American tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, 45, spends $2m a year trying to get the body of an 18-year-old, says Ashlee Vance in Bloomberg. One thing he doesn’t have to pay for is his monthly injections of young blood, because he has persuaded his 17-year-old son, Talmage, to be his “blood boy”. Johnson Jr drains a litre of the stuff, a machine separates it into its constituent parts – liquid plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets – and the plasma gets fed into his dad’s veins. The science is “anything but settled”: one top LA biochemist calls it “gross, evidence-free and relatively dangerous”. But tests on rodents have suggested that old rats benefit from “absorbing the life force of their younger counterparts”. For some rich tech types, that’s enough.
Johnson isn’t messing around, says Will Pavia in The Times. He has recruited a team of 30 specialist doctors to help him regain his youth, and they have devised an all-consuming regimen. He rises at 5am, eats “two dozen supplements and medicines” to help “ginger up his arteries”, reduce inflammation in his liver and keep his brain healthy. He does an hour-long workout, chugs down a breakfast of green juice, and then undertakes a teeth-brushing and flossing session “beyond the dreams of the most demanding dental hygienist”. Two hours before bedtime he wears special glasses that cut out blue light. While he sleeps, a device counts his night-time erections – of which there have been a “significant uptick” of late. So that’s something.