The Strange Health Experiments Of Silicon Valley's Wealthy Elite

As a tech titan dies amid reports that he tried to live on low oxygen, here’s a look at other fads.

- Chris Stokel-Walker

What would you do to live forever, or at least improve your health and extend your life? While most of us are spending our time emptying chocolate boxes, some are expending time and effort into strange attempts to extend healthy life. Many are based in Silicon Valley, the home of tech giants and of Calico, a Google-backed company that has spent the past seven years researching the biology of ageing.

One Silicon Valley stalwart, Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, an online shoe business that was sold to Amazon for US$1.2 billion ($1.6 billion), died in a fire last November, reportedly after spending the night in a shed with a heater that would deliberately lower the oxygen level. Until his demise, he was trying a range of odd ways to stay healthy, including inhaling laughing gas and depriving himself of oxygen.

He was not alone in Silicon Valley. “These people are incredibly smart and driven and interested in so many different things,” says Colin Selman, a professor of biogerontology at the University of Glasgow. “The quest to understand ageing is one of the great scientific mysteries.”

But what methods are the tech elite using — and do they work?

Hypoxia

Hsieh, who died aged 46, is reported to have spent his final months in confined spaces, including sheds, with heaters that would deliberately lower the oxygen level in the room — something designed to trigger hypoxia (low blood oxygen), which some long-lifers believe can extend your life by altering the way genes operate.