Tech tycoon who spends $2 million a year to look 18 trades BLOOD with teenage son and father
A well-known eccentric tech mogul with a zeal to look 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 infamous for spending millions of dollars each year on a group of doctors and medical procedurals who claim 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 clinic in Dallas where the senior father and teenage son have a quart of their blood drawn and machined into its single parts—a batch of liquid plasma, 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 damage from the aging process by replacing old blood in an old body with new blood from a young donor.
Bryan Johnson, founder and CEO of Kernel Holding SA, at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, USA, on Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Johnson maintains a strict diet and exercise regimen that keeps his body fat around 6 percent
Johnson, the nearly half-billion-dollar American tech magnate, has become the de facto poster child of drastic measures to combat age-related decline.
Johnson and his doctors claim that in two years he has reduced his total 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 .
He recently underwent plasma swapping. Before doing this with his father and son, Johnson had received plasma transfusions from a young, healthy, anonymous donor whom he carefully screened by making sure the person had an ideal body mass index, lived a healthy lifestyle, and was free of disease. .
After plasma was extracted from Talmage, the process was repeated with Richard draining some of his blood and drenching it with some of Bryan’s blood.
The science behind plasma transfusion as a cure for aging is far from crystallized and has its origins in experiments with mice.
In 2005, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley made the shocking discovery that putting young and old mice together changed their cellular age.
After putting an old mouse and a young mouse together so that they shared blood and organs, they studied the mice for five weeks. The muscles of the old mice healed about as quickly as those of the young mice, while the old mice grew new liver cells at a youthful rate.
A later study would show that transferring blood from an older mouse to a younger one would actually speeds up the aging process.
Talmage gets the short end of the stick, while Bryan wins by getting blood that, based on some limited conclusive study, will rejuvenate him from the inside out.
Richard, meanwhile, probably comes out as the biggest winner, as he receives a blood transfusion from one of the healthiest people on the planet. Richard and Bryan have had a troubled relationship, with the former seeing the transfusion procedure as a family renewal and a deepening of his bond with his son.
Richard told Bloomberg, “Yes, I won the lottery. There must be an advantage to getting that much volume from him.”
When Bryan’s plasma was removed from his veins, he noticed the yellow-gold hue that indicates healthy blood.
He said, ‘Hey, look. So you can see if I am a scammer or not. The color is beautiful. It’s pristine.’
As part of what he calls Project Blueprint, Johnson lives by a regimen that’s more like a full-time job.
He’s had his pelvic floor radiated with electromagnetic pulses to improve his muscle tone in hard-to-reach places, and he wears glasses that block blue light for two hours before going to sleep at the same time every day.
He claims to consume exactly 1,977 calories per day, which keeps his body fat content between 5 and 6 percent.
Project Blueprint has also helped Johnson’s dad Richard, a lawyer, shave off 50 pounds and feel sharper and more energetic.
Johnson says his goal is to keep his brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, hair, penis and rectum functioning as they were when he was 18.
He has said his goal is to keep his brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, hair, penis and rectum functioning as they were when he was 18.
His lifestyle and obsessive dedication to trying to subvert the effects of time have drawn much criticism, with some medical experts saying this is merely a manifestation of his fear of mortality.