A man focused on achieving biological immortality disclosed he’s been diagnosed with a chronic illness.
“My stomach is eating itself,” Johnson said. “But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms. I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it.”
Johnson describes AIG as being a chronic progressive disease where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the acid-producing parietal cells in the stomach lining.
The condition can cause irreversible atrophy of the stomach lining tissue. The resulting disruption in stomach acid production can prevent the absorption of nutrients such as iron and vitamin B12.
“You too may have a lurking health issue that is undiagnosed and could increase in severity from unhealthy life choices, without your knowing,” Johnson added. “The absence of symptoms is not the presence of health. A gentle nudge that minding your health, no matter your situation in life, is good decision making.”
Johnson became a tech multi-millionaire after selling his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million. Since then, he’s invested $2 million a year into Project Blueprint, an anti-aging experiment launched in 2021 that aims to reverse the biological age of Johnson’s 78 organs.
In April 2023, Johnson engaged in a blood plasma swap experiment with his son Talmage, who is 28 years younger.
“My team and I are going to try and solve my AIG,” Johnson said. “Modern medicine has normalized too many conditions that erode our health, function, and comfort, shrinking the goal to monitoring and management while a cure is rarely even attempted.”
The Cleveland Clinic estimates that up to 2 percent of the U.S. population has AIG.
Before he was diagnosed with AIG, Johnson revealed that he suffered for years with a low iron condition called low ferritin.
“We chased the obvious solutions first," he said. "A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.”
Rather than being defeated by his AIG diagnosis, which could ultimately lead to the development of stomach cancer, Johnson remains optimistic.
"I'm going to try and solve it," he said. "No condition should be presumed incurable."