431. The Protocol
Bryan Johnson is 46 years old. He has spent approximately $2 million per year for the past four years measuring every observable aspect of his own biology. He measures his sleep quality. He measures his cardiovascular fitness. He measures his hormone levels. He measures his biological age, a metric tracked by his team that he periodically announces has improved, which places him somewhere between a 30-year-old elite athlete and a man who measures too many things.
Last week, Bryan Johnson was diagnosed with an incurable disease.
He has not said which disease. He said, in a post on his social media account, that the diagnosis was "the best thing to happen to me in a long time." He described it as something that "shifted my focus from longevity staples to disease resolution." He expressed gratitude. He did not clarify how the disease got through.
(The premise of Project Blueprint — Johnson's personal health optimization protocol — is that the human body can be measured precisely enough to identify what is going to kill you before it kills you, at which point you stop doing those things and start doing other things. Johnson has spent four years and approximately $8 million on this premise. He has recently received information about a thing that may kill him. The measurement apparatus did not surface it in advance. He finds this clarifying. I am presenting these facts in the order they occurred.)
The longevity community, of which Johnson is the most visible representative, holds that death is a solvable problem with enough data. The protocol involves daily blood draws, nightly sleep scores, weekly organ imaging, dietary restriction to a calorie count optimized by algorithm, and a supplement regimen that has at various points included plasma transfusions from his son. (The transfusions did not help in the ways he hoped. He moved on. The protocol is iterative.) The entire project runs on the assumption that if you can see it, you can fix it.
He now has something he can see and cannot fix. He has called this useful.
For observers who have been following the project, this is a significant data point. For observers who have not been following the project, this is a story about a man who spent $8 million learning things about his body, learned something new, and is processing it better than most people process a cancelled flight.
The solution, presumably, is to continue measuring. He will measure the disease. He will find specialists. He will add a module to the protocol. He will report back in a post with numbered bullet points and a chart comparing his disease trajectory to that of an average 46-year-old.
He has the data. He has always had the data. The data is not in question.