I’m a professional rejuvenation athlete”: that’s how Bryan Johnson, a 47-year-old American businessman, describes his quest to regain his youthful glow.
Turn back the clock biologically. The American, who is almost fifty, wants to be a veritable scientific object in his quest to look younger. Excessive food supplements, a timed, almost military routine, injections of his 18-year-old son’s blood, surgery… Bryan Johnson seems convinced that he can reverse the ageing of his body’s cells and regain all the freshness of his early youth. It’s an ambition that many people still secretly dream of, but which has become obsessive and ethically questionable.
A phase of depression
His background is ambivalent, to say the least. Bryan Johnson grew up in Springville, Utah, in a modest environment and under the aegis of the Mormon community, a religious movement derived from Christianity. His father, a lawyer, suffered from drug addiction and was disbarred. His parents divorced when he was three. At 19, he left America for Ecuador to become a missionary. Marked by the extreme poverty of the country, the young man returned to the United States two years later and completed his studies at Brigham Young University and the University of Chicago.
With an MBA in business, Bryan Johnson launched several companies before he even turned 30, but without much success. ‘I had this irresistible desire to try and improve other people’s lives. So I thought about becoming an entrepreneur, making a lot of money before I turned 30. Then, with that money, to earn some free time to do something useful’, the businessman told a conference.
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In 2007, he founded Braintree, a solution for managing international payments for businesses, which quickly attracted investors. Bryan Johnson hit the jackpot in 2013 when his company was bought by PayPal for $800 million. Despite this windfall, the father of three is prone to dark thoughts, deep depression, anxiety and significant weight gain.
Reversing time
Now a multi-millionaire, the businessman refocused on himself. It was at this time that he began to reflect on the concept of eternal life. The aim is to optimise his existence as much as possible and bring humanity into a higher sphere. In 2016, he founded Kernel, a headset company that measures the electromagnetic and haemodynamic signals produced by the brain.
Increasingly self-convinced that he could stop the effects of time on the body and health, in 2021 he launched the famous Project Blueprint. Two million dollars will be invested every year to enable Bryan Johnson, surrounded by a team of 30 people, to become young again.
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The protocol began with a battery of tests to analyse his 78 organs and samples of blood, saliva, faeces and urine. Added to this were various examinations, including MRI, ultrasound and DNA methylation tests. In short, hundreds of measurements are taken on her body at frequent intervals. Everything is scrutinised. In a video posted on his Youtube channel (1.37 million subscribers), he says he wants to be ‘the most connected person in the world’.
All his data was then compared with that of a healthy protagonist aged 10, 20, 30 and 40. The doctors around him then developed an algorithm that would make it possible to rejuvenate the body of the wealthy American. ‘We gathered all the data, drew up clinical guidelines and implemented the various protocols. […] My daily lifestyle is the result of this process’, he explains to the British magazine GQ.
An ultra-protocol routine and crazy actions
What he should eat (vegan recipes), when he should sleep, how much sport he should do every day, what food supplements he should take… His whole life is punctuated by Project Blueprint. He gets up at 5am, ingests dozens and dozens of capsules and eats his meals (the same ones every day) at 7am, 9am and 11am, before fasting until he goes to bed between 8.30pm and 9.30pm. In all his interviews, and despite what you might think, the 47-year-old says he is happy with this routine and feels fitter than ever.
As British GQ reports, ‘fitness tests revealed that he has the body of an 18-year-old. He has slowed his rate of ageing by 28%. And he reversed his epigenetic age – the equivalent of his DNA when measured – by more than five years.’ He claims to be 7.5 months younger every 12 months, gaining 4.5 months of life expectancy.
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The results are quite impressive, but they stem from other actions that are far more excessive and morally more questionable than these ultra-calibrated daily rituals. In May 2023, Bryan Johnson shocked the world by transfusing the plasma and blood of his own son, then aged 17. He stopped these injections, the principle of which had already been condemned by the American health authorities, because of their inconclusive and non-existent effects. The man who was desperate to look younger was prepared to do anything. Even to… rejuvenate his penis.
Adulated by some, criticised by others: the method of the ‘professional rejuvenation athlete’, as he describes himself, is not at all popular on the scientific scene. Some experts denounce the battery of out-of-the-box tests that skew the results, and point the finger at the as-yet-unknown potential side-effects. All the more so since Bryan Johnson’s fad is flourishing in business terms, with the marketing of products that bring in big bucks at a time when rejuvenation cures are in great demand.
What is certain is that the future envisaged by Bryan Johnson, in which people will live to 120 or 150 years of age, is difficult to envisage under current conditions, which are excessively formalised and expensive.
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Featured photo: © DR
