What are Britain’s biohackers so afraid of? They crave control in a disordered world

At first glance, the Health Optimisation Summit feels remarkably normal — or the new normal anyway. Over 4,000 strong, the attendees are the kind of people you might meet at a Clapham gastropub. There are tech bros, and gym bros, and corporate girlies, and a couple of aesthetically out-of-place hippies walking around barefoot. But then you turn a corner. To your left, a cage gyro, a woman spinning frantically inside. To your right, an infrared sauna, complete with a couple decked out in trunks and a bikini. If this is Clapham, the landlord has swapped IPAs for something stronger.

The brainchild of Tim Gray, a professional podcaster with over 600,000 followers on Instagram, the Summit’s watchword is a concept called “biohacking”. Gray himself simply describes the idea as health optimising, but others see it as using technology to “hack” the natural body, while some regard it as a transhumanist endeavour littered with futuristic tech to escape mortality. Regardless, biohackers belong at this conference, where nutritionists, wellness influencers and DIY scientists all show off, and ultimately hope to sell, technology that’ll let you live forever, or at least a few years longer.

This is new. For years, biohacking was the domain of billionaires, who’d happily splash out millions in an attempt to extend their lives indefinitely, using their wealthy bodies as test subjects. Bryan Johnson, probably the world’s most famous biohacker, is known mostly for injecting himself with his 19-year-old son’s blood, and monitoring the length and strength of his erections. At the conference, toys for the billionaires aren’t hard to find. One hyperbaric oxygen chamber I spotted costs a sweet £200,000. Fully customisable, it features a bench press and a TV.

As the presence of the gym bros implies, however, biohacking has now come for the masses. Technology is clearly part of the appeal here, and certainly helps explain how the sector reached the $24 billion mark last year. In the end, though, I couldn’t help returning to those humdrum attendees, and how biohacking feels just as much a displacement exercise as their up-to-date LinkedIns. Far from helping you live forever, the Health Optimisation Summit is more about enduring the here and now — especially as its precepts only continue to enter the mainstream.

The underlying philosophy behind biohacking is a scepticism, depending on who you ask, towards an underfunded NHS; a greedy pharmaceutical industry; or the entirety of Western medicine. Regardless, this flouting of the health industry’s norms leans towards a radical, unorthodox practice. Quite aside from the gyros and the saunas, this was clear in the Summit’s talks. At one point, a speaker promised they could “reverse” incurable diseases. Elsewhere, someone gave a talk on why peptides, the building blocks of protein, demolish the fraudulent history of mainstream medicine.

Where did this manic blend of conspiracy, commerce and healthcare ultimately stem from? Most vendors I speak with have been selling their products for around a decade, but all agree that the pandemic propelled the biohacker movement into the limelight. Since Covid, says Kayla, hawking her wares at an IV-drip stall, “people want to be the best version of themselves”. She isn’t alone. Indeed, in a sense the entire conference feels like a symptom of Long Covid, as every attendee points to 2020 as the moment that catapulted their niche field to prominence.

Yet if Covid was the spark, the divisive legacy of lockdown suggests this is about something more than mere medicine. Consider, for instance, talks with names like “Ten Relationship Tools to Maximise Compatibility and Avoid Conflict” or “Finding Your People: How to Attract Relationships that Match Your Growth” — hardly topics your GP can help with. To me, at least, it all suggests a desperate attempt to reassert not health so much as control. Facing climate change, financial instability, and even just the bewildering future itself, many here seem to be turning inwards, with the technology merely a means to an end.

I get the same impression from Gray himself. In his mid-40s, covered head to toe in Boohoo menswear, his salt-and-pepper hair somewhat contradicts his claimed biological age of 24. His supposed biological youthfulness is thanks to his meticulous biohacking routine, which includes drinking hydrogen-infused, reverse osmosis water, and blood tests every 10 to 14 days. Yet throughout our interview, the Summit’s founder seems equally keen to distance himself from some of the more radical technology on display. He talks in staccato phrases, but repeatedly offers a straightforward message: “Eat well, sleep well, hydrate well, sun well, ground well.”

A fair point. But with the cage gyro whirring nearby, that only begs another question. For if Gray is right, and biohacking is more about routine than revolutionary technological change, do I really need blue light-blocking glasses before bed, or should I just avoid using my phone? Do I really need a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in my flat — or should I just do more morning stretches?

It’s a contradiction that arguably runs through the whole biohacking scene. A simple message of improving daily life becomes absorbed by corporations, and spat out in the form of pricey red-light face scrubs. And if there’s a clear financial aspect at work here — turning big tech into a must-have is good news for firms hawking £4,000 vibrating mattresses — the longer I spend at the Health Optimisation Summit, the more the machinery blurs into the background: replaced, again, by that desperate need of control, whether independently or as a larger collective.

I’m thinking, here, of the presentations, which seem to transcend the whys and wherefores of ageing to become almost religious events. There’s murmuring agreement, nodding at every line, and desperately taking photos of every slide. As Gary Eckles, a pal of Joe Rogan revered for his supposed miracles solving chronic health issues, begins his hour-long talk on how genetics and supplementation can optimise your health, one chap seems overwhelmed. “Let’s go!” he cries, amid roars of applause.

It goes without saying that mainstream medicine is unimpressed by all this. Critics cite the lack of scientific accountability, a modern-day snake oil industry, without the scientific rigour and clinical trials typically required for health practices. When I ask Gray about this, he distances himself from some of the more extreme views of his speakers, explaining that Western medicine and the pharmaceutical industry do, in fact, serve a purpose. The pharmaceutical industry and biohacking, he says, “go hand in hand like this” — as he clasps his hands together.

Gray is similarly cautious when it comes to politics, snapping that he’s “not interested in discussing that” when the topic comes up. Not everyone is so diffident. Across the Atlantic, after all, health has become closely linked to the political Right. Robert F. Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement are supported by many US biohackers, including Dave Aprey, whose policy in the Trump administration is based on much of biohacking’s anti-Big Pharma sentiment.

And at the Summit itself, the fervour of MAHA’s manosphere-adjacent podcasters is palpable. Attendees are eager to tell me how much they admire Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, and UK-leading voice Steven Bartlett. Yet if Aprey, a friend of Gray’s, invested in the conference, there is no real overt political sentiment to the event in most of the talks I listened to. Certainly, no British politicians openly support the biohacking movement.

Could this change? The numbers are suggestive, with many Britons increasingly mistrustful of mainstream medical science. As far as politics is concerned, the obvious comparison to make with America, given its populist frontman and the anti-establishment sentiment, is the Reform UK party. At their latest conference, RFK adviser Aseem Malhotra gave a speech titled — you guessed it — “Make Britain Healthy Again”: where he claimed mRNA vaccines could alter genes and that the World Health Organisation had been captured by Bill Gates. In the event, though, the party soon distanced itself from its guest speaker, stating it doesn’t endorse his radical views.

It’s hard to imagine the pint-loving Farage taking up biohacking, let alone railing against mainstream healthcare. Quite aside from his own common-sense persona, Britain’s obsession with the NHS means that if Reform might flirt with privatisation, the party’s leader ultimately knows that attacking the saintly caste of doctors and nurses would backfire.

In other words, then, British biohacking will likely remain a medical rather than a political project, especially when new variations are constantly appearing. With obesity-management jabs like Ozempic increasingly popular for managing weight, they’ve also become the latest frontier in DIY science, complete with a thriving black market and counterfeit prescriptions. Combined with the continued popularity of cold plunges and breathwork — and, yes, those famous gyros — it seems clear that biohacking will only seduce more of the sort of people I saw at the Summit: regular folk, whether corporate girlies or gym bros, eager for that elusive sense of control. And what could be more normal than that?

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