Eccentric? Undoubtedly. But as we report this week, Mr. Johnson is not alone. He is part of a growing movement that the human body sees as just another piece of hardware to be hacked, optimized and upgraded. In the name of “human improvement”, Mr. Johnson and his guys, who include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, investigate life extension, brain implants and medicines that improve mind and body.
It would be easy to return from a project filled with cranks and has uncomfortable echoes from the Eugenic movement of the early 20th century. But it would be a mistake to reject all forms of human improvement. The idea that medicines should try to increase the body, not only to restore health when things go wrong has a lot of merit. The key to maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks is to expel the quack and to bring this fast -growing project into the scientific mainstream.
A wannabe above person has a large menu with techniques to choose from. Some options can already be found in medicine cabinets. For example, the drug metetformin has been prescribed to diabetics for decades. At least it seems to extend lifetime for mice. Those results are not confirmed in humans, but aspiring methuselahs (including Mr. Johnson) are taking it anyway.
Ritalin, prescribed to treat attention shortages Hyperactivity disorder and testosterone, the most important male sex hormone and a powerful anabolic steroid, is claimed that they are nuts, drugs that increase cognitive performance. Other chemicals are less known. Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, better known as NAD+, is vital for cellular metabolism. It is not just a supposedly a nootropic; It is said that it also has anti-aging properties.
Adventurous biohackers can do more than pop pills. They can travel to Propspera, a slightly regulated place in Honduras founded with the help of Mr Thiel. There they may have brought genes into their cells to try to get their bodies to make more a protein called follistatin. The clinic says that this will promote muscle growth and telomerate, chemical caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten the age.
An even more drastic choice is the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), a device that is designed to provide signals directly between organic brains and silicon chips. Some can be worn externally. But others are implanted directly into the brain. Various disabled human patients have used such devices – including those of Neuralink, a company founded by Mr. Musk – to control computers with impressive precision. But that is just a proof of concept: Neuralink was founded because, according to Mr. Musk, only a human brain that can achieve 'symbiosis with artificial intelligence' can hope to remain relevant in a world of intelligent machines.
Many people seem to try these ideas. People have always searched for ways to stimulate their strengths, from massive education to the wrist watch. If you sound a brain -eliminating chemical sounds exotic or unbelievable, consider that the world produces about 11 meters of coffee every year, and not just because people love the taste. The market for supplements has been shifting $ 485 billion pills every year, despite little evidence that many of them do a lot of good things.
The project for people and care suffers from two related problems. The first is that it is a staggering mix of advanced science and old -fashioned snake oil. Some of his ideas look really promising, some are honest long photos and many are designed to fleece gullible customers of their money. The second problem is that the poor reputation that this quackery makes is afraid of the kind of large -scale investments that can help to help improve improvement faster and safely. The industry is at the same time dangerous and shortage of money.
To solve that, governments must create an environment in which rigorous tests can take place more easily. That means that the purpose of medical regulation is recalling. For decades, regulators have focused on treatments that are designed to restore sick people to a health basis. Attempts to improve those who are already healthy, or to combat natural processes, are therefore neglected. For example, the elder is usually not classified as a disease, making it more difficult to perform tests that are designed to “treat” it. That starts to change: American supervisors recently approved a test with metformin as an anti-aging medicine. Reform must go further and faster.
Better rules would help patients sort the copper of the mud. They would also be in the interest of honest researchers, because an official stamp of approval would be worth a lot of money. And the benefits can be huge. Most people like to live and not to grow old. A medicine that delayed the aging of everyone in America enough to increase life expectancy by a year would bring benefits that one study appreciates $ 38trn.
We can rebuild it
If you now think about human improvement, governments will also help to prepare for the disadvantages. Technologies such as BCIS can theoretically be voluntary. But if they work both half as the only hope, they will leave the ones they refuse to a major disadvantage. As with most technologies, from cars to antibiotics, the rich first get access. What would it be like to live in a society where the rich are not only better off, but also much stronger, smarter and longer, to start?
Serious human improvement sounds like science fiction. But there is no reason to think that it is impossible. If and when real progress pops up, the world can change very quickly. Think of GLP-1 weight loss medicines, which were developing for years before the question exploded at night. It is better for governments to lay down some rules now than to be caught on the Hop ALS and when Mr. Johnson and his colleague biohackers are getting big.
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