Hacking Biology is presented to the Rapamycin News community
The project was introduced to the Rapamycin News longevity community with a 14-slide presentation: measure the hallmarks of aging with biomarkers, document the protocol, and build an open platform so results can be compared across people.
Hacking Biology was introduced to the Rapamycin News community — one of the largest and most technically serious longevity forums online — in a thread opened by the forum’s admin , who had noticed a new member “getting serious about longevity biohacking and in the process of developing his plan and a software platform”.
That thread is where the project first met the people it was built for.
What was presented
The presentation shared then is still the clearest statement of the original idea, and it is worth reading as a historical document — most of it survived into what biohack.it is becoming.
Read the 2024 presentation (PDF, 14 slides)
Its argument, in order:
The motivation is personal before it is technical. Slide four says it plainly: “I am 43; I know my body is changing with a slow functional loss and I do want to act on it.” The research already exists but there is no comprehensive approach to applying it — very rich people buy their way into high-end clinics, and everyone else buys pills on a monthly subscription and hopes.
The method is measurement, not belief. Aging shows up as changes at many biological levels, and most of those levels can be measured. So: measure biomarkers, act, measure again, and judge the action by what moved. The deck budgets for 130+ biomarkers — a wide blood panel from lipids up to NAD+, DNA methylation and telomere length, microbiome, DEXA — collected frequently enough to produce a trend rather than a snapshot.
The interventions are treated as a landscape, not a shopping list, from supplements and pharmaceuticals through peptides, plasmapheresis and an HBOT protocol with alternating hyperoxia — each one an experiment with a schedule, not a purchase.
The hard part is organisation. Running a serious DIY trial on yourself means scheduling compounds, booking measurements, keeping cycles straight and recording what actually happened. That is what the software was proposed to do.
And the point of the software is other people. The deck’s phrase for it was a “kind of crowd-sourced trial” — knowingly not a scientifically diligent, reproducible protocol, but a way of generating investigative leads that nobody is currently generating, because everyone’s data dies in a private spreadsheet.
What was promised to the community
Two commitments were made in that thread, and they are the reason the Foundation exists in the shape it does today:
most of the people don’t do proper measurement and related data management … don’t stick to a documented protocol of what they are doing, making it difficult or impossible to compare
and, on what the project would be:
a non-commercial, collaborative and opensource hacker-led biohacking project on longevity
Everything since — the AGPL licence, the open dataset, the non-profit that cannot sell the software — is that second sentence turned into structure.
The thread has since been read some 2,700 times. The community it addressed is still where this project’s work gets argued with, which is the correct place for it.