Will you be immortal by 2039?

Do you want to live forever?

If you do, plan on staying alive at least another thirteen years. According to entrepreneur-turned-biohacker Bryan Johnson, that's how long it will take us to unlock the secrets of immortality.

Try not to die

Johnson, a 48-year-old ex-Mormon, founded several startups over his career. The most successful was an electronic payments firm called Braintree, which was acquired by PayPal in a deal that netted him $300 million. By his account, he was profoundly unhappy and unfulfilled by success, and even that fortune only deepened his depression.

Then he found a cause that appealed to him and that gave his life a sense of purpose. That cause was health and life extension, which he embraced with the zeal of the convert. He spent millions of dollars to develop a longevity protocol which he calls Blueprint.

According to Johnson, the root problem is that human beings are fallible. We give in to temptation; we're easily swayed to make choices that are bad for us. We're susceptible to harmful, addictive stimuli like sugar and alcohol, or breaking our bodies down through overwork, stress and poor sleep. The solution, according to him, is to plan out your life with an all-encompassing method that eliminates the necessity of moment-to-moment decision-making:

"You never want to put yourself in a situation where you have to make a decision," Johnson warns. "You want this decision to be made ahead of time. You want life habits and life systems that run automatically."

The base of Johnson's protocol is a strict diet, sleep and exercise regimen which he follows with religious exactitude, like a medieval monk who abides by a book of hours.

He wakes up at 4:30 AM and completes a vigorous hour-long exercise routine. He eats a vegan diet (the same meals at the same times every day, with barely any variation), consuming his last meal of the day at 11 AM. He avoids alcohol, caffeine and other recreational drugs. He goes to sleep promptly at 8:30 PM every night.

He undergoes a battery of regular medical tests and measurements—from weight and body composition, to grip strength and VO2 max, to regular MRIs and blood tests—aimed at assessing his overall health and gauging his biological age, as opposed to his chronological age.

While most people would balk at the strictness of Johnson's protocol, the basic concepts are inarguable. Regular exercise, a consistent sleep schedule and a balanced diet are good for you. People who develop these healthy habits will generally live longer than people who don't.

The problem, of course, is that none of them will make you immortal. To achieve that goal, Johnson has voluntarily made himself a guinea pig for an arsenal of experimental therapies, from the merely unusual to the outright bizarre.

Young blood

The Netflix documentary Don't Die gives a detailed look at the more radical parts of Johnson's protocol. He takes a daily cocktail of dozens of supplements. He bathes his skin in red light and uses a machine that delivers electric stimulation to his ab muscles, which he claims is the equivalent of doing thousands of sit-ups.

He takes an immunosuppressant drug, rapamycin, that has anti-inflammatory properties and that's been demonstrated to extend lifespan in mice. He breathes high-pressure oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber.

He transfused blood plasma from his son (willingly donated!) into his body. According to Johnson, he discontinued this practice because he saw no benefits from it, but later tried a different therapy that entails replacing all his plasma.

The most eyebrow-raising therapy Johnson has tried out is genetic modification. In Don't Die, he visits a private clinic in Honduras where he receives a plasmid injection that aims to increase the production of follistatin, a protein that promotes muscle growth.

Johnson's intention is to buy time through a stepping-stone method (and I do mean buy; reportedly, he spends $2 million a year on all of these treatments). Even if none of the therapies he's currently using will prolong his life indefinitely, the idea is that they'll extend it enough that other, more effective anti-aging therapies will be invented in his lifetime, which he can use to extend his life still further, and so on.

Eventually, he hopes, one or more of these interventions won't just slow his aging, but halt or reverse it. He calls 2039 a "reasonable target" for achieving this goal.

The big problem is that none of this is based on science.

N=1

Bryan Johnson would say otherwise. He'd say that nothing is added to his protocol unless there's at least some scientific evidence supporting its efficacy, even if only in animal studies. However, what this approach fails to reckon with is that you can't do a true experiment with a single participant.

Extending the human lifespan is a valid scientific goal, but it won't be achieved by one person trying hundreds of different things with no control group. Any anti-aging therapy would have to prove its worth in double-blind studies that test one intervention at a time and follow their participants for decades.

By combining so many different ideas, he's made this impossible. Even if one of the therapies he's trying turned out to be effective at increasing his lifespan, how would he know which one deserves the credit?

The plasma transfusion from his son is a case in point. Supposedly, Johnson tried it once, saw no benefits, and discontinued it. But there's no way to know whether or not it's having an effect on aging if you only do it once! That's like taking one dose of chemotherapy and deciding it didn't work because you're not cured of cancer. More likely, he stopped doing it because he knew it was creepy and weird, not for any strong scientific reason.

There's another problem he doesn't consider, and that's the possibility of adverse interactions. Given the hundreds of different drugs and therapies he's testing on himself, there's a very real risk that some will cancel out others—or that they'll interact with each other in unexpectedly harmful ways. That's a problem even in people who are taking thoroughly-tested drugs for well-understood conditions.

If he wants to advance the cause of anti-aging research, what he should be doing is using his wealth to fund rigorous clinical trials for the most promising ideas. But that wouldn't be as attention-grabbing, and wouldn't get him as many social-media views. It would also be less likely to benefit him personally, and that seems to be a large part of his motivation.

Talking Turritopsis

Is it possible to reverse aging? Almost certainly.

Anti-aging advocates cite examples from nature, especially Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish. It possesses a remarkable regenerative power: in response to stress or injury, its adult form, the medusa, can revert to the larval polyp form, which matures into the medusa form again. It's as if an adult human could revert to an embryo and then grow back into an adult. There's no apparent limit to the number of times the jellyfish can do this.

Obviously, this isn't what seekers of immortality are after. No one wants to be a baby again. But the fact that it happens is proof that aging isn't a clock that only ticks down. In principle, cells can be reprogrammed to revert to more youthful stages. If we could figure out how to do this in a controlled manner, we could de-age ourselves.

However, we're not going to attain such an advanced level of genetic manipulation any time in the foreseeable future. It's not even clear that we understand aging well enough to correctly state the problem. Aging may not be one thing, but a constellation of things that all have different causes and require different solutions. It's more likely than not that those who expect the advent of immortality within our lifetimes will die disappointed.

It's still a good idea to do what we reasonably can to lengthen our lives, and ensure that our later years are as healthy as possible. But we shouldn't sacrifice our happiness in the present in the hope of attaining a transhumanist utopia that may never come. If Bryan Johnson and those who follow him find genuine fulfillment in living in such a restrictive way, that's one thing; but if it's merely out of fear of death, a life well-lived is the best antidote to that.