(LifeSiteNews) — A wealthy entrepreneur who spends more than $2 million a year and who has received blood from his teenage son and other young persons in his quest to achieve immortality, or at least stave off aging, reports that he has developed a rare disease that he says is causing “My stomach to eat itself.”
Biohacker Bryan Johnson, founder of online payments company Braintree, announced on social media that he has been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis (AIG), an incurable autoimmune disease.
In a lengthy, nearly 2,000-word post on X, Johnson said, “My stomach is eating itself,” but declared that is “going to try and solve it.”
“AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk,” Johnson said. “When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.”
In 2023, news emerged that Johnson had recruited his then-17-year-old son, Talmage, to provide a full liter of his blood that was separated into a batch of liquid plasma and then a batch of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, according to a Bloomberg report.
His son’s plasma was then infused into his veins.
Johnson had previously received blood transfusions from young anonymous donors with the goal of reversing the aging process.
According to Bloomberg, Johnson personally screened the donors in order to ensure they had an ideal body mass index, were free of diseases, and lived a healthy lifestyle.
“As well as blood transfusions, Johnson follows a strict daily routine that includes monitoring his body fat, heart rate variability, blood, stool samples, and the number of erections he has per night,” a May 2023 Fortune report explained. “Every day he also takes two dozen medicines at 5 a.m., consumes 1,977 ‘vegan calories,’ and exercises for an hour before using blue-light-evasive glasses and hitting the hay.”
Elsewhere, Johnson has stated that he takes 54 pills each day.
He has also had himself injected with “gene therapy.”
Johnson founded Braintree, an e-commerce company that he sold to PayPal for a reported $800 million in 2013.
He has amassed 1.5 million followers on X, 2.6 million followers on Instagram and 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube, all of whom are interested in following his crusade to discover the fountain of youth.
Since early last year, Netflix has streamed a 1.5-hour documentary about Johnson’s longevity quest titled Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.
“As a species, we accept our inevitable decay, decline, and death,” Johnson said at the outset of the film. “I want to argue that the opposite should be true.”
He says he wants to “neutralize aging.”
Johnson claims that through his “Project Blueprint” he has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, inflammation 66% lower than the average 10-year-old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.