In 2019, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson began to experiment on himself by taking daily injections of rapamycin. This immunosuppressant drug is typically used to prevent organ rejection after transplants, but the 48-year-old technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist had a different goal — to extend his life.
He tested several protocols, experimenting with weekly, biweekly and other schedules. He tried 5-milligram doses as well as 6-mg and 10-mg ones. But in September 2024, Johnson decided to end his personal trial with rapamycin: the benefits didn’t outweigh the drawbacks, which Johnson outlined in a post on social-media platform X. He had intermittent skin infections, high glucose levels and abnormalities in his blood lipid levels, plus a heightened resting heart rate. “With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected Rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it entirely,” he wrote.
Johnson, who sold his mobile-payment business Braintree to financial-technology firm PayPal in 2013 for US$800 million, often tinkers with his daily regimen of drugs, peptides in the form of both supplements and injections and other medical interventions in pursuit of a longer life. He’s part of a growing crowd of tech entrepreneurs who are seeking extra years by hacking their own bodies — and sharing their exploits widely through social media and other channels.
Johnson’s Blueprint protocol — a self-published guide to his life changes and medical choices — has been adapted over time. He and his team told Nature that “the new focus of our protocol is to tackle chronic conditions that current medicine accepts as manageable but not treatable, and to render them treatable through advanced diagnostics and next-generation personalized therapeutics”.
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