The person behind the project

About Fabio

Fabio Pietrosanti: a seasoned hacker and entrepreneur across cybersecurity, transparency, anti-corruption, logistics and AI trading, now applying the same open-source, radical-open-data method to longevity with Hacking Biology.

About Fabio

While a board of biohackers and stakeholders is being formed, here is who is behind how the project started.

Fabio Pietrosanti — online as naif — started Hacking Biology, and writes everything on this blog. He has spent close to thirty years building things people have to be able to trust, across a run of companies and non-profits that keeps landing in the same place: take a domain nobody has made properly transparent, build the open infrastructure for it, and give it away.

From hacking to cybersecurity to whistleblowing

He started hacking in 1995 and turned it into a career fast: system administration in 1998, network security engineering and then management at I.NET (now BT) from 2000, senior information security consulting for Telecom Italia from 2004 — firewalls, intrusion detection, security operations, open-source intelligence, incident handling.

In 2006 he founded PrivateWave, building military-grade encrypted voice and messaging as its CTO. In 2011 he co-founded the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights , building GlobaLeaks and Tor2web — whistleblowing and anonymous-publishing infrastructure now run by newsrooms, anti-corruption bodies and public institutions worldwide. That is where cybersecurity turned into transparency and anti-corruption work, and where the habit of shipping open-source infrastructure that other organisations depend on took hold.

Startups in more domains than the résumé suggests

The pattern repeats across very different industries: General Logistic Services, restructuring a family logistics business; civic and public-interest data projects on digital sovereignty and institutional transparency; and, more recently, AI-assisted financial trading systems (SignalSwarm) applying the same measure-everything discipline to markets that this project now applies to biomarkers.

Multiple non-profits sit alongside the companies — Hermes Center among them — because the parts of this work that matter most tend to be the parts nobody can be allowed to own.

Why longevity, and why open

The reason this project exists is personal: after losing his mother to lung cancer, Fabio turned a hacker’s attention to the biology of aging, and became a biohacker himself — running a documented protocol on his own body and measuring what it does, published on this blog since 2023.

What twenty-five years of the pattern above says is that the interesting infrastructure is never proprietary for long, if it is any good. Applied to health, that means: open source (biohack.it under AGPL-3.0, not a product with a paywall), free services where the platform can offer them, and a radical open-data approach to health data — the individual owns the record, the platform does not, and the aggregate dataset is released so research can build on it instead of on a spreadsheet nobody else will ever see. The Foundation is that intention turned into an institution that can be held to it.

Portrait of Fabio Pietrosanti

Elsewhere

In the press