Eccentric? Undoubtedly. But as we report this week, Mr Johnson is not alone. He is part of a growing movement that sees the human body as just another piece of hardware to be hacked, optimised and upgraded. In the name of “human enhancement” Mr Johnson and his fellows, who include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are exploring life extension, brain implants and drugs that enhance mind and body.
It would be easy to recoil from a project that is filled with cranks and has uncomfortable echoes of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. But it would be a mistake to dismiss all forms of human enhancement. The idea that medicine should seek to augment the body, not just restore it to health when it goes wrong, has plenty of merit. The key to maximising the benefits and minimising the risks will be to drive out the quacks and bring this rapidly growing project into the scientific mainstream.
A wannabe superhuman has a large menu of techniques to choose from. Some of the options are already to be found in medicine cabinets. The drug metformin, for instance, has been prescribed to diabetics for decades. In mice, at least, it seems to extend lifespans. Those results have not been confirmed in humans, but aspiring Methuselahs (including Mr Johnson) are taking it anyway.
Ritalin, prescribed to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and testosterone, the chief male sex hormone and a powerful anabolic steroid, are claimed to be nootropics, drugs that boost cognitive performance. Other chemicals are less familiar. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, better known as NAD+, is vital for cellular metabolism. Not only is it supposedly a nootropic; it allegedly has anti-ageing properties, too.
Adventurous biohackers can do more than pop pills. They might travel to Próspera, a lightly regulated place in Honduras founded with help from Mr Thiel. There they can have genes inserted into their cells to try to get their body to make more of a protein called follistatin. The clinic says that this will promote muscle growth and lengthen telomeres, chemical caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age.
A still more drastic choice is the brain-computer interface (BCI), a device designed to pass signals directly between biological brains and silicon chips. Some can be worn externally. But others are implanted directly into the brain. Several disabled human patients have used such devices—including those made by Neuralink, a firm founded by Mr Musk—to control computers with impressive precision. But that is merely a proof of concept: Neuralink was founded because, in Mr Musk’s view, only a human brain that can achieve “symbiosis with artificial intelligence” can hope to remain relevant in a world of intelligent machines.
Plenty of people seem to want to try out these ideas. Humans have always looked for ways to boost their powers, from mass education to the wristwatch. If taking a brain-boosting chemical sounds exotic or implausible, consider that the world produces around 11m tonnes of coffee annually, and not just because people like the taste. The market for supplements already shifts $485bn-worth of pills every year, despite little evidence that many of them do much good.
The human-enhancement project suffers from two related problems. The first is that it is a baffling mix of cutting-edge science and old-fashioned snake oil. Some of its ideas look genuinely promising, some are honest long shots and many are designed to fleece gullible customers of their money. The second problem is that the poor reputation this quackery produces scares off the sort of large-scale investment that could help move enhancement forward more quickly and safely. The industry is at once dangerous and short of cash.
To fix that, governments should create an environment in which rigorous trials can more easily take place. That will mean rethinking the purpose of medical regulation. For decades, regulators have concentrated on treatments that are designed to restore ill people to a baseline of health. Attempts to improve those who are already healthy, or to fight natural processes, are therefore neglected. Ageing, for instance, is not usually classified as a disease, which makes it harder to run trials designed to “treat” it. That is starting to change: American regulators recently approved a trial of metformin as an anti-ageing medicine. Reform needs to go further and faster.
Better rules would help patients sort the brass from the muck. They would be in the interest of honest researchers, too, since an official stamp of approval would be worth a lot of money. And the benefits could be huge. Most people enjoy being alive and dislike the effects of growing old. A drug that slowed the ageing of everyone in America enough to raise life expectancy by a year would bring benefits that one study values at $38trn.
We can rebuild him
Thinking about human enhancement now will also help governments prepare to deal with the downsides. Technologies like BCIs may be voluntary in theory. But if they work half as well as some hope, they will leave those who refuse them at a big disadvantage. As with most technologies, from cars to antibiotics, the wealthy will gain access first. What would it be like to live in a society where the rich are not only better off, but much stronger, cleverer and longer-lived, to boot?
Serious human enhancement sounds like science fiction. But there is no reason to think it is impossible. If and when real advances turn up, the world could change very quickly. Think of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which were in development for years before demand exploded overnight. Better for governments to set some rules now than be caught on the hop if and when Mr Johnson and his fellow biohackers strike it big.
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