First time ever for a gathering by the US government focused on “Reversing Aging…”, but I’m not sure why BCI was thrown into the mix…
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“Someday, science will help us slow or reverse all the damage of aging.”
Great albeit expected. Hopefully it’s bipartisan.
Reversing aging requires more than a backdrop
A few days ago, social media was full of celebratory posts from the MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. On one panel, under a glowing backdrop reading “Reversing Aging & Brain Computer Interface,” Bryan Johnson sat alongside Jim O’Neill, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services (and former CEO of SENS Research Foundation), and representatives from Neuralink and New Limit.
On the surface, this looks like exactly what many of us have been asking for. Aging finally being discussed openly from a federal stage. And not crap like “healthy aging.” Reversing aging. LEVITY sure likes the sound of that.
But. Will the Trump administration actually make America healthy again? Let’s just say that from where I’m sitting - in the land of the (almost) free healthcare, the home of the brave who still trust their institutions, and a place where a whopping 93 percent of the population hold a negative view of Donald Trump - I’m not getting my hopes up.
What I see so far is an administration that says one thing and does another. You might call it paradoxical, if it weren’t already the defining feature of Trump’s entire modus operandi.
Talk is important. But it’s also cheap. And right now, the talk and the actions diverge so sharply that it’s hard to take the “reversing aging” framing at face value.
Psychedelics and immortality: Nature went to a health summit starring RFK and JD Vance
The Make America Healthy Again summit, attended by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and vice-president JD Vance, gave a sense of what’s driving US health policy.
Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House last week. The meeting’s purpose was to discuss the future of health in the United States.
Organizers called it the MAHA Summit, referring to US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s signature ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement. Attendees included Kennedy, US vice-president JD Vance, NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya, US Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary and the food activist Vani Hari, who blogs under the name ‘Food Babe’. Sessions at the summit, which Nature attended, covered a wide range of health-related topics, including psychedelics, brain implants and anti-ageing therapies. Academic researchers or clinicians were not among the speakers at the sessions, which were peppered by comments critical of the medical establishment.
The conference showcased the influence of the MAHA movement, whose supporters say there is a chronic-disease epidemic in the United States that they blame in part on corruption in the food and pharmaceutical industries. To combat this epidemic, supporters advocate lifestyle choices, such as improving sleep and taking dietary supplements.
Other speakers included mixed-martial-arts promoter Dana White and actor and comedian Russell Brand. Attendees also heard health advice from Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire known for his anti-ageing ‘biohacks’, such as receiving plasma transfusions from his teenage son, and his view that his generation might be first to never die.
Makary decried “groupthink that again and again led us astray”, citing as an example public-health recommendations against eating saturated fat. (Kennedy has suggested that saturated fats are part of a healthy diet; the US government has, for decades, recommended limiting saturated-fat consumption.) “We got ‘saturated fat causes heart disease’ wrong for 50 years,” Makary said. “That’s a war we’re going to end.”
Full story: Psychedelics and immortality: Nature went to a health summit starring RFK and JD Vance (Nature)