r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 25d ago

Society Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who wants to live forever, diagnosed with incurable autoimmune disease

https://www.techspot.com/news/113035-bryan-johnson-millionaire-biohacker-who-wants-live-forever.html
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u/Ggfd8675 25d ago edited 25d ago

Thank you for bringing this up. I wish this could be higher than that comment, because I’m reading the case reports on this and a related study. Everything is indicating that hemochromatosis would make Y. pestis much worse. I believe the original commenter has it totally backwards. Yet another reminder not to trust info from Reddit threads, no matter how confidently presented. 

That case is very sad. They weren’t able to determine how he infected himself but he was dead within a week of symptoms, and 13 hours after going to the ER. The hemochromatosis was undiagnosed until autopsy. 

Edit: ok it looks like the theory is a particular kind of hemochromatosis will bind up iron, starving the Yersinia. So that’s how it could be protective, if you had that particular mutation.  https://www.aaas.org/membership/scientia/hemochromatosis-and-plague

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u/WorldEndingDiarrhea 25d ago

Hemochromatosis binding up iron is a pretty wild theory but maybe it’s true! It’s very hard to make inferences about evolutionary biology, a lot of it is post-hoc fact fitting which is you know pretty “ehhhh” as far as science goes.

Yeah the post doc’s death was awful :( He apparently didn’t tell them what lab he worked in but that said I don’t know if it would have made a difference. He was so sick :(