Cryogenics and pill-popping: Meet the middle-aged men desperate to cheat death

In his last days, James Miller plans to travel to Scottsdale, Arizona so that when he dies his brain can be removed and frozen in liquid nitrogen.

By pausing death cryogenically, James hopes to be restored to life whenever medical technology allows.

Cryogenics might seem ‘out there’, but as an economics professor at Smith College, in Massachusetts, he sees it as a simple cost/benefit exercise.

‘Most people’s reaction is “yuck!, but after all, you have nothing to lose and perhaps a lot to gain,’ James tells Metro. ‘It might mean just another five or ten years but it could also be a million years.

‘The only limit to mortality is the eventual heat death of the universe,’ he adds.

As a transhumanist biohacker, Professor Miller believes that ultimately, human beings can only avoid extinction by merging with technology into a new species.

But he’s afraid of dying before that’s possible.

So, first he has to survive long enough to reach  ‘longevity escape velocity’ – the theoretical point when life expectancy is extending at a faster rate than people are ageing – when, for example, a kindly AI superintelligence may have cured every fatal disease.

‘If I can live to that point, I stand to live a lot longer because I’m convinced they’re going to cure ageing in the next twenty years,’ James explains.

After all, having his brain frozen is only the Professor’s plan B option of last resort. Plan A is  to postpone death indefinitely through biohacking.

James, 57, doesn’t look like your ‘average’ biohacker – if such a thing exists. Think of the spookily youthful looking 46-year-old Bryan Johnson who swaps blood with his son in a bid for eternal life, and James certainly doesn’t fit that mould.

He is just a middle-aged man who wants to do what he can to improve his chances, which is why each day, James takes a bewildering array of supplements: baby aspirin, ginseng, taurine, Gluscosamine, Zinc, glycine, desiccated liver and multivitamins.

Some of the supplements are to avoid nutrient deficiencies caused by his low carb diet, while others mimic the health benefits of fasting and help stabilise blood sugar at lower levels.

One such drug is Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant so powerful James only takes it once a week. It has been used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients for decades and shown to increase lifespan in clinical trials on mice.

Rapamycin is the biohacking community’s greatest hope of  a ‘quick win’ against ageing but is controversial due to its potentially harmful side effects – not that they deter James.

‘Sometimes it causes dental sores in mouth,’ he says. ‘But in a way that’s reassuring because it suggests it’s having some effect on my cells.

‘If I were younger I wouldn’t be experimenting. But at 57 I’m more vulnerable to cancers and that means that I might not live to see longevity escape velocity. So to me the benefits of biohacking outweigh the risks.’

Stabilised low blood sugar levels in a bid to reduce the risk of cancer that comes with ageing is a hugely desirable practice among middle aged biohackers and it’s all down to the influential research of David Sinclair, a professor of biology and genetics at Harvard.

His works builds on the idea of cellular senescence, the prevalent theory of aging since the 1960s. As we age, more of our cells stop dividing but do not die. Instead, these senescent cells start to build up creating toxic cocktails of molecules in tissues throughout the body which in turn creates the  damaging inflammation associated with ageing.

When we’re younger our strong immune systems are effective at clearing those toxins away. But as we age and our immune systems weaken, inflammatory toxins accumulate in senescent tissues and consequently our chance of  getting cancer increases dramatically.

Fasting and dietary restriction has been shown to significantly extend life expectancy in yeast, worms fish rats and mice  

As the longevity community’s most influential biohacker, Sinclair has helped popularise the approach of depriving ‘hungry’ cells of fresh supplies of glucose, to force them to feed off cellular material, and so reduce the build up of those damaging toxins.

This ‘tidying up’ process is known as autophagy – a term that literally translates as ‘self eating’.

By taking on the bulk of his calories in the early evening and then skipping breakfast and often lunch too, Professor Sinclair has helped popularise  autophagy.

In fact, he only consumes 1,100 calories per day focusing on plant based, low carb, low protein, and high healthy fat foods. 

And to be far, David Sinclair does indeed look unnervingly young. Although he is 54, at first glance he could easily pass for a thirty-something.

The professor has more than a million followers on X and Instagram combined and over 300,000 subscribers to his youtube channel and in response to his extreme quest for youth, an army of anti-ageing biohackers pour over his social media output looking for dietary and lifestyle hacks to induce and sustain autophagy.

But biohacking isn’t just for the reserve of the rich, famous and American. It’s a growing business in the UK too.

Six  years ago, Joe Bains was a stressed out, overweight IT consultant, hoovering up four or five snacks on the run while working for 15 hours, six days a week.

‘I didn’t understand anything about the importance of sleep, diet or exercise. I thought was invincible,’ he tells Metro.

But then his health took a nosedive and Joe was left bed bound, originally diagnosed with sciatica and nerve damage, and transferred between five hospitals over a six month period.

‘I ended up at Addenbrookes Hospital, where a consultant told me I had type 2 diabetes,’ Joe recalls. ‘He said he couldn’t fix me and I’d just have to accept it. Something switched in my brain and I said “no, I take responsibility for my health.”

The quest to stabilise his blood sugar at lower levels began with purging carbs, sugars and processed foods from his diet but gradually evolved into fully fledged biohacking.

Now 56, Joe has been using his body as a laboratory for six years and has transformed his blood sugar, physique and overall general health.

‘It forced me to wake up and understand what I had really been doing to my body. As biohackers we keep the things that work and reject the things that don’t.’ he explains.

Since his health crisis, Joe has been working as a coach specialising in lifestyle biohacks. Most of his clients seek him out when they start experiencing health problems in their forties or fifties.

The sheer array of lifestyle biohacks that Joe shares with clients in his work as a lifestyle coach can seem confusing: fasting, cold water immersion, buttered coffee, low carb diets, nootropics, high intensity exercise and breathing exercises don’t seem to have much in common.

Howeverm he insists that almost all of them are best understood as either trying to induce autophagy directly or indirectly by making it sustainable through lifestyle hacks.

‘It’s all about triggering the process where cells start to eat themselves [autophagy]. Everything is built around that,’ he explains.

Without the early morning ‘lift’ sugar provided, Joe has experimented with Modafonil the so called ‘smart drug’ or nootropic that boosts concentration. He’s also tried microdosing magic mushrooms to monitor their effect on concentration and creativity.

Then there’s injections of peptides, which are chains of amino acids and claimed to enhance concentration and also promote autophagy.

That’s why Joe’s day often  begins with strong coffee laced with oil or fat  as the energy source  to provide the ‘cognitive lift’ needed  to complete his work, while helping  his body’s cells feed off themselves instead of sugar.

By combining intermittent fasting with a strict ultra low carb diet which forces his body to break down fat as its main energy source, he brings about metabolic changes that promote autophagy.

Joe believes that if you really want to drive your body into the healing mode of autophagy, you have to place it under duress and encourage that repairing process to kick in.

He tells Metro that he’s particularly influenced by Wim Hof, the extreme athlete who’s also known as The Iceman for breaking multiple world records for cold water exposure.

Using Wim Hof’s  yogic breathing exercises, Joe stresses his body by alternately hyperventilating and holding his breath. He also endure ice baths for up to twenty minutes.

By distressing the body to the body where cells start to thinks they might die, the body goes into healing recovery mode and it’s thought that autophagy is induced aiding in the reduction of inflammation.

However, fasting is the ultimate stressor, Joe explains. In the past he has gone 21 days without food – which he insists was pretty straightforward.

‘Fasting recreates the harsh environment and erratic food supply which is perfect for a hunter gatherers,’ he adds. ‘We think we need carbs to give us energy but actually our body soon adapt and conditions itself to doing without because our ancestor were designed to survive long periods without food.’

According to Joe, it’s the standard western diet that ages us prematurely.

‘As you get older the ability to fight those toxins reduces and by overloading our systems with poor quality food we’re just creating more damage,’ he says.

There’s a definite sense that biohacking is becoming mainstream with a lot of demand coming from a tech savvy but ageing Generation X. It’s striking just how many of the biohackers Metro meets online are in their late fifties like James and Joe.

Most have modest goals and are seeking less frightening exit strategy by extending ‘healthspan’ and delaying the ravages of age related diseases like cancer and dementia. 

Given that on average we’ll each rack up five concerning health issues by the time we reach our late seventies, it’s not hard to see why ageing men are looking for a more control and feel that like James Miller they have little to lose.

Being in control seems to be a recurring theme. Back in Massachusetts, James Miller follows developments at Elon Musk’s company Neuralink closely in the hope that it might one day be possible to put a chip in his brain to directly interact with technology.

‘If I were to end up in an electric wheelchair, it would be great to be able control it with my mind,’ James explains. ‘I see it as a great hedge against disability.’

Like most biohackers – for the time being at least- he’s placing his bet on autophagy as the best way of delaying his date with the grim reaper.

‘After all, death is really bad,’ he adds.