Turning the science into humans
Brianna Stubbs is the scientist who takes longevity research out of the petri dish and puts it into people. Based at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California, she built the institute’s clinical-trial capacity almost from scratch — the recruitment, the protocols, the testing infrastructure — so that promising ideas from the lab bench can finally be tested in humans. Buck CEO Eric Verdin introduced her to us as “the superstar of the Buck.” She is also a two-time world-champion rower, which tells you something about how she works.
Her decade-long research subject is ketones. She likes to explain them simply: ketones are a small molecule your body makes in the liver from fat, an alternative fuel to sugar that your brain, heart and muscles burn readily. She and others learned to synthesise them into a drink — effectively a fourth macronutrient alongside carbs, fat and protein. A ketone drink is, in her words, a caffeine-free, sugar-free energy source that won’t spike your blood sugar or insulin: a cleaner replacement for the 3pm energy drink, and increasingly a metabolic tool for healthy aging.
What sets her apart is the rigour. A ketone drink replicates part of ketosis — the ketones in your blood — but it is emphatically “not a ketogenic diet in a pill.” She ran the field’s longest ketone study to date (twelve weeks, with no safety concerns), has five more trials in the pipeline, and is candid that good clinical research is as much logistics as science: ethics approval, recruitment, and keeping volunteers engaged. It is, she jokes, a bit like being “the Navy SEAL of science.” This data-driven, optimise-on-top-of-the-basics approach is exactly why she sits in Biohacking Upgrades.
And yet she keeps both feet on the ground. “I don’t believe in shortcuts,” she says — think of health as a pyramid and get the foundations right before tweaking the top. She still races (training for a 240-mile ultramarathon when we met), studies elite masters athletes to redefine what healthy aging can look like without the confounder of inactivity, and her advice to young people is disarmingly simple: sleep, exercise you actually enjoy, an 80/20 diet, and real, in-person connection.
