Altered States

Through cutting-edge procedures, innovative menus and positive stress, biohacking aims to produce longer and healthier life spans

- Chris Wright

UNTIL FAIRLY RECENTLY, it was not considered good business for a hotel to promise to freeze its guests half to death, or for restaurants to encourage diners to eat like troglodytes. As for a spa whose listed treatments include lymphatic drainage and (ahem) “venom”—well, whatever happened to a good old-fashioned shiatsu? It seems inevitable that more and more hospitality providers will lavish their guests with similarly alarming services in the coming years—in-room cryotherapy chambers, say, or coffee laced with cognition-enhancing nootropics—and for this we can thank biohacking.

A sweeping, quasi-scientific wellness movement that incorporates everything from blood transfusions and mechanical limbs to getting a good night’s sleep, biohacking is mainly defined by its do-it-yourself ethos, and the shared belief that biological tinkering can introduce positive, permanent changes in a person. The movement’s most ardent devotees insist that it will one day allow humans to cheat death.

Finnish thinker Teemu Arina, co-author of the influential Biohacker’s Handbook, takes a more measured approach. “I define biohacking as better living through science, technology and nature,” he says. “People don’t really want to live forever. What people want is more healthy years in their lives. It’s not about life span but health span.”