Shivangi Roy, Associate Science Editor
(Source: drawing by Shivangi Roy)
Every seven seconds in our body, a cell decides to stop dividing, entering a state of permanent arrest, known as “cellular senescence,” a process that gets engaged to safeguard excessive and harmful mutations within DNA during a cell cycle. But, in our current interpretations of longevity of life, senescence is no longer just a biological protective system connected to ageing but an “engineering problem,” according to some. For this, the entrepreneurs have proposed a so-called solution.
This all came to fruition when a tech entrepreneur took matters into his own hands. Bryan Johnson, 47, now spends $2 million annually to keep track of all his organs, kind of like an investor’s stock portfolio. According to his reports on his heart, kidney, and liver functions, age is truly just a suggested number, and the biology associated with ageing is negotiable—how, you may ask? Through extreme calorific restrictions on diet, over 100 supplements a day for adequate nutrient intakes, and repeated experimental therapies like stem cell injections and gene therapy, all to reduce the pace of ageing, as Johnson wrote in his Blueprint Protocol and reported in Wellness Pulse, 2025. Moreover, he documents his journey on social media, transforming the process of ageing (or not, allegedly) into his personal brand of resisting a biological inevitability. If only Benjamin Button had his number.
The alarming thing is that he is not alone in this thought process. Modern longevity has turned the process of senescence into a spectator sport, trying to determine how they can outrun their biology. Biohackers and blueprint protocols are gaining traction, as more and more people are gearing up to get stem cell therapies to stop cell senescence, as if it were just a suggestive measure. Their mantra seems to portray a clear message: ageing is not a fact, but a failure to prevent and act.
As a process, cellular senescence involves an arrest in the cell division cycle to counter drastic changes in gene expressions, functioning, and morphology. When cells encounter damage or undergo undue stress, they enter this state of arrest to cease all replication, to avoid over-replication and mutations in the replicant DNA. While transient senescence is associated with tissue repairs, persistent accumulation of senescent cells equates to dysfunctionality of tissue systems, inflammatory symptoms, and age-associated issues. The non-dividing senescent cells often secrete inflammatory compounds (senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP), which assist in repair and damage control, depending on cellular environment and contexts. Over the course of time, these non-dividing cells accumulate in number and secretions, and create an ecosystem that accelerates the process of ageing. Certain drugs, such as senolytics and senomorphics, are designed in an effort to kill/suppress these long senescent cells, and studies have shown that they help in improving tissue repair and function, delay age-associated issues and can even extend lifespans – as seen in mice… but the million-dollar question remains: what about for humans?
The situation would not be as dire if people just wanted to remove these cells; it has taken a turn for the extreme, because people want to completely reprogram these cells, like a factory reset. In theory, the idea is elegant, involving an epigenetic reprogramming of Yamanaka transcription factors, which restores youthful DNA methylation patterns and was seen to extend mice’s lifespan by ~109%. Researchers also developed chemical cocktails to try and reverse cellular age within weeks, without genetic manipulations. So the infamous fountain of youth? Hiding in a petri dish. While this research is promising, there’s a very distinct gap between discoveries in labs and their application in human lives, and bridging that requires investment of huge sums of time, effort and money, and is a road filled with obstacles and failures. Johnson himself learnt that the hard way – after five years of taking an immunosuppressant, rapamycin, which extended mice’s lifespan, he ultimately had to stop. It was revealed that this drug in fact accelerates ageing across 16 epigenetic factors in human cells, and works in contradiction to theorised views as seen from mice studies. Such is the irony of biohacking: the man who was measuring every biological metric possible, could not ultimately measure his way out of ageing. Dr. Morgan Levine, who pioneered epigenetic clocks and their advancements in science, says they do not function and measure ageing rates in units measured by years; thus Johnson’s claim of reducing his ageing pace by 31 years would be mathematically inaccurate.
But even with this concrete evidence, the saga continues—because this was never about a biological rethinking. It was about finding a niche to build a brand and a name. To influencers and entrepreneurs, it has become a theatrical challenge to prove their relevance, like a modern equivalent of the corrida de toros. The question arises: Why do we feel the need to go down this road at all? Why are we insistent on trying to debug, decode, and biohack our way out of a natural phenomenon like ageing? The answer, perhaps, is in our mindset of what it means to age; as a society, our perception of ageing has shifted from a collective inevitability of life to an individual checklist of accomplishments and failures. This reframing has changed the priorities and purposes of biological entities: organs are products to be serviced and maintained, wrinkles are a lack of effort, drooping skin is a beacon of failure, and a sign of giving up. The culture of longevity – programmed or otherwise – provides an escape from the ordinary human condition where facts like ageing are beyond our purview.
The science behind the elimination and alteration of senescent cells is real. The possibilities are intriguing, and trials for evaluating the safety and efficacy of the application are underway. So the question isn’t about how we can engineer and biohack ageing—it is whether we should let this capability reshape how we see what it means to be human. Emancipation from biology is a novel idea, until we realise it is a mirror of our mortal fears and anxieties, and natural progression is not a battle to be won but lived. We must remember that ageing is a privilege afforded to some, and that this temporary emancipation from biological fact might not be an escape, but a trade of prisons, a captivity where survival depends on optimisation, and existence is driven solely by relevance and a pursuit to be young enough, fast enough, successful enough… and perhaps never enough. Johnson acknowledged that perhaps the key motivators to his improved longevity were balanced diets and exercise, and basic lifestyle improvements—things that can be done right here, right now, without a multi-million dollar budget and biohackers on speed-dial. If senescence and ageing become optional pursuits, what happens to parts of the human condition contingent on our finality, on the finite nature of our being, on the knowledge that we all must live and we all must die?
Perhaps the real fountain of youth is derived from acceptance that ageing is not a code to be debugged, or a problem to be optimized, but rather a reminder of the human experience. The question is not in our capabilities of slowing senescence; it is whether this project to “biohack ageing” is an attempt to make us more human, or less.
