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(NewsNation) — Entrepreneur and “longevity guru” Bryan Johnson has taken a different approach to how he will manage his autoimmune disease: cloning himself.
“I just cloned myself … as a newborn,” Johnson, 48, wrote to his followers on X. He added that for now, “baby Bryan” currently lives in a Petri dish.
In early July, Johnson announced he’d been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, an incurable condition in which the immune system attacks the stomach’s acid-producing cells. According to the National Institutes of Health, it can cause iron and vitamin B12 deficiencies, leading to anemia.
He attributed his diagnosis to poor eating and being stressed as a father of three.
“With this clone, I can become my own blood boy, test therapies on the clone, grow organs for transplantation, develop new treatments and inject young cells,” Johnson wrote.
He said the process involved doing a blood draw, extracting his cells, exposing them to Yamanaka factors and resetting them to an “embryonic-like state.”
Johnson’s plan quickly drew criticism from many online, with some calling it unsettling, while others said the process was just “evil.” Another person wrote: “Bryan Johnson is what happens when you give too much money to a man who is morbidly afraid of death.”
Others were more receptive to the plan, however, and said some medical breakthroughs in the past have been achieved through unconventional means.
The description of Johnson’s cloning experiment doesn’t seem to be like an actual clone. He may be describing induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. Those are mature, specialized cells (like skin or blood cells) that have been genetically reprogrammed in a lab to act like embryonic stem cells.
By introducing the Yamanaka factors, scientists can erase a cell’s memory, giving it the ability to self-renew and develop into any cell type in the body.
“I mentioned getting diagnosed with an incurable disease is one of the best things that has happened to me in a long time,” Johnson continued. “It’s opened up a frontier of new paths to repair and strengthen the body. This is the first example.”
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