figured out a way to redirect that multibillion-dollar enthusiasm toward actual science.”
As for rumors of the latest shortcuts on social media, “it gives people a sense of control,” says David Gems, a biogerontology researcher at the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, who has worked in the field since the early 1990s. “It’s hubris on the part of the techies. They think that because they’ve been so successful, they could beat aging.”
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time June 16, 2026.
