People’s lives have been getting longer for more than a century. In 1900, in even the wealthiest countries, life expectancy was under 50, according to the World Health Organization. By 2015, the worldwide average was 74, and a girl born in Japan that year could expect to live to 87. Most of that extra lifespan came from improvements in nutrition and sanitation, and the development of vaccines and antibiotics.
The question is, how will slowing aging change society?
But now scientists are trying to move beyond just eliminating the diseases that kill us to actually slowing the aging process itself. By developing new drugs to tackle the underlying mechanisms that make our bodies grow old and frail, researchers hope to give people many more years of healthy life. The question is, how will that change society?
There are several biological mechanisms that affect aging. One involves how cells react when they’re damaged. Some die, but others enter a state called senescence, in which they halt their normal growth and send out signals that something’s gone wrong. That signaling causes inflammation at the sight of a wound, for instance, and triggers the body’s repair processes. Once everything is back to normal, the senescent cells die off and the inflammation fades. But as we age, the machinery for clearing senescent cells becomes less efficient and they begin to pile up. Some researchers think that this accumulation of senescent cells is what causes chronic inflammation, which has been implicated in conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
The first clinical trial in humans of senolytic drugs is happening now.
In 2015, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the Scripps Research Institute in Florida tested the first so-called senolytic drugs, which cause senescent cells to die. After the scientists treated mice with a combination of an anti-cancer drug and a plant pigment that can act as an antioxidant, some of the senescent cells shrank away and caused the mouse’s heart function to revert to that of a much younger mouse.
“That suggests that senescence isn’t just a consequence of aging, it’s actually a driver of aging,” says Paul Robbins, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps and one of the researchers involved. Other animal studies have found that reducing the number of senescent cells improves a variety of age-related conditions, such as frailty, diabetes, liver disease, pulmonary fibrosis, and osteoporosis.
Now the same researchers are moving those tests to humans in the first clinical trials of senolytic drugs. In July 2016, the Mayo Clinic launched what may be the first clinical trial of senolytic therapy, studying the effect of the two drugs, called dasatinib and quercetin, on people with chronic kidney disease, which they hope to complete in 2021. Meanwhile Mayo and Scripps researchers have identified six different biochemical pathways that give rise to senescence, along with several drug candidates that target those pathways. Robbins says it’s likely that different drugs will work better for different cells in the body.
Would radical life extension lead to moral deterioration, risk aversion, and an abandonment of creativity?
In Robbins’ work, treating mice with senolytic drugs has extended their median lifespan—the age at which half the animals in his experiment have died—by about 30 percent, but hasn’t extended the maximum lifespan. In other words, the oldest mice treated with the drugs died at the same age as mice who hadn’t been treated, but more of the mice who received senolytics lived to that ripe old age. The same may turn out to be true for humans, with more people living to the limits of the lifespan—estimated by some to be about 115—but no one living much longer. On the other hand, Robbins says, it’s early days for these therapies, and it may turn out that delaying aging actually does push the limit of life farther out.
Others expect more radical extensions of human life; British gerontologist Aubrey DeGray talks about people living for 1000 years, and people who call themselves transhumanists imagine replacing body parts as they wear out, or merging our minds with computers to make us essentially immortal. Brian Green, an ethicist at Santa Clara University in California, finds that concept horrifying. He fears it would make people value their own lives too highly, demoting other moral goods such as self-sacrifice or concern for the environment. “It kind of lends itself to a moral myopia,” he says. “Humans work better if they have a goal beyond their own survival.” And people who live for centuries might become averse to risk, because with longer lives they have more to lose if they were to accidentally die, and might be resistant to change, draining the world of creativity.
Most researchers are focused on “extending the ‘healthspan,’ so that the people who live into their 90s are vigorous and disease-free.”
He’s not too worried, though, that that’s where studies such as the Mayo Clinic’s are headed, and supports that sort of research. “Hopefully these things will work, and they’ll help us live a little bit longer,” Green says, “but the idea of radical life extension where we’re going to live indefinitely longer, I think that is very unrealistic.”
Most of the researchers working on combatting aging don’t, in fact, talk of unlimited lifespans. Rather, they talk about extending the “healthspan,” so that the people who live into their 90s are vigorous and disease-free up until nearly the end of their lives.
If scientists can lengthen life while reducing the number of years people suffer with dementia or infirmity, that could be beneficial, says Stephen Post, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. But even increasing the population of vigorous 90-somethings might have negative implications for society. “What would we do with all these people who are living so long?” he asks. “Would we stop having children? Would we never retire?”
Adding 2.2 healthy years to the U.S. life by delaying aging could benefit the economy by $7.1 trillion over 50 years.
If people keep working well past their 60s, that could mean there would be fewer jobs available for younger people, says Maxwell Mehlman, professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law in Ohio. Mehlman says society may have to rethink age discrimination laws, which bar firing or refusing to hire people over a certain age, to make room for younger workers. On the other hand, those who choose to retire and live another two or three decades could strain pension and entitlement systems.
But a longer healthspan could reduce costs in the healthcare system, which now are driven disproportionately by older people. Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, has estimated that adding 2.2 healthy years to the U.S. life by delaying aging would benefit the economy by $7.1 trillion over 50 years, as spending on illnesses such as cancer and heart disease drop.
For his part, Robbins says that the scientific conferences in the anti-aging field, which tend to focus on the technical research, should hold more sessions on social and economic impacts. If anti-aging therapies start extending healthy lifespans, as he and other researchers hope they will within a decade or so, society will need to adjust.
Ultimately, it’s an extension of health, not just of longevity, that will benefit us. Extra decades of senescence do nobody any good. As Green says, “Nobody wants to live in a nursing home for 1000 years.”
Millions of people with diabetes don’t have access to insulin globally. In the US, many patients have to ration the vital drug due to soaring prices. Now, biohackers have come up with a plan to produce it more cheaply
Those genetically engineered yeast cells are to produce a precursor of insulin
David Anderson is pipetting a yellowish liquid into conical flasks, anxious not to spill anything.
The liquid contains yeast cells, which, thanks to a bit of genetic engineering, are able to produce a precursor of insulin — the hormone that people with Type 1 diabetes need to administer to themselves to survive.
“We are doing a test today with an enzyme that’s going to create the insulin from the proinsulin,” David explains. “The enzyme did show activity before, so we are hopeful.”
The group aims to develop a protocol for ‘do-it yourself insulin’, a manual to produce the vital drug on a small scale with quite simple means.
“It makes good economic sense,” says Anthony Di Franco, founder of the Open Insulin Project.
“You don’t require much in terms of equipment or labor to produce quite a substantial amount of insulin. In the corner of a room you could make enough for 50,000 to 100,000 people.”
The biohacking lab is located behind these walls.
Anyone can help
The biohackers’ lab is set up in a large hall in a run-down community centre in Oakland.
The hall’s walls are covered with graffiti, and everything is crammed with tables and shelves, with material of all kinds piling up.
The technical equipment has seen better days, and some of it has been mended.
But the hall holds everything a biotechnologist needs: lab benches, freezers, a centrifuge, a clean bench, a DNA amplifier and much more.
Other more luxurious equipment requests have been scribbled on a “lab gear wishlist” attached to a nearby freezer.
David mixes the yeast cells together with other liquids, inducing the production of proinsulin, then places the flasks in an incubator at 30 degree centigrade.
He has to frequently check the instructions on his smartphone, because he is not too familiar with this kind of work yet.
For Oakland’s biohackers, you don’t need to be a trained scientist to become a genetic engineer – David himself has a major in business economics.
“This is my first time with anything with science and biology. I am really glad biohacking came about.”
The biohackers want to help those who can not afford expensive medication.
GMO drug
Anthony Di Franco, a computer scientist and a Type 1 diabetic himself, founded the Open Insulin Project four years ago.
“For most of my life I’ve been aware of how difficult it is to manage diabetes, even if you do have access to the best treatments – and how much harder it can become if you don’t,” Di Franco says.
Diabetes – can it be cured by changing your diet?
Insulin was first introduced in 1922 to treat diabetes.
Until the 1980s, the protein was extracted from the pancreas of pigs or cows.
Now, the pharmaceutical industry can produce a virtually unlimited amount of biosynthetic human insulin with the help of genetically engineered cells.
However, according to the World Health Organization, many people with diabetes around the world don’t have access to the vital drug, with “devastating” consequences.
An undersupply of insulin increases blindness, amputations, kidney failure and premature mortality in people with diabetes around the world, according to a 2015 report by Health Action International,a network aiming to improve access to medicines.
“In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, lack of insulin access results in a life expectancy of less than a year for a child with Type 1 diabetes, compared to almost normal life expectancy in high-income settings.”
The US insulin crisis
Even in the US, the world’s largest economy by nominal gross domestic product, many people struggle to get the insulin they need.
The drug is available at every pharmacy, but the cost can be too high to afford for low-income families.
8.8 percent of people, or 28.5 million in total, don’t have health insurance – and even with health insurance, the co-pay might be exorbitant.
The Open Insulin Project workplace
“The price for insulin is much, much higher in the United States than it is just about anywhere else in the world,” says David Belk, an internist in Alameda calling for a major change in the US healthcare system.
While the average out-of-pocket cost for the insulin brand Humalog is $13.4 USD per milliliter in the US, it is only $3.16 USD/mL in Canada, according to the non-profit organization T1International.
Insulin prices in the US have been soaring for decades, Di Franco adds.
“There are just a very few insulin producers that control the production and that gives them the ability to raise prices, essentially arbitrarily.”
According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the average price of insulin in the US nearly tripled between 2002 and 2013.
An ADA survey in 2018 revealed that approximately 27 percent of the 535 patients surveyed rationed the drug, either by reducing the dosage or taking it less frequently, thus risking their health.
America’s getting angry about the rising cost of insulin, with many taking to social media outlets such as Twitter to express their frustration.
Milestone in sight
“It would be really cool to help people to make this drug so much cheaper than what the pharmaceuticals are asking,” Anderson says.
If the last step – converting proinsulin into insulin – works at small scale, the group can begin to upscale the process, increasing the amount of insulin they produce in a single batch.
“But there’s still a long road ahead of us,” Di Franco adds. “We are waiting on legal advice about a lot of details.”
Such as: who will test whether the insulin is pure and safe enough for the patient?
Hank Greely, professor at the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, says he understands the impulse to create DIY insulin, but still calls the idea “borderline crazy.”
“Manufacturing pharmaceuticals is difficult, painstaking, and dangerous. If you get the dosing or the strength on insulin wrong, it’s death. If you let contaminants into the insulin, it’s possible death. If your insulin breaks down too quickly in storage, it’s death.”
“A wake-up call”
In the end, it doesn’t matter if someone produces a drug commercially or in a community lab at cost price, says press officer Nathan Arnold from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “if this biohacking team found a way to produce insulin, the producers – large or small – would still need to follow federal regulations to produce the drugs.”
That means the process itself as well as the production facilities would need to be FDA-approved.
However, simply publishing a manual on the internet on how to produce insulin would not fall into the FDA’s responsibilities, says Patricia Zettler, a Georgie State University law professor with a specialty in food and drug law.
So, this might be a first step for the project to take.
“It’s understandable that people are looking for creative solutions”, Zettler adds. “I hope, if nothing else, that initiatives like the Open Insulin Project are wake-up calls on the drug pricing issues.”
And already, change may be in sight.
In the future, insulin products will be regulated under a different act to govern their approval, the FDA announced mid-May.
This way, generic insulin products are able to enter the market, possibly opening up competition – and hopefully improving access to insulin for many people.
By: Brigitte Osterath
* This article is a repost which originally appeared on DW.
Aging is not a mystery, says famed researcher Dr. Aubrey de Grey, perhaps the world’s foremost advocate of the provocative view that medical technology will one day allow humans to control the aging process and live healthily into our hundreds—or even thousands.
“The cultural attitudes toward all of this are going to be completely turned upside down by sufficiently promising results in the lab, in mice.”
He likens aging to a car wearing down over time; as the body operates normally, it accumulates damage which can be tolerated for a while, but eventually sends us into steep decline. The most promising way to escape this biological reality, he says, is to repair the damage as needed with precise scientific tools.
The bad news is that doing this groundbreaking research takes a long time and a lot of money, which has not always been readily available, in part due to a cultural phenomenon he terms “the pro-aging trance.” Cultural attitudes have long been fatalistic about the inevitability of aging; many people balk at the seemingly implausible prospect of indefinite longevity.
But the good news for de Grey—and those who are cheering him on—is that his view is becoming less radical these days. Both the academic and private sectors are racing to tackle aging; his own SENS Research Foundation, for one, has spun out into five different companies. Defeating aging, he says, “is not just a future industry; it’s an industry now that will be both profitable and extremely good for your health.”
De Grey sat down with Editor-in-Chief Kira Peikoff at the World Stem Cell Summit in Miami to give LeapsMag the latest scoop on his work. Here is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Since your book Ending Aging was published a decade ago, scientific breakthroughs in stem cell research, genome editing, and other fields have taken the world by storm. Which of these have most affected your research?
They have all affected it a lot in one way, and hardly at all in another way. They have speeded it up–facilitated short cuts, ways to get where we’re already trying to go. What they have not done is identified any fundamental changes to the overall strategy. In the book, we described the seven major types of damage, and particular ways of going about fixing each of them, and that hasn’t changed.
“Repair at the microscopic level, one would be able to expect to do without surgery, just by injecting the right kind of stem cells.”
Has any breakthrough specifically made the biggest impact?
It’s not just the obvious things, like iPS (induced pluripotent stem cells) and CRISPR (a precise tool for editing genes). It’s also the more esoteric things that applied specifically to certain of our areas, but most people don’t really know about them. For example, the identification of how to control something called co-translational mitochondrial protein import.
How much of the future of anti-aging treatments will involve regeneration of old tissue, or wholesale growth of new organs?
The more large-scale ones, regenerating whole new organs, are probably only going to play a role in the short-term and will be phased out relatively rapidly, simply because, in order to be useful, one has to employ surgery, which is really invasive. We’ll want to try to get around that, but it seems quite likely that in the very early stages, the techniques we have for repairing things at the molecular and cellular level in situ will be insufficiently comprehensive, and so we will need to do the more sledgehammer approach of building a whole new organ and sticking it in.
Every time you are in a position where you’re replacing an organ, you have the option, in principle, of repairing the organ, without replacing it. And repair at the microscopic level, one would be able to expect to do without surgery, just by injecting the right kind of stem cells or whatever. That would be something one would expect to be able to apply to someone much closer to death’s door and much more safely in general, and probably much more cheaply. One would expect that subsequent generations of these therapies would move in that direction.
Your foundation is working on an initiative requiring $50 million in funding—
Well, if we had $50 million per year in funding, we could go about three times faster than we are on $5 million per year.
And you’re looking at a 2021 timeframe to start human trials?
That’s approximate. Remember, because we accumulate in the body so many different types of damage, that means we have many different types of therapy to repair that damage. And of course, each of those types has to be developed independently. It’s very much a divide and conquer therapy. The therapies interact with each other to some extent; the repair of one type of damage may slow down the creation of another type of damage, but still that’s how it’s going to be.
And some of these therapies are much easier to implement than others. The easier components of what we need to do are already in clinical trials—stem cell therapies especially, and immunotherapy against amyloid in the brain, for example. Even in phase III clinical trials in some cases. So when I talk about a timeframe like 2021, or early 20s shall we say, I’m really talking about the most difficult components.
What recent strides are you most excited about?
Looking back over the past couple of years, I’m particularly proud of the successes we’ve had in the very most difficult areas. If you go through the 7 components of SENS, there are two that have absolutely been stuck in a rut and have gotten nowhere for 15 to 20 years, and we basically fixed that in both cases. We published two years ago in Science magazine that essentially showed a way forward against the stiffening of the extracellular matrix, which is responsible for things like wrinkles and hypertension. And then a year ago, we published a real breakthrough paper with regard to placing copies of the mitochondria DNA in the nuclear DNA modified in such a way that they still work, which is an idea that had been around for 30 years; everyone had given up on it, some a long time ago, and we basically revived it.
A slide presented by Aubrey de Grey, referencing his collaboration with Mike West at AgeX, showing the 7 types of damage that he believes must be repaired to end aging. (Courtesy Kira Peikoff)
That’s exciting. What do you think are the biggest barriers to defeating aging today: the technological challenges, the regulatory framework, the cost, or the cultural attitude of the “pro-aging” trance?
One can’t really address those independently of each other. The technological side is one thing; it’s hard, but we know where we’re going, we’ve got a plan. The other ones are very intertwined with each other. A lot of people are inclined to say, the regulatory hurdle will be completely insurmountable, plus people don’t recognize aging as a disease, so it’s going to be a complete nonstarter. I think that’s nonsense. And the reason is because the cultural attitudes toward all of this are going to be completely turned upside down before we have to worry about the regulatory hurdles. In other words, they’re going to be turned upside down by sufficiently promising results in the lab, in mice. Once we get to be able to rejuvenate actually old mice really well so they live substantially longer than they otherwise would have done, in a healthy state, everyone’s going to know about it and everyone’s going to demand – it’s not going to be possible to get re-elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to turn the FDA completely upside down and make sure this happens without any kind of regulatory obstacle.
I’ve been struggling away all these years trying to bring little bits of money in the door, and the reason I have is because of the skepticism as to regards whether this could actually work, combined with the pro-aging trance, which is a product of the skepticism – people not wanting to get their hopes up, so finding excuses about aging being a blessing in disguise, so they don’t have to think about it. All of that will literally disintegrate pretty much overnight when we have the right kind of sufficiently impressive progress in the lab. Therefore, the availability of money will also [open up]. It’s already cracking: we’re already seeing the beginnings of the actual rejuvenation biotechnology industry that I’ve been talking about with a twinkle in my eye for some years.
“For humans, a 50-50 chance would be twenty years at this point, and there’s a 10 percent chance that we won’t get there for a hundred years.”
Why do you think the culture is starting to shift?
There’s no one thing yet. There will be that tipping point I mentioned, perhaps five years from now when we get a real breakthrough, decisive results in mice that make it simply impossible to carry on being fatalistic about all this. Prior to that, what we’re already seeing is the impact of sheer old-school repeat advertising—me going out there, banging away and saying the same fucking thing again and again, and nobody saying anything that persuasively knocks me down. … And it’s also the fact that we are making incremental amounts of progress, not just ourselves, but the scientific community generally. It has become incrementally more plausible that what I say might be true.
I’m sure you hate getting the timeline question, but if we’re five years away from this breakthrough in mice, it’s hard to resist asking—how far is that in terms of a human cure?
When I give any kind of timeframes, the only real care I have to take is to emphasize the variance. In this case I think we have got a 50-50 chance of getting to that tipping point in mice within five years from now, certainly it could be 10 or 15 years if we get unlucky. Similarly, for humans, a 50-50 chance would be twenty years at this point, and there’s a 10 percent chance that we won’t get there for a hundred years.
“I don’t get people coming to me saying, well I don’t think medicine for the elderly should be done because if it worked it would be a bad thing. People like to ignore this contradiction.”
What would you tell skeptical people are the biggest benefits of a very long-lived population?
Any question about the longevity of people is the wrong question. Because the longevity that people fixate about so much will only ever occur as a side effect of health. However long ago you were born or however recently, if you’re sick, you’re likely to die fairly soon unless we can stop you being sick. Whereas if you’re healthy, you’re not. So if we do as well as we think we can do in terms of keeping people healthy and youthful however long ago they were born, then the side effect in terms of longevity and life expectancy is likely to be very large. But it’s still a side effect, so the way that people actually ought to be—in fact have a requirement to be—thinking, is about whether they want people to be healthy.
Now I don’t get people coming to me saying, well I don’t think medicine for the elderly should be done because if it worked it would be a bad thing. People like to ignore this contradiction, they like to sweep it under the carpet and say, oh yeah, aging is totally a good thing.
People will never actually admit to the fact that what they are fundamentally saying is medicine for the elderly, if it actually works, would be bad, but still that is what they are saying.
Shifting gears a bit, I’m curious to find out which other radical visionaries in science and tech today you most admire?
Fair question. One is Mike West. I have the great privilege that I now work for him part-time with Age X. I have looked up to him very much for the past ten years, because what he did over the past 20 years starting with Geron is unimaginable today. He was working in an environment where I would not have dreamt of the possibility of getting any private money, any actual investment, in something that far out, that far ahead of its time, and he did it, again and again. It’s insane what he managed to do.
What about someone like Elon Musk?
Sure, he’s another one. He is totally impervious to the caution and criticism and conservatism that pervades humanity, and he’s getting on making these bloody self-driving cars, space tourism, and so on, making them happen. He’s thinking just the way I’m thinking really.
“You can just choose how frequently and how thoroughly you repair the damage. And you can make a different choice next time.”
You famously said ten years ago that you think the first person to live to 1000 is already alive. Do you think that’s still the case?
Definitely, yeah. I can’t see how it could not be. Again, it’s a probabilistic thing. I said there’s at least a 10 percent chance that we won’t get to what I call Longevity Escape Velocity for 100 years and if that’s true, then the statement about 1000 years being alive already is not going to be the case. But for sure, I believe that the beneficiaries of what we may as well call SENS 1.0, the point where we get to LEV, those people are exceptionally unlikely ever to suffer from any kind of ill health correlated with their age. Because we will never fall below Longevity Escape Velocity once we attain it.
Could someone who was just born today expect—
I would say people in middle age now have a fair chance. Remember – a 50/50 chance of getting to LEV within 20 years, and when you get there, you don’t just stay at biologically 70 or 80, you are rejuvenated back to biologically 30 or 40 and you stay there, so your risk of death each year is not related to how long ago you were born, it’s the same as a young adult. Today, that’s less than 1 in 1000 per year, and that number is going to go down as we get self-driving cars and all that, so actually 1000 is a very conservative number.
So you would be able to choose what age you wanted to go back to?
Oh sure, of course, it’s just like a car. What you’re doing is you’re repairing damage, and the damage is still being created by the body’s metabolism, so you can just choose how frequently and how thoroughly you repair the damage. And you can make a different choice next time.
What would be your perfect age?
I have no idea. That’s something I don’t have an opinion about, because I could change it whenever I like.
Work hard, become successful, then you’ll be happy. At least, that’s what many of us were taught by our parents, teachers and peers.
The idea that we must pursue success in order to experience happiness is enshrined in the United States’ most treasured institutions (the Declaration of Independence), beliefs (the American dream), and stories (Rocky and Cinderella). Most people want to be happy, so we chase success like a proverbial carrot on a stick – thinking that contentment lurks just the other side of getting into college, landing a dream job, being promoted or making six figures. But for many chasers, both success and happiness remain perpetually out of reach. The problem is that the equation might be backwards.
Our hypothesis is that happiness precedes and leads to career success – not the other way around. In psychological science, ‘happiness’ relates to ‘subjective wellbeing’ and ‘positive emotions’ (we use the terms interchangeably). Those with greater wellbeing tend to be more satisfied with their lives, and also to experience more positive emotions and fewer negative ones. Research suggests that it’s these positive emotions – such as excitement, joy, and serenity – that promote success in the workplace.
Let’s look first at the cross-sectional studies that examine people at a single point. This allows researchers to determine whether happiness and success are correlated. Relative to their glummer peers, happier people are more satisfied with their jobs; they also receive greater social support from co-workers and better performance evaluations from supervisors. Notably, it might be that bosses give happy employees higher performance evaluations due to a halo effect, where a favourable impression in one area (such as happiness) influences opinion in another area (such as work ability): eg, ‘Tim is happy, so he must be great at his job too.’ However, there’s also some evidence that people with higher wellbeing perform better on a range of work-related tasks: one pivotal study found that sales agents with a more positive outlook sold 37 per cent more life-insurance policies than their less positive colleagues.
Happiness is associated with excellent work performance in other areas as well. People who frequently experience positive emotions tend to go above and beyond for their organisations; they’re also less likely to be absent from work or quit their jobs. People with better wellbeing also tend to earn bigger salariesthan those with lower wellbeing.
However, such cross-sectional research has its limits, since it can’t establish which comes first – happiness or success. Longitudinal studies can help here, as they follow people over days, weeks, months or years to see how they’ve changed over time. According to the longitudinal literature, people who start out happy eventually become successful, too. The more content a person is at an earlier point in time, the more likely she is to be clear later on about what kind of job she wants, as well as to fill out more job applications, and find employment. A key study found that young people who reported higher wellbeing than their peers just before graduating from college were more likely to receive follow-up job interviews three months later.
Positive emotions are also predictors of later achievement and earnings. In one study, happy 18-year-olds were more likely to be working in prestigious, satisfying jobs and to feel financially secure by age 26. In another, people who were more cheerful when starting college went on to have higher incomes.
But it’s not enough to establish that happiness comes beforesuccess; we want to know, does one cause the other? After all, there could be some unmeasured variable, such as intelligence or extraversion, that’s driving both wellbeing and work performance. Indeed, extraverts are more likely both to be happy and to earn greater incomes.
Well-designed experiments can control for these variables. For example, studies have randomly assigned people to situations that make them feel neutral, negative or positive emotional states, and then measured their subsequent performance on work-related tasks. These experimentsshowed that people who are made to feel positive emotions set more ambitious goals, persist at challenging tasks for longer, view themselves and others more favourably, and believe they will succeed. Happy people’s optimistic expectations appear to be realistic, too: on both clerical-coding assignments and digit-substitution tasks, people with positive emotions tend to do better and be more productive than those in the grip of neutral or negative emotions. The weight of experimental evidence suggests that happier people outperform less happy people, and that their positive demeanour is probably the cause.
From our review of more than 170 cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental studies, it’s clear that wellbeing promotes career success in many ways. That’s not to say that unhappy people can’t succeed – which is just as well, as a sad person reading this and telling herself she must cheer up to be successful is unlikely to help matters! To the contrary, history demonstrates that depressed individuals such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill can accomplish incredible feats. Both negative and positive emotions are adaptive to situations – there’s a time to be sad, just like there’s a time to be happy.
So for any business leaders or managers reading this, we’d caution against hiring only overtly happy people or pressuring your employees to be more upbeat. Such strategies have backfired in the past – as in the case of the mandatory jollity imposed on staff at the US supermarket chain Trader Joe’s, where the policy ironically made workers more miserable. People and companies hoping to boost happiness in a healthier way would have better luck if they introducedpositive activities, like performing acts of kindness and expressing gratitude.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1951 said that: ‘The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life.’ But he went on: ‘I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.’ When it comes to making your mark at work, we agree. If you want to be successful, don’t hang around and wait to find happiness: start there instead.
Biohacking is all the rage these days. The idea that we can optimize our physiology with lifestyle and nutrition gets talked about over and over in expert health blogs and on popular podcasts. But you might have noticed that the vast majority of people who talk about biohacking are men. You may also have noticed that most of the scientific research on nutrition and lifestyle is done on men and/or male lab animals.
And that’s just fine… for men. Biohacking is the practice of using food, lifestyle, exercise, and targeted supplementation to enhance health. But men and women have different needs based on their hormones. So what works for men won’t always work as well, or in the same way — or at all — for women.
If you suffer from hormone-related health concerns—like heavy periods, severe PMS, bloating, acne, fibroids, PCOS, irritability, insomnia, low libido, infertility, irregular or missing periods, and/or hormone-related migraines — you can biohack your way to fewer symptoms and better health. But to get the best results, you have biohack for your unique female physiology.
Here are my 7 top biohacks for women who want to solve their period problems and look and feel their best.
Biohack #1: Cycle sync your food
Eating to ease period problems requires synching your weekly meal plans with your 28-day cycle. Women have unique nutritional and energetic needs during each week of the month—unlike men, who can thrive by eating more or less the same way everyday—and you will look and feel your best when you match the vegetables, meats, plant proteins, fruits, and legumes you eat to your shifting hormonal needs. Think of it this way: as your hormones change, so does your menu!
If the idea of switching up what you eat each week feels challenging, start with my 4-Week Flo Food Challenge. And if you’re scratching your head (and maybe freaking out a little) because you don’t know what your hormones do or when, don’t panic! Use the MyFLO app to track your cycle and start eating cyclically.
Biohack #2: Cycle sync your exercise
To really optimize your hormonal health, you should shift your workouts to fit your cycle in much the same way as you do your diet. Your body is primed for different kinds of activity across your cycle, just as its looking for different kinds of nutrition through each of the four phases. Ready to get started? Learn what type of exercise is right for each phase of your cycle here.
Biohack #3: Detox the RIGHT way
If you suffer from hormone imbalances and period problems, it can be tempting to do an extreme detox. The severe restrictions and big promises (Lose 20 pounds overnight! Eliminate all the toxins from your body!) sound like a relief after suffering with hormone-related symptoms for so long. But deprivation plans and strict detoxes backfire for the vast majority of women. Severe calorie restrictions tax our already overburdened adrenal and endocrine systems—and make our hormone problems worse.
Don’t get me wrong: a detox can be helpful, but it must be the right kind of detox, one that focuses on clearing the body of excess estrogen. Excess estrogen in the body (relative to progesterone) contributes to everything from severe PMS to PCOS.
If you want to detox estrogen, don’t do a juice fast or a cleanse. Do a gentle detox that supports the body’s elimination process by giving it all the nutrients it needs. If you want even more support in doing a safe, nourishing detox, I designed a 4-day Hormone Detox to kickstart your hormonal healing.
Biohack #4: Be very careful with intermittent fasting (if you do it at all)
Most studies on fasting have been done on men and/or have shown mixed results for women. One study found that intermittent fasting helped improve insulin sensitivity in men, but women didn’t get the same benefit. (Good insulin sensitivity is essential for balanced hormones.) At the same time, the study showed that women’s ability to tolerate glucose actually got worse during intermittent fasting. Other research shows that fasting can have a negative effect on cortisol, insulin, estrogen, and progesterone— all the major hormonal players in your body!
Studies suggest that intermittent fasting can be very helpful for women (and men) with compromised cellular health (individuals with cancer and/or those going through chemotherapy), but for women in generally good health who are working to balance hormones and heal hormone-related symptoms, I don’t recommend fasting.
Biohack #5: Don’t default to the ketogenic diet
The ketogenic diet, which is a high fat-low carbohydrate diet, is all the rage these days, but research suggests that it can mess with thyroid function— and thyroid health is absolutely essential for healthy hormone balance. Here’s where this biohack becomes sex specific: thyroid problems disproportionately affect women. It’s estimated that one in five women have a thyroid issue, and many of those cases are undiagnosed. If you’re trying to bring your hormones into balance, your best bet is to eat in line with your cycle—and leave the ketogenic diet for individuals with other health issues.
Biohack #6: Ditch coffee
Bulletproof coffee can work well for men, but caffeine is a no-go for women who want to optimize hormone health.
Women have unique micronutrient needs, and we can’t expect optimal hormonal health—or optimal overall health—when we follow blanket supplement prescriptions. We need supplements tailored to our unique female physiology. Specifically:
While every woman should be supplementing with B vitamins, if you’re suffering from hormone imbalances, you’ll need to be extra aware of your intake. Research has shown that intake of vitamins like thiamine (B1) is inversely related to endometriosis. Another important type of B vitamin, folic acid, is known to be important in managing PCOS.
Magnesium is a must for women with hormone imbalances since it improves insulin sensitivity, which has widespread implications for the entire hormone system. And if you’ve ever suffered from hot flashes (whether you’re menopausal or not even close) magnesium has been shown to significantly reduce the symptoms.
If you’re suffering with fibroids or any hormone-related health condition, vitamin D is an absolute must. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that supplementing with vitamin D reduced the size of uterine fibroids. This may be especially essential for African American women since they’re 3-4 times more likely to develop fibroids and 10 times more likely to be deficient in vitamin D than white women. More generally, vitamin D acts like a master hormone in the body, which is what makes it so critical for all women with hormone imbalances.
Probiotics are a must: one study found that in just 12 weeks, probiotics s helped significantly reduced endometriosis pain. I designed my FLO Balance supplements with women’s unique micronutrient needs in mind. They contain everything you need to supplement strategically for optimal hormonal health.
Always remember, that once you have the right information about how your body really works, you can start making health choices that finally start to work for you! You can do this – the science of your body is on your side!
Sara Anderson knows exactly what she needs to manage her anxiety: seven hours and 18 minutes of sleep; 20 to 30 minutes of journaling and 10 minutes of meditation each morning; a B8 vitamin supplement that she says lightens the tightness in her chest and helps her sleep; no cold food (it causes her to tense up); and limited caffeine, alcohol, and sugar. The 28-year-old, who works for a tech company in San Francisco, first saw a doctor about her anxiety as a teen. He prescribed sleeping pills to help with her insomnia (which he thought was contributing to her anxiety), but she never took the medication—and never fully addressed her anxiety. She coped by doing yoga and meditating, but her symptoms persisted.
Then, in her early twenties, Anderson moved to Silicon Valley to work at a start-up where 80 percent of the company was male. “It was very stressful,” she says. “I was successful in my career, but I was really anxious and edgy. I couldn’t focus, my body hurt, and I was so fatigued I could barely keep my eyes open at work.” She didn’t want to take medication, so when Anderson, who’s always been “very analytical,” heard about biohacking—tracking personal metrics like sleep, diet, and exercise to glean insights about your body and tweaking those variables to feel better—she jumped at the chance to try it. Using data to deal with her anxiety made perfect sense to her. After more than two years of tinkering with her sleep, diet, and even her birth control, she says she feels anxiety-free and better than ever.
What Is Biohacking?
The buzzy practice originated in Silicon Valley and is loosely defined as experimenting on your body—everything from eating less junk food, microdosing on psychedelic drugs, eliminating certain foods from your diet, or taking supplements—all to “hack” your biology and improve your health. “You look at your body as a study,” says Molly Maloof, M.D., a general practitioner in San Francisco who specializes in helping engineers and start-up founders biohack safely. “You have a hypothesis on what’s causing this problem, and then you do an experiment to see if you can fix it.”
Some take this tinkering to the extreme; people have reportedly even tried to edit their own DNA in an attempt to eliminate a genetic disease. Other biohacking fanatics have magnets or radio-frequency identification implants inserted under their fingertips as a more secure way to get into their cars or access other valuables. Biohacking also can include using at-home health kits, such as SmartJane, VitalGene, and HomeDNA, to test for everything from STIs to food allergies. But most commonly, biohacking is about feeling—and functioning—your best.
Biohacking Your Moods
In the cutthroat world of Silicon Valley, some women view a mental health issue much the way they see any problem that crosses their desk—it’s something that can be disrupted. Last May, Paris Rouzati, a 28-year-old in San Francisco, started X Women, a digital support group for women with anxiety and depression, with Jessica Sit, 28. “We found immense comfort in our shared experience,” recalls Sit. “There’s that massive exhale of relief when you find that someone else is feeling the same thing as you.” Their team of two grew, and today they have an intensely engaged group on Telegram (a popular messaging service) where about 100 women from all over the world share how they cope with anxiety.
One of the most popular channels is on biohacking. “Being from California,” says Sit, “the discussion started with CBD,” or cannabidiol, which is the nonpsychoactive component of marijuana. (While the research is somewhat promising, more is needed to determine whether CBD may be effective in treating anxiety.) Other buzzy topics: blue-blocking glasses, meditation and breath-monitoring gadgets, acupuncture, supplements, and essential oils. The group does more than just share stories. “It’s, ‘Here’s this resource. How can I help? Here, let me reach into my bag of experiences,’” says Rouzati. “There’s a road map set by someone else.”
So Should You Try It?
If your anxiety is debilitating, an appointment with a mental health professional to talk about treatment, which might include therapy and/or medication, is critical, says Lynn Bufka, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist and associate executive director of practice research and policy at the American Psychological Association. For milder anxiety, certain biohacks to tame it don’t cost much (and actually aren’t all that high-tech). Some popular ones:
Practicing mindfulness… In a review of 47 studies, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that meditating for about 2.5 hours a week moderately improved anxiety after eight weeks. Anderson meditates every morning: “It helps me feel calmer throughout the day,” she says.
…And yoga. “It’s the best way to boost your parasympathetic nervous system, which gets you into ‘rest and digest’ mode,” says Dr. Maloof, who recommends her patients do it at least three times a week. Research has found it’s more effective in improving mood than a walking workout.
Eating mood-boosting foods. Fiber-rich veggies, foods high in omega-3s like wild salmon, probiotic-filled yogurt, and foods with zinc (such as cashews and egg yolk) may spur the release of feel-good hormones like serotonin and dopamine. Junk foods, Dr. Maloof says, do the opposite, telling your brain you’re under stress.
Wearing blue-blocking glasses. The blue-tinged light from computer, phone, and TV screens can throw serotonin levels out of whack, making it harder to sleep and raising the risk of anxiety and depression. These special glasses(generally about $30) may block that light and can be helpful when worn for any screen time before bed.
Taking Nootropics. These supplements, which claim to boost memory and focus and protect your brain from degeneration, have gotten lots of buzz. But experts say there’s no proof of their safety or efficacy and, like all supplements, they aren’t regulated by the FDA.
Optimizing sleep. We’ve all heard we need eight hours a day. But biohackers also watch their sleep cycles. Everyone goes through four to six distinct sleep cycles per night; waking up during the active REM stage can leave people feeling groggy and anxious. By charting her sleep patterns on an app, Anderson was able to make sure she woke up after the REM stage had passed.
Emphasizing touch. “Human touch is overlooked when it comes to mental health,” says Dr. Maloof. The right kind of touch, like a reassuring pat on the back or warm embrace, elicits in the recipient the release of the feel-good hormone oxytocin. Dr. Maloof schedules a massage for herself every few weeks and tells patients to make time to see friends. “If you don’t have a nurturing community around you,” she says, “you’re sending your body signals that you’re not healthy.” Zero tech required.
The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span.
In Acciaroli, a hamlet in southern Italy, about one-in-60 residents are over the age of 90. A survey of about 4,000 Italians found that mortality rates in old age plateau around 105, suggesting that the ceiling for human lifespan has not yet been reached.
“If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday in the journal Science.
In 2016, a team of scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx made the bold claim that Ms. Calment was even more of an outlier than she seemed. They argued that humans have reached a fixed life span limit, which they estimated to be about 115 years.
A number of critics lambasted that research. “The data set was very poor, and the statistics were profoundly flawed,” said Siegfried Hekimi, a biologist at McGill University.
Anyone who studies the limits of longevity faces two major statistical challenges.
There aren’t very many people who live to advanced ages, and people that old often lose track of how long they’ve actually lived. “At these ages, the problem is to make sure the age is real,” said Dr. Barbi.
Dr. Barbi and her colleagues combed through Italy’s records to find every citizen who had reached the age of 105 between 2009 and 2015. To validate their ages, the researchers tracked down their birth certificates.
The team ended up with a database of 3,836 elderly Italians. The researchers tracked down death certificates for those who died in the study period and determined the rate at which various age groups were dying.
It’s long been known that the death rate starts out somewhat high in infancy and falls during the early years of life. It climbs again among people in their thirties, finally skyrocketing among those in their seventies and eighties.
If the death rate kept exponentially climbing in extreme old age, then human life span really would have the sort of limit proposed by the Einstein team in 2016.
Jeanne Calment set the current record for human life span in 1997, when she died at the age of 122. So far as scientists know, no one else has lived longer.Credit: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
But that’s not what Dr. Barbi and her colleagues found. Among extremely old Italians, they discovered, the death rate stops rising — the curve abruptly flattens into a plateau.
The researchers also found that people who were born in later years have a slightly lower mortality rate when they reach 105.
“The plateau is sinking over time,” said Kenneth W. Wachter, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study. “Improvements in mortality extend even to these extreme ages.”
“We’re not approaching any maximum life span for humans yet,” he added.
Brandon Milholland, a co-author of the study finding a limit to human life span, questioned the new paper. The research, he noted, was limited to just seven years in one country.
“You’re reducing yourself to a narrow slice of humanity,” he said.
Dr. Milholland also took issue with how the team analyzed their data. They only examined two possibilities: that the death rate continued its exponential climb, or that it turned into a flat plateau.
The truth might be somewhere in between, he said: “It seems rather far-fetched that after increasing exponentially, the chance of dying should suddenly stop in its tracks.”
Dr. Hekimi, on the other hand, praised the study for the quality of its data and called its conclusions, “very interesting and surprising.”
The new research doesn’t explain why death rates flatten out in the oldest of the old. One possibility is that some people have genes that make them more frail than others. Frail people die off sooner than more resilient ones, leaving behind a pool of tough seniors.
But Dr. Hekimi speculated that there might be other factors at play.
Throughout our lives, our cells become damaged. We only manage to partially repair them, and over time our bodies grow weak.
It’s possible that at the cellular level, very old people simply live at a slower rate. As a result, they accumulate less damage in their cells, which their bodies can repair.
“This is a reasonable theory for which there is no proof,” Dr. Hekimi said. “But we can find out if there is.”
A flat death rate doesn’t mean that centenarians have found a fountain of youth. From one year to the next, the new study suggests, they still have a much higher chance of dying than someone in her nineties.
Exactly how long centenarians live may simply be a roll of the dice each year.
But even if this turns out to be the case, Jeanne Calment’s age won’t be easily matched, said Tom Kirkwood, associate dean for aging at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the new study.
“The higher the ceiling gets set as records are successively broken, the harder it gets to break it,” he said.
These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.
Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)
The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.
Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.
As biohacking starts to appear moreofteninheadlines, it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.
1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).
Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.
One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.
Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worrythat his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.
Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”
Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.
Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.
A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chipsin their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.
For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”
Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.
2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?
On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.
These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.
That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.
Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”
Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.
(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)
An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded. Getty Images/iStockphoto
The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.
3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?
Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.
Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.
What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.
As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking]once results start to happen.”
Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”
If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.
4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?
Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.
But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.
After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.
Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have notedthat for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.
And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:
“What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.”
5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?
Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?
Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.
If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.
This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.
As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although somelimited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.
In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.
But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.
Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.
Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.
“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ … That is incredibly painful.”
She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”
6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?
Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.
After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”
This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.
Now he’s under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.
The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.
According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.
“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”
Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”
Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”
Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.
7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?
Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.
He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.
Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.
The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.
But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”
He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”
Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”
8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?
Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.
“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.
Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.
Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the firstpeople to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.” Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.
9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?
When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.
But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.
The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)
As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?
When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.
“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”
That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.
Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?
Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.
Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.
“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”
In a therapeutic sense, energy healing describes any therapy that aims to affect and impact the energy field: the ‘invisible forces in and around the body’ that many term as ‘personal space,’ but with compassion and positive intention—often in an effort to encourage the body’s natural ability to heal. The practice of energy healing can take many forms, but often involves gentle touch and guidance on breathing regulation.
Quoted in U.S. News & World Report, Diane Goldner, an energy healer in Santa Monica, California, uses the analogy of fixing a problem on a computer document: not by clicking into the specific document, but rather by altering something broader within the computer’s infrastructure. “It’s like opening a zip file and all the contents of the zip file open up,” states Goldner, who was once a skeptical journalist covering the topic, before she changed careers after becoming firmly convinced of the power of energy healing.
Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, an integrative family medicine physician and co-director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine’s fellowship in integrative medicine, asserts that research in adults indicates that energy healing can not only decrease pain, but also increase relaxation, and even improve dementia symptoms and alleviate emotional suffering & distress. While the evidence is more limited in younger children, a specific clinical report on pediatric integrative medicine penned by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Integrative Medicine included biofield and energy therapies like ‘healing touch, therapeutic touch, and spiritual healing’ among safe and effective complementary & alternative medicine therapies for children.
Moreover, a 2012 study focused on pediatric cancer patients demonstrated that children who received ‘healing touch’ reported decreased fatigue, stress, and pain, along with their caregivers and families. An additional 2015 study of infants in the NICU found that measures of oxygen content in blood, heart rate, and pain significantly improved after receiving healing touch and massage. “When used in conjunction with conventional therapies, children get the best of all possible outcomes,” states Weydert, the chair-elect of the AAP’s Section on Integrative Medicine.
One of the primary reasons that energy healing might prove effective lies in its use of touch: largely attributable to the hormone oxytocin, which promotes and increases trust and social bonding, and helps regulate the body’s overall stress response. Chiasson says that the “right quality of touch…creates oxytocin the fastest…it has to be compassionate or caring or loving touch.”
* This article is a repost which originally appeared on The A4M Blog.
In this episode, we’re delving into the next level recovery techniques that have rapidly been gaining popularity across the country: whole body cryotherapy, photobiomodulation, and dynamic sequential compression. These treatments aren’t just reserved for world-class athletes or celebrities anymore — they’ve become a key component of many individuals’ everyday health and wellness routines. And it’s plain to see why:
Cryotherapy has been linked to increased blood circulation, an enhanced immune system, decreased fatigue, accelerated injury recovery, improved sleep patterns and even an elevated sense of cognitive abilities.Photomodulation has proved incredibly effective at relieving inflammation and chronic pain. And Dynamic Sequential Compression is known to relieve muscle aches, boost circulation, prevent future injuries and reduce recovery time — benefits that could propel anyone to the next level, which is why Tony Robbins himself has become such a raving fan.
You will hear from Tony, who recently sat down with Mark Murdock, Managing Partner of CryoUSA, to discuss just why cryotherapy has become such an integral strategy for recovery, and what other cutting-edge technology is helping him stay in peak condition. Then we segue into an in depth interview between our host, Ana Yoerg, and Mark Murdock, where you will learn more about the treatments themselves and how you can start incorporating them into your life. Because it’s not just about pain management, it’s about health and wellness and taking your physicality to it’s optimal state.
SHOW NOTES
[01:30] Ana introduces the episode
[02:45] Tony sits down with Mark Murdock
[03:05] Tony is traveling every 3 to 4 days across the world
[03:30] The stamina and endurance Tony needs
[04:20] The physical toll on Tony’s body
[05:00] How cryotherapy was a game-changer for Tony
[05:30] The psychological shift cryotherapy creates
[06:15] Tony’s use of the Norma Tec
[06:45] Cleanse, detox and strengthen
[07:25] The power of red and infrared light
[07:55] How Tony incorporates the laser into his routine
[09:30] The impact on the everyday person
[09:50] If you’re in pain, you have to deal with the source
[11:00] Ana takes us into the science behind the treatments
[11:30] What are the three types of clients looking for recovery
[13:30] How do people find these treatments?
[14:30] Natural, non-invasive options for health and wellness
[15:10] How CryoUSA began
[16:20] The cryotherapy business did not exist 8 years ago
[16:40] “We didn’t just have to build a business, we had to build an industry”
[17:00] Educating people about cryotherapy
[18:40] The different types of recovery
[20:15] How these treatments address inflammation
[21:20] Flushing the toxins from your system
[22:30] The sensation you experience after these treatments
[23:00] A core component of elite athletes’ conditioning
[23:50] Celebrities that utilize these treatments
[24:20] Purchasing these tools for your own home
[25:00] Improving employee wellness
[26:30] What Tony uses in regards to light and laser
[27:50] The science behind the light and LED
[29:45] How the cryotherapy chambers work
[31:45] Cryotherapy vs. ice baths
[34:40] Partnering with Nike, NBA, NFL, The Dallas Cowboys, UFC
[37:00] Growing the recovery industry
[38:00] New revenue streams for those in the wellness field
[41:30] Supporting new business owners who want to enter this space
[43:00] CryoUSA Team
[44:40] A special offer for our listeners
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