Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a new form of adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) that adjusts therapy in real time as patients walk, improving gait stability and reducing falls in people with Parkinson’s disease.
Published in Nature Medicine, the study demonstrates for the first time that an implanted neurostimulator can detect brain signals associated with individual steps and modify stimulation within fractions of a second. The approach represents a significant advance in personalized neuromodulation and could help address one of the most difficult-to-treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
“Difficulty walking is one of the most disabling symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and one of the hardest to treat,” said senior author Doris D. Wang, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurological surgery at UCSF. “Walking is a highly dynamic behavior that requires precise timing across both sides of the body. We developed a system that can recognize those movement patterns and respond in real time, effectively allowing the stimulation to work with the patient as they move.”
Addressing a major unmet need in Parkinson’s disease
More than 10 million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by tremor, rigidity, slowness of movement, and postural instability.
Deep brain stimulation has become an established treatment for many motor symptoms of the disease, particularly tremor and rigidity. However, gait impairment, freezing of gait, and falls often persist despite therapy and are major contributors to disability, hospitalization, and loss of independence.
One limitation of conventional DBS is that it delivers continuous stimulation regardless of a patient’s activity. While effective for relatively stable symptoms, this approach may not adequately support complex behaviors such as walking, which require rapid and constantly changing coordination between the brain, spinal cord, and muscles.
The UCSF team hypothesized that stimulation timed to a patient’s actual movements might provide more effective support for gait control.
Turning brain signals into therapeutic feedback
To develop the system, researchers identified neural activity patterns associated with movements of the left and right legs. These movement-related signals were then incorporated directly into an implanted neurostimulator capable of adjusting therapy automatically during different phases of walking.
Unlike previous adaptive DBS approaches that typically respond to slower changes in disease-related brain activity, the new system operates on a timescale of milliseconds and responds directly to behavior itself.
“The brain contains remarkably rich information about movement,” said first author Kenneth H. Louie, PhD, a UCSF postdoctoral scholar. “We found that we could identify neural signatures linked to each step and use them to guide stimulation in real time.”
The researchers liken the device to a cardiac pacemaker. Rather than delivering constant stimulation, the neurostimulator continuously monitors neural signals and dynamically modifies therapy to match the brain’s walking rhythm.
The system performs these adjustments internally without requiring an external computer, making it suitable for real-world use outside the laboratory.
Testing the adaptive system
The study enrolled five individuals with Parkinson’s disease who had previously undergone DBS surgery as part of a UCSF investigational research program.
In addition to therapeutic DBS leads implanted deep within the brain, participants received research electrodes positioned over motor-related cortical regions. These electrodes allowed researchers to record neural activity associated with walking and identify personalized movement signatures for each participant.
Using these individualized neural biomarkers, investigators programmed the implanted device to automatically adjust stimulation during walking.
Laboratory testing demonstrated improvements in several objective measures of gait performance, including increased gait symmetry and reduced variability between steps. Both metrics are associated with more stable and efficient walking patterns.
The researchers then evaluated the system in participants’ daily lives through a blinded, multi-day crossover study comparing periods with adaptive stimulation and periods with conventional stimulation settings.
During adaptive stimulation, participants experienced fewer falls while maintaining overall control of their Parkinson’s symptoms.
No serious adverse events were reported, and participants tolerated the rapid stimulation changes without difficulty.
Although the trial was small, the findings provide early evidence that matching stimulation to behavior may offer benefits beyond those achieved with continuous DBS.
A shift toward behavior-responsive neuromodulation
The study highlights an emerging trend in neuromodulation: moving from static therapies toward systems that continuously sense and respond to changing neural states.
Most adaptive DBS technologies under development focus on biomarkers that fluctuate over minutes or hours. The UCSF approach instead targets neural signals associated with immediate actions, enabling stimulation to respond almost instantaneously.
“This study is about more than walking,” said Wang. “It demonstrates that brain stimulation can adapt to what a person is doing in real time. That opens the door to future therapies that respond dynamically to movement, speech, mood, cognition, and other brain functions.”
The concept could ultimately extend beyond Parkinson’s disease to other neurological and psychiatric disorders in which symptoms vary throughout the day.
Toward intelligent brain implants
Researchers envision future implanted devices that function as closed-loop systems, continuously monitoring neural activity and delivering therapy only when needed.
Such systems could potentially improve treatment efficacy while reducing side effects and conserving device battery life. By tailoring stimulation to specific behaviors or symptoms, clinicians may be able to provide more precise and individualized care.
The work also represents an important technological milestone because the adaptive algorithms were embedded directly within the implanted device rather than relying on external processing hardware.
“This is an important step toward a new generation of brain therapies,” Wang said. “Instead of delivering the same stimulation all day long, future devices may continuously listen to the brain and immediately respond to a patient’s needs. Just as pacemakers transformed the treatment of heart disease, intelligent neurostimulators may transform how we treat disorders of the brain.”
While larger clinical studies will be needed to confirm the benefits of the approach, the results provide an early demonstration that real-time, behavior-responsive neuromodulation may offer a new way to address some of Parkinson’s disease’s most challenging symptoms.
As the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Or as Verge Labs might put it, one company’s failed clinical trial … is that same company’s new AI benchmarking dataset.
Over a decade ago, Alice Zhang co-founded Verge Genomics with the idea that by looking at the network of genes causing neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, ALS, or Alzheimer’s, the company would be able to come up with better drugs. The company did target discovery work, for example, coming up with two targets that Eli Lilly nominated to its internal pipeline in 2024. Verge also had its own pipeline, where it was pursuing an ALS drug — that is, until its Phase 1b trial failed last month.
The company published a postmortem explaining what exactly went wrong with the trial, in which a third of the patients dropped out because they could not tolerate the drug. “While the temptation is strong, when a trial doesn’t meet the anticipated end points, to kind of look away and not talk about it, we think there are a lot of learnings that can come — not just for us, but for the field and for ALS broadly — that’s really important to share. That’s not done very often,” Zhang told STAT in an interview.
IntroductionCortical and subcortical alterations in brain intrinsic function have been widely reported in Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, sex differences in brain intrinsic function in PD are poorly understood. This study aimed to examine sex differences in spontaneous brain intrinsic function in PD and their associations with neuropsychological measurements.MethodsUsing Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) resting-state fMRI, we compared amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) between male and female PD patients in substantia nigra (SN), globus pallidus (GP) and whole-brain. Subgroup analysis was performed, matching demographics with equal sample sizes. ALFF correlations with behavior were assessed by sex.ResultsFemale PD patients demonstrated higher ALFF in the right SN compared to males in the primary analysis. This sex difference achieved statistical significance in the demographics-matched subgroup analysis. Bilateral premotor ALFF was significantly elevated in female patients relative to males, independent of brain structure. Furthermore, right premotor ALFF showed a preliminary positive trend associated with visuospatial function exclusively in female PD patients.ConclusionFemale PD patients exhibit distinct functional signatures, primarily involving elevated premotor fluctuations and a preliminary premotor-visuospatial association. Preliminary SN alterations were also noted. These findings highlight the necessity of sex-stratified neuroimaging and provide preliminary support for premotor ALFF as a potential sex-divergent functional signature associated with cognitive profiling in female patients with PD.
A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.
Neural decoding algorithms that leverage physiological principles of locomotor encoding support activity-dependent deep brain stimulation therapies that improve locomotor deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease.
Pramipexole, in patients with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression, reduced Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale scores significantly compared to placebo.
Developing truly disease-changing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions has proved challenging, with many failed trials over the last few decades. The approval of Eisai/Biogen’s monoclonal antibody lecanemab in 2023, the first such treatment to have a positive, albeit modest, impact on symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, was therefore received with enthusiasm by many.
Critics of lecanemab and Eli Lilly’s donanemab, approved a year later for the same indication, argue that the small benefit gained from the drugs does not outweigh the economic costs, possible side effects, and burden of regular intravenous infusions.
Using a vaccine-style approach, where the treatment prompts the body to generate its own antibodies, has the potential to solve these problems. Several companies are developing active immunotherapies to target Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, as well as other neurological conditions.
Andrea Pfiefer, PhD CEO and Co-founder AC Immune
“What we’re trying to do is link the antigen to a carrier and bring it into a form which mimics the pathology,” explained Andrea Pfeifer, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Swiss company AC Immune, a leading biotech taking the active immunotherapy route to target Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
“We inject it into the immune system, and what it recognizes is the misfolded protein. So, because of that, the immune system only makes antibodies against this pathological protein.”
Although none have yet reached the market, the active vaccine-style approach potentially has a number of advantages over passive treatment with monoclonal antibodies. Importantly, fewer rounds of treatment are required. The exact dosing is yet to be determined, but it would certainly be less frequent than the regular infusions of lecanemab or donanemab that are currently prescribed. This would help reduce costs and treatment burdens for patients and their families. There is also likely to be less risk of amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) due to the relatively slower onset of antibody generation by the body.
“If you have to take the patient every two to four weeks to get a two-hour infusion in a hospital, and then you have to wait and do imaging, it’s really burdensome,” said Pfeifer.
“After a certain while, they just don’t want to go. … They say, ‘Sorry, we believe your science, we believe everything, but we don’t want this.”
To date, most vaccine trials have enrolled people with at least some degree of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, as preventive vaccine trials need to be large and long in duration. Theoretically, developing a preventive vaccine is a feasible approach, as many neurodegenerative diseases typically have a slow onset before noticeable symptoms appear. However, reliable biomarkers that can accurately predict disease onset have been in short supply.
ALZ-101 – Alzinova’s disease-modifying vaccine candidate for Alzheimer’s disease
This is changing, though. Last year, two blood tests that measure phosphorylated tau and amyloid ratios were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The biomarker field is less developed for Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), but things are slowly improving.
Promising mid-stage results from front-runners like AC Immune and Alzinova suggest that this pathway has merit, but whether they can succeed in larger registrational trials going forward is unclear.
Tord Labuda, PhD CEO, Alzinova
“It remains to be seen how our immune system reacts. I think that when we look at the titers we see from the vaccine, they’re similar to what we get with passive immunizations. So I think there are a lot of things that point in the right direction,” said Tord Labuda, PhD, CEO of Swedish biotech Alzinova, which has an amyloid beta vaccine in development.
“Personally, I don’t think that the vaccine or passive immunization is the real challenge. The real challenge is to have the right target.”
Taking a more active approach to immunotherapy
While passive immunotherapies like lecanemab and donanemab are groundbreaking in that they are the first disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s to be approved by the FDA and they slow cognitive decline by around 25%–35% over two years, these drugs can cause significant side effects such as ARIA.
This can cause brain swelling and bleeding in some people. Individuals at highest risk for some neurodegenerative conditions, such as carriers of the APOE4 gene variant, are prevented from accessing these therapies at all, as they have a higher-than-average risk of experiencing ARIA-like side effects.
Treating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease when symptoms commence is problematic, as currently, there is no known method of regaining neuronal function once it has been lost.
Classic pathology studies suggest that, by the time the typical motor symptoms of Parkinson’s appear, around 50%–70% of dopaminergic neurons are already lost from the brain. Similarly, in early clinical Alzheimer’s disease, where those affected have mild dementia, hippocampal volume in the brain seen on imaging is already up to 25% lower than that of age-matched controls. This means, however good the treatment is, the patients will never regain complete function.
“There’s no way we can restore these neurons,” said Roman Kniazev, CEO of U.S.-biotech Nuravax, which is developing several different Alzheimer’s vaccines. “They are gone forever. So that is why the best strategy, and this is our motto in our company, is to not let the pathology kill the neurons.”
Researchers trying to develop new therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are increasingly moving towards an early or even preventive approach. The idea of a vaccine-like approach to targeting Alzheimer’s is not new. Animal work in the late 1990s showed that vaccinating against amyloid‑beta could clear plaques and improve cognition in transgenic mouse models. This led to the development of Elan/Wyeth’s amyloid‑beta vaccine, AN1792.
It entered Phase I/II trials for mild‑to‑moderate Alzheimer’s and successfully induced anti‑amyloid beta antibodies in some patients. But the study had to be stopped in 2002 because around six percent of the participants developed meningoencephalitis, linked to T cell–mediated inflammation in the brain. Despite strong amyloid plaque clearance, there was little impact on symptoms in the clinical trial participants.
Several other candidates, designed to avoid the T-cell activation seen with AN1792, have been unsuccessfully trialed over the last two decades. Although largely safe and antibody-producing, most of these programs were discontinued due to a lack of efficacy.
The field has persevered despite this, with improvements in technology, safety, biomarkers, and clinical trial design having led to a new generation of vaccine candidates that, while not yet approved, are showing good results in Phase I and II trials.
Neil Warma CEO, ProMIS Neurosciences
“I think what we’ve learned over the past five or 10 years from other vaccine approaches is that the next generation are those that come with a very precise approach to generating antibodies against the toxic species of a given protein for that specific neurodegenerative disease,” said Neil Warma, CEO of ProMIS Neurosciences, a U.S.-based company taking an antibody and a vaccine-based approach to treating Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
“Those are really the things that make the vaccine approach much more interesting now. The sophistication of the biomarkers, the data we’ve learned from past and current products in the market, and then this ability to design and create antibodies that are highly specific to a targeted pathogenic form of the protein.”
AC Immune has three active immunotherapy candidates in Phase II: an anti-amyloid beta therapy, ACI-24, that is being developed with Takeda; an anti-tau therapy, ACF 35, being developed with Johnson & Johnson; and an anti-alpha synuclein candidate targeting Parkinson’s disease.
Staining of neurons in the brain from Neil Cashman’s lab-1.
The company reported good results for its Parkinson’s Phase II study at the end of last year. The interim study results showed a 100% response rate and a good safety profile in people with early Parkinson’s disease. Alpha-synuclein and neurofilament light levels in the blood, as well as scores from standard movement tests, suggested that disease stabilization had occurred.
If confirmed by results from the second part of the study, this would be the first time that disease modification, rather than symptom management, has shown promise for Parkinson’s disease. It would also confirm alpha synuclein as a pathogenic contributor to the condition.
“The statistical variability was very, very small, which was a surprise to us. Every single marker, preclinical biomarker, clinical imaging, went into the same direction,” said Pfeifer. “For me, what was particularly rewarding was that there was a connection between the titers, so the antibody response in the people versus the reduction of this pathology … the alpha-synuclein versus the imaging, which showed that the neurons can be protected.”
Better targeting to improve safety and efficacy
A common theme among vaccine developers in the neurodegeneration space is precision targeting. There is a strong consensus that a lack of specificity when picking targets is likely why many trials failed to show efficacy and had significant side effect issues in the past.
Different companies or research groups back slightly different protein targets, but the experts all emphasize the importance of avoiding binding to inert plaque in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, and of targeting toxic, misfolded proteins that are disease-specific.
“We provide the body with active immunotherapy, and then the body induces the antibodies. But what is important is that these antibodies are really specific for the pathological form,” said Pfeifer.
AC Immune is not the only company with a keen focus on tightening up targeting in this area. Alzinova is specifically targeting toxic amyloid beta oligomers with its lead candidate ALZ-101, a therapeutic Alzheimer’s vaccine.
It received a recent FDA Fast Track designation for ALZ-101 after good safety and efficacy data were reported last year from its completed Phase Ib clinical trial.
“They have shown in many in vitro and in vivo models that … when you remove these toxic oligomers using antibodies towards them, you can basically neutralize the toxicity in these extracts towards the neurons,” explained Labuda.
He added that many of the “vaccines, as well as the monoclonal antibodies, are going for the N-terminal part of the protein. … By doing that, you will target the monomers, all the fibrils, but most importantly, also the plaques. Very little will be left to bind to something else that might be more important for the disease. I think this is what we see with the current treatments on the market. There’s a lot of off-target effects … and that’s why we have these huge challenges.”
ProMIS is also targeting amyloid beta oligomers in Alzheimer’s using both a monoclonal antibody and vaccine approach. It has developed a special method with the help of artificial intelligence to develop antibodies, taking both conformational shape and protein sequence into account.
“These three-dimensional shapes don’t exist on monomers, and they’re buried in plaque. We’ve tried and tried and tried to get these antibodies to bind monomers, to bind plaque, and they really don’t, which is good,” said Warma.
“We’ve done side-by-side testing with other antibodies to see if ours is truly differentiated. … In many different studies before we got to the clinic, PMN-310, our therapeutic antibody, was the only one that bound oligomers and avoided monomers and plaque. All the others cross-reacted with everything.”
ProMIS is testing its PMN-310 antibody before moving on to the vaccine approach. “If we can come with that one-two punch to say we’ve got a drug now that can treat patients with Alzheimer’s, we’ve got the ability to detect the onset of disease pathology in Alzheimer’s, and we have a vaccine that prevents you from developing that disease, I mean, that would be a pretty powerful combination,” noted Warma.
Nuravax is aiming to address two key shortcomings of first‑generation Alzheimer’s vaccines, such as AN1792: the risk of problematic T cell-driven inflammation and uneven immune responses in older adults. Its MultiTEP‑based candidates (AV‑1959R, AV‑1980R, and Duvax) are engineered to elicit a strong, antibody‑dominant response against amyloid‑beta and tau while minimizing activation of potentially autoreactive T cells and maintaining effectiveness.
“The platform which we developed makes the vaccine highly immunogenic, and this high immunogenic feature is essential for diseases in the brain,” said Kniazev.
Kiran Bhaskar, PhD Professor University of New Mexico
Kiran Bhaskar, PhD, is a professor and group leader at the University of New Mexico. He has worked on Alzheimer’s disease for many years and is also a scientific co-founder of TheraVac Biologics. He and his colleagues are developing an anti-tau Alzheimer’s vaccine that is about to start human trials.
They are also aiming to reduce risks associated with immune reactions to vaccine adjuvants, which can contribute to ARIA, and have created a vaccine that does not need an adjuvant.
“We use a strategy called a virus-like particle,” he explained. “You don’t need to expect any side effects because of adjuvants. In this way, we trick the immune system into thinking that there is a viral attack on the body. It immediately starts an immune response against the virus-like particle and also anything sticking to the surface of those virus-like particles, which in this case is pathological or phosphorylated tau proteins.”
Overall, in the trials carried out so far in the active immune therapy space in Alzheimer’s disease, rates of ARIA have been very low, which is another selling point for the vaccine approach. “We don’t expect to see ARIA in active immunotherapy because we are using the host’s own immune response system to generate antibodies. … So that way there’ll be less unanticipated immune response,” explained Bhaskar.
Credit: Ake Ngiamsanguan / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Overcoming challenges on the road to the clinic
There is no doubt that active immunotherapies or vaccines to target Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are more advanced than they have ever been before, but they are still a long way from a mainstream rollout.
One reason the conversation has shifted is that the approval and broader use of the first anti-amyloid antibodies, for all their modest effect sizes and ARIA issues, shows that lowering the right protein species can slow deterioration. Using a more vaccine-like approach, where people make their own antibodies, does have the potential to make targeting these conditions safer, cheaper, and more accessible for patients.
But basic clinical questions remain unanswered. For example, how long vaccine-induced protection will last, how often boosters will be needed, and whether early stabilization of biomarkers and motor or cognitive scores—such as AC Immune’s interim Parkinson’s data or Alzinova’s Phase Ib Alzheimer’s study results—will translate into true preserved function a decade later.
Biomarkers are a big potential stumbling block for the development of preventive vaccines. The position is better for Alzheimer’s disease; the FDA’s approval of two blood-based Alzheimer’s biomarkers now gives developers a way to find people with silent pathologies without relying solely on positron emission tomography imaging. But there is still a lot more to do on this front, particularly in diseases like Parkinson’s, ALS, or other neurological or neurodegenerative diseases where less is known.
Credit: Martin Philip / iStock / Getty Images Plus
“We need better and safer treatments, but it’s also linked to having the right biomarkers, because if you have a risk factor, it doesn’t mean necessarily that you have the disease,” said Pfeifer. “These biomarkers are still not very well established. … The goal is absolutely to go to preclinical, and preclinical will require these biomarkers. If you ask me what is needed most in Parkinson’s right now, [it] is definitely to have better biomarkers.”
A second stumbling block for companies that want to develop vaccines that can effectively immunize people against neurodegenerative disease is that clinical trials of vaccines in populations of people with no symptoms have historically been large, expensive, and time-consuming—something out of reach of most biotechs without significant outside investment.
ProMIS and others are hoping that the efficacy of their therapeutic antibodies will boost their vaccine pipeline in the future. “If we show that it works in Alzheimer’s, then a similar approach should work in these other diseases,” said Warma. “Since it’s an almost identical process for vaccines, it also shows proof of concept for this whole wave of vaccines coming behind it.”
For now, active immunotherapies promise something that is more modest than true disease prevention but still crucially important. Namely, cheaper, less burdensome, and potentially safer ways to target the same disease biology as today’s monoclonal antibodies, ideally years earlier in the process.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a multisystem neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive nigrostriatal dopaminergic degeneration, α-synuclein aggregation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and neuroinflammatory remodeling. Although these mechanisms have been extensively investigated, how systemic metabolic and microbiota-derived signals intersect with neuronal translational control remains incompletely understood. Queuosine (Q) modification of tRNAs is a distinctive RNA modification because its precursor, queuine, is not synthesized de novo by mammalian cells but is acquired from diet and gut microbial metabolism. Emerging evidence indicates that Q-tRNA modification can influence codon decoding, translational speed, proteostasis, oxidative stress responses, and mitochondrial function, but direct evidence linking Q-tRNA dysregulation to PD remains limited. In this narrative review, we propose a conceptual and hypothesis-generating framework in which the microbiota-queuine-Q-tRNA modification axis may contribute to neuronal translational buffering and stress adaptation in PD. We distinguish established mechanisms, emerging evidence, and speculative links, emphasizing that the complete causal chain from exercise-induced microbiota remodeling to altered queuine availability, Q-tRNA modification, mitochondrial translational recalibration, and dopaminergic neuroprotection has not yet been experimentally demonstrated. We further discuss tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs) as candidate biomarkers and potential effector molecules in PD-associated translational stress, neuroinflammation, and intercellular RNA communication. Finally, we outline experimental priorities for validating this model, including direct Q-tRNA profiling in PD tissues and biofluids, exercise-intervention studies in PD models, microbiota/queuine manipulation, and mechanistic testing of circulating RNA carrier transport across the blood-brain barrier. This framework does not establish a new pathogenic pathway, but provides a structured roadmap for investigating how exercise, microbial metabolism, and RNA modification biology may converge on selective neuronal vulnerability in PD.
Phase 1 results reveal that BBM-P002, a dual-target gene therapy co-delivering TH and DDC, is safe and well tolerated in Parkinson’s disease, with 12-month motor improvements signaling therapeutic potential.
Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.
On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk.
The open-air venue was compact and decked out in bright blue, with a six-lane, 100-meter track down one side, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool down the other, and a weightlifting platform and stage at the front. You could see the golden façade of the Trump Hotel looming in the background. The scene had all the trappings of an NFL game, with the too-loud music and crowd work on the big screen—a “flex cam” gave the well-muscled an excuse to unveil their biceps. Between events, adverts flashed up for the line of performance products sold by Enhanced, the company behind the event: injectable peptides that supposedly support cellular energy and skin elasticity, daily supplement powders with names like “Stronger” and “Longer.”
SAEED RAHBARAN
SAEED RAHBARAN
Australian swimmer James Magnussen was the first athlete to sign up with Enhanced but hasn’t broken any world records. He finished last in his two events in Las Vegas.
The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”
At the bar, bodybuilders swapped before-and-after pictures and talked about their stacks, and VCs and finance bros traded LinkedIn details. Lukas Lakutsin, a 6-foot-10, 354-pound Russian bodybuilder who was milling around the entrance to the VIP suites, initially told me he didn’t use any performance-enhancing drugs. Except testosterone replacement therapy, of course. But he didn’t think that really counted. “I’m almost 34 years old,” he said. “I need to do this to stay strong.”
The “protocol” for Enhanced athletes only includes FDA-approved drugs. While Enhanced’s team might make recommendations, individuals have the final say on what they want to take, if anything.
SAEED RAHBARAN
Jeremy Sigal, an influencer and author, wore a USA tank top that showed off hugely muscled arms adorned with prison tattoos. He told me he was proudly natural, in both his health and his personal life. “I’ve got an exceptional credit score,” he said. He has written 12 books on marketing and leadership. Later, I looked up his most recent book online. It’s called Simp to Pimp: 10 Steps to Fix Why She’s Not Banging You and lists AI as a coauthor.
What I saw in Las Vegas probably wasn’t the future of sport. But it was a perfect encapsulation of our present moment, as Silicon Valley biohackers, alt-right looksmaxxers, Make America Healthy Again boosters, and longevity-obsessed scientists all vie to remake reality in their own image. For them, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future where medical advances push the human race to new heights, and where they never have to get old.
I’ve tracked Enhanced’s journey from a crazy idea scribbled on a napkin to a public company valued at $1.2 billion. Behind the scenes, there have been power struggles, life-changing victories, and moments of total farce. As I recently, finally, watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: Were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
In December 2022, the Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza flew to Miami to spend New Year’s Eve with his friend and mentor Peter Thiel. A decade earlier, D’Souza had helped Thiel orchestrate the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker—a stunning revenge against the gossipy New York media blog that had outed him as gay. Now he was armed with a disruptive idea that he thought Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, would love. It was inspired by the buff bodies he’d been seeing at the gym, highlighting a disconnect between a workout culture where the use of steroids was an open secret and a sporting establishment where it was, at least on paper, an inviolable taboo.
His initial pitch was provocative and confrontational: a grand sporting event to rival the Olympic Games, where competitors could take any substance they wanted—their body, their choice. The first time I met D’Souza, in the spring of 2024, he had founded the company and attracted some initial investment but seemed obsessed with taking on the fat cats at the International Olympic Committee and reinventing sports (even though he didn’t seem to be a huge sports fan himself). On Enhanced’s Discord server, I found a folder full of memes with names like IOC Clowns.jpg. The whole thing felt very unserious.
That would change.
D’Souza told me that Thiel had previously introduced him to Christian Angermayer, a German biotech billionaire, who would come onboard at Enhanced. He’s funded clinical trials of psychedelics through his company Atai Life Sciences and is helping bring them into the medical mainstream as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Angermayer says he spotted an opportunity to do the same thing for steroids. What he really wants is to redefine medicine, he told me. Its focus has already changed from treating disease to trying to prevent it; actively enhancing people’s health, he says, is just the next logical step.
By early 2024, Angermayer had brought his own people into key roles. The team included Michael Sagner, an anti-aging expert and private doctor who works with many of Hollywood’s leading men, and Max Martin, who has the jawline and cheekbones of an Instagram looksmaxxing influencer and the boundless enthusiasm of a puppy. (He started his own enhancement program a few years ago, when he was just 27.) Sagner would head up Enhanced’s medical commission, making sure the games were safe for the athletes. It was Martin’s job to make sure they actually happened.
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion. Christian Angermayer stands far right with Max Martin to his left (front row), and Aron D’Souza next to him.
LEV RADIN/ZUMA PRESS WIRE VIA ALAMY
Tensions sparked as D’Souza’s freewheeling style clashed with the more sensible image that Sagner and others were now keen to present. “It was not just his personality and his abrasive way of talking,” Sagner told me recently. “Even when he was briefed on a scientific fact, he would just completely ignore it and say something outrageous.”
But the more outrageous D’Souza got, the more attention his idea received. In February 2024, James Magnussen, a retired Australian swimmer, became the organization’s first official athlete, and Enhanced promised to pay a million dollars to him, or anyone else, who could break the world record in the 50-meter freestyle.
The notion of a “steroid olympics,” as many have dubbed the Enhanced Games, had been kicking around for decades—for instance, in a Wiredarticle from the early 2000s and an SNLsketch from the 1980s. Two things helped finally make the Enhanced Games a reality. First, in November 2024, Donald Trump was again elected president of the United States. The Biden administration had been actively hostile to the games, but the founders saw a more receptive political environment in Trump world. Not long after the election, Enhanced announced a new tranche of funding led by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr.
And second, in February 2025, an enhanced swimmer finished the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in human history. It wasn’t Magnussen, though. He had been injecting himself with testosterone to grow muscle, plus a cocktail of peptides that aimed to speed up recovery—but his journey hadn’t quite worked the way he’d planned.
A combination of reputational issues (no pools wanted to host his training) and physical complications (the regimen did help him get stronger, but he packed on so much muscle that it slowed him down in the water) meant he watched from the sidelines as the Bulgarian-Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev—who had finished fifth at the Paris Olympics in 2024—came in two-hundredths of a second under the record and won a million-dollar payout from Enhanced. The idea has always been that breaking records would effectively prove the legitimacy of this enhancement project: Look what we can do now.
Enhanced swimmers like Magnussen (right) wore supersuits to compete, though they’ve been banned by World Aquatics since 2010.
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Gkolomeev, though, had a different motivation for participating: “One successful year in the Enhanced Games and I could make as much as I would in almost 10 careers,” he told me not long after setting the new record (notably, wearing a kind of “supersuit” that’s been banned by World Aquatics since 2010). Enhanced was paying its athletes a regular salary, on top of any potential bonus. And he had a young family to support and feared that the four-year stretch to the next Olympics would be long and precarious.
In May 2025, with a world record in the bag and a friendly administration in the White House, Enhanced was ready to announce its first games: They’d take place in May 2026 at Resorts World in Las Vegas.
At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.
“The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds,” says Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. “From my perspective, this significantly changes the nature of the project. It is one thing to organize a closed sporting event built around controversial principles, but openly marketing and commercializing substances such as testosterone, hGH, GLP-1 drugs, peptides, and other pharmacological compounds is something else entirely.”
As the games approached, more athletes joined. Some were genuinely elite. The US sprinter Kerley—who is serving a two-year ban for missing three drug tests—had won silver in the 100 meters in the Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in Paris. Ben Proud, a British swimmer, had won silver at the Paris Olympics and dozens of medals at world and European championships and the Commonwealth Games. He had been mulling over joining the Enhanced Games ever since the idea first emerged, but the tipping point seemed to come when Gkolomeev’s record was announced.
Some participants, like Magnussen and another swimmer, Megan Romano, had been tempted out of retirement. Romano hadn’t swum competitively for almost a decade. Others were at the start of their careers but ready to cash in their chips and bid goodbye to Olympic dreams for a potential six-figure payday. The $1 million payouts were reserved for records in the two flagship events—the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter sprint—but winning any other event would mean a prize of $250,000, with an additional $250,000 bonus for setting a world record.
Athletes would get paid even if they just showed up and finished last—as much as $50,000. This is all on top of the salaries that stretched into six figures in some cases, making the payout from the games more than many athletes make in a year.
Sport’s governing bodies reacted to each new athlete announcement with fury. World Aquatics threatened to ban for life any athlete who participated in the games, even if they didn’t take any drugs. Enhanced responded with an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against the global swimming organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and USA Swimming, alleging misuse of monopoly power.
American Fred Kerley (right) won the 100-meter sprint without performance enhancing drugs.
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In November 2025, a court in New York dismissed the case. Three days later, D’Souza, the mind behind the entire project, was out. A notice on Enhanced’s website said he had “transitioned out of the company’s day-to-day operations.” Martin would take over as CEO. “The investors basically said we need someone a bit more serious,” Sagner told me. In conversations, execs at Enhanced played down any suggestion of a feud—D’Souza was simply the ideas man, with little interest in the day-to-day dreariness of actually running a company. (Enhanced spokesperson Chris Jones wrote in a statement that “there is no tension between Aron and Enhanced that I’m aware of.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)
I got the sense that Enhanced, in its new iteration as a pharmaceutical subscription company, was almost embarrassed by the games. When I visited enhanced.com a couple of months before the event, they had been relegated to a sub-heading on the home page. D’Souza’s showmanship had helped get attention for what was becoming a run-of-the-mill telehealth business like Hims & Hers—albeit one well timed to take advantage of a shifting regulatory landscape around peptides, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services, has been pushing the FDA to approve despite a lack of evidence that they’re actually effective.
Sagner is still loosely involved with Enhanced, but he says the medical commission was not consulted before it launched its line of performance products. (Jones did not respond to a question regarding this claim.) Sagner is scathing about what he sees as the “hype” around peptides. “I can tell you already, peptides do nothing,” he says—with the exception of human growth hormone and GLP-1. “The peptides that people use, black-market peptides that they buy online—they do nothing. We have tested them; 80% of them contain nothing. It’s saline solution, salt water, and some of them are contaminated.”
At the end of January 2026, a group of around 40 swimmers, weightlifters, and sprinters arrived in Abu Dhabi to start their individualized enhancement “protocol,” as Enhanced calls it. Officially, they would be taking part in a clinical trial, pending approval by the Abu Dhabi government and overseen by Guido Pieles, a Qatar-based cardiologist who has taken over the reins of Enhanced’s medical commission from Sagner.
The day started with the weightlifters, but by late afternoon, only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift.
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They would be allowed to choose only from a menu of specific FDA-approved drugs. Pieles broke them down into five categories: testosterone variants and growth hormones, which can both boost muscle mass; metabolic modulators that can tweak how the body burns fat; stimulants like Adderall to improve focus; and EPO, which can increase the amount of oxygen the blood is able to carry. While Enhanced’s team might recommend particular things, the athletes would have the final say on what they wanted to take, if anything. (As Oslo University’s Bjørnebekk points out, FDA approval “does not mean the substances are inherently safe, particularly not when used for enhancement purposes.”)
There would be regular blood tests, heart scans, and brain scans and access to the best training facilities money could buy. Pieles and others say the clinical trial will help inform the line of supplements Enhanced is offering consumers, but there’s actually very little overlap between the drugs the athletes were taking and the substances the company is currently selling.
Not long after they arrived in the Middle East, the athletes were awakened by the sound of explosions at a military base near their hotel. The US and Israel had struck Iran, and the Iranian regime was responding by peppering the region with missiles. “It wasn’t a pleasant situation,” says Andrii Govorov, the world record holder in the 50-meter butterfly, who a year earlier had become one of the first swimmers to join Enhanced. Govorov had some experience in these matters—back in Ukraine, he’d had a business selling cars that helped fund his swimming career, but he’d lost it after the Russian invasion.
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Swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting were the focus of the first Enhanced Games but in many ways the sports were the sideshow.
The conflict exacerbated delays in getting approval for the clinical trial and sourcing the drugs, and as a result, what was supposed to be a 12-week enhancement protocol got cut down to eight weeks. The athletes didn’t actually start taking the drugs until toward the end of March. For those who had always been clean, that represented the irreversible crossing of a line. “The first injection was very emotional, very tricky to navigate,” says Proud. “For me, that was the day I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.”
Proud was joined in the enhancement program by his girlfriend, Emily Barclay, who had swum at college level without ever appearing at a major international event; she was working as a swimming teacher at a school in England. After that first injection, they left Abu Dhabi and spent a few days in Dubai as they reckoned with what they had done. “I just couldn’t be around the team,” Proud says. “I wanted to be by myself and feel those feelings, because it is a big deal to make that step, and I felt it.”
Those feelings were soon forgotten, though, as the drugs kicked in. Proud says he had incredible energy, and a drive to train that he hadn’t experienced before. Shania Collins, an American sprinter, says she had “increased strength, increased recovery, and increased mental clarity at practice.” Sagner and several athletes admitted there were some side effects: acne and some swelling around the joints; unwanted hair growth for the women, unwanted hair loss for the men.
Like Kerley, sprinter Tristan Evelyn from Barbados competed without taking any drugs. She too won big in Vegas, besting her Enhanced peers in two events.
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One thing the athletes wouldn’t talk about, though, is what drugs they were actually taking. They all had the same reason: not wanting to encourage copycats who might take enhancements without a doctor on hand to tailor programs to their needs.
The one exception was Thor Björnsson (testosterone, deca-durabolin, anastrozole, halotestin), a hulking Icelandic deadlifter and former World’s Strongest Man who played The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Björnsson first heard about the games on Joe Rogan’s podcast and was immediately interested. The rules for strongman competitions are somewhat less stringent than those for Olympic sports, though, and he actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
Icelandic strongman Thor Björnsson actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
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There is some debate over how much doping some of the athletes were actually doing. In a conversation last year, Gkolomeev told me he’d only really been “microdosing,” and he confirmed that his 2026 enhancement program was largely the same. Sagner says the doses the athletes were taking were a fraction of the amounts some Olympic athletes had been caught using in the past. I heard that a few athletes had decided not to take steroids or growth hormones and were only using modafinil, a narcolepsy medication that’s thought to improve focus.
The day before the games, I asked Angermayer what it would mean if clean athletes like Kerley and Armstrong won their events—what impact it would have on Enhanced’s business model of using sports as a showcase for its line of performance products if the people using those products didn’t actually win anything. “I know what you mean, but mostly our business model is headlines to drive attention,” he said. “Any debate is good for us.”
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion.
That same week, it was finally go time. The athletes and coaches left Abu Dhabi and flew to Las Vegas, where they were put up in five-star luxury at the Conrad hotel inside Resorts World while they made their final preparations.
When I got there a few weeks later, toward the end of May, I found it jarring to see these hulking presences walking around the casino in their Enhanced sportswear, weaving their way through packs of half-drunk tourists, with slot machines flashing in the background and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I had expected the games to be a bigger deal within the city itself, but they were just one of a thousand things happening in Vegas that weekend—drowned out by a series of BTS shows at the football stadium, by the Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs, by No Doubt’s residency at the Sphere.
If this was a sporting earthquake, it was one whose tremors were mainly being felt online, where bodybuilding influencers livestreamed to their followers on Kick and Twitch, and where thousands watched on YouTube and Rumble. (D’Souza once told me he’d had “every major sports broadcaster” vying for the rights; in the end, Enhanced struck an exclusive streaming deal with Roku in the US.)
No tickets were sold, so the crowd was a mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in on a chartered jet.
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On the morning of the games, Enhanced held a medical symposium that was supposed to provide a taste of the company’s long-term objectives. The first speaker was Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed entrepreneur famous for plowing his personal fortune into wild attempts to reverse his aging: receiving transfusions of his teenage son’s plasma, measuring his nighttime erections, taking more than 100 supplement pills a day. He spends $2 million per year on all this, but he looked pale and vampiric as he delivered the slightly off-brand message that, really, the most important thing was getting a good night’s sleep: “You don’t need to chase IV infusions; you don’t need to chase crystals. You don’t really need to do much of anything.”
At 2 p.m., I took two escalators from the conference room down to the arena, where spectators were filtering in. Though it had cost $50 million, it had been constructed in just three and a half weeks, and it showed; on the media tour the previous day, there were still loose screws on the floor of the bleachers.
There were a few thousand seats in an open grandstand down one side, and two rows of VIP suites on the other. No tickets were sold, so it was a strange mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet. The rapper Tyga was the biggest name to grace the “blue carpet,” although I did also spot Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger. Rumors swirled that Peter Thiel might show up; they proved unfounded.
In attendance was Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger.
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A few hours before the doors opened, journalists got a stern message from the organizers trying to bar us from interviewing guests. Still, I talked to a Cambridge professor who wanted to use Enhanced as a case study in innovation for his MBA students, a retired Brazilian swimmer with the Olympic rings tattooed on his forearm, and a biotech investor wearing an Enron hat. Proud’s family and friends were sheltered from the blazing sun in the shadow of the big screen.
D’Souza was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he really mentioned at all—not during the introductory press conference, where Martin was introduced as the “founder of the Enhanced Games,” nor during the event itself, where the athletes showered praise on Angermayer and Martin. But the tens of millions D’Souza had banked from the stock listing likely softened any blow. Plus, he’s already moved on to his next provocative venture: an AI-powered arbitration platform designed to scrutinize the work of journalists on behalf of the rich and powerful.
As the sun set behind the hills, casting the arena in soft gold light, there were still no world records. That and the wins for clean athletes seemed to put the whole Enhanced project in jeopardy—the knives were already being sharpened online. I asked the organizers whether this threatened the legitimacy of the project.
German swimmer Marius Kusch was among the dozen or so athletes who hit personal bests in Vegas.
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“Our response is that enhancements help athletes improve and, in some cases, break records. And yes, some non-enhanced athletes also won—because talent and ability also matter,” Enhanced’s Jones emailed last week. “Breaking world records is incredibly hard as the margin is infinitesimal, as we witnessed. Ignoring that 13 athletes some of whom 10 years later broke personal bests is disingenuous and selective reporting.”
Megan Romano was one of them, swimming faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she had at 22. And Emily Barclay knocked two seconds off her fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle, coming in second in that event and winning the 50-meter freestyle; she went home with a check for $375,000. “No one’s ever heard of this girl,” said Enhanced swim coach Brett Hawke afterwards. “She’s retired; she’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims a time that would have got a bronze medal in Paris.” For all the talk of “superhumanity” and pushing the boundaries of performance, making a 35-year-old feel 22 again is probably the perfect marketing message for the products Enhanced wants to sell.
Angermayer cheers on swimmer Megan Romano, who swam faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she did at 22.
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Enhanced’s executives say people should take enhancements only with medical supervision, but price could be a barrier to heeding that advice. The battery of health tests the company was giving its athletes in the run-up to the games cost $25,000 per athlete per month. The drugs themselves start at $75 a month and go up toward $200. While Jones says the products “are in line with industry price points,” there were almost certainly people watching who saw the drug-altered physiques of athletes like Gkolomeev or Magnussen and decided to find cheaper, less safe alternatives on unlicensed websites.
“Many of these substances require medical supervision and prescriptions, and several are associated with potentially serious long-term health consequences,” says Bjørnebekk. “Presenting them in this lifestyle-oriented and commercial format risks normalizing use while downplaying the medical risks and uncertainties.”
Although his world record-breaking time won’t stand as the official record, swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev will walk away from the Enhanced Games with a million dollar prize in the 50-meter freestyle.
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Before the night was over, Gkolomeev again had the chance to right the Enhanced ship. The final event of the night was the men’s 50-meter freestyle swim. His 2025 time had been surpassed by the Australian swimmer Cam McEvoy (without a supersuit) at the China Swimming Open a couple of months before, so he needed to lose another two-hundredths of a second to beat the new record of 20.88 seconds.
Gkolomeev was wearing the same supersuit he’d used the previous year, and he’d shaved off his mustache for a little extra streamlining. But he messed up his start—doing four kicks instead of five—and was trailing Proud at the halfway mark. His long arms levered him forward, though, and he reached the wall in 20.81. The spectators were on their feet as “WORLD RECORD” flashed red on the big screen. Martin vaulted over the glass partition from the VIP suites, beaming, to embrace Gkolomeev. They had their record.
Or did they? Online, people shared screenshots from the video feed, purporting to show that the clock had stopped before Gkolomeev’s hand touched the pressure sensor at the end of the pool. An Enhanced spokesperson gave a statement to the Guardian dismissing this as “completely unfounded internet drivel.” But hey—live by the sword, die by the sword. It’s quite possible Gkolomeev didn’t care. He had another million in the bank.
It remains to be seen if it’ll work out so well for the other athletes. Enhanced organizers recently announced a prize of $10 million for anyone who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in 2027. They are adamant that the games will happen again next year. If they don’t, dozens of sporting careers will be over, and the athletes will join the long list of victims of VC-backed disruption.
My personal prediction is that Enhanced will pivot away from the risk and uncertainty of a flagship event—the company’s valuation plunged by almost $800 million when markets opened after what was perceived as an underwhelming set of results in Vegas. I expect you’ll see individual stunts and challenges, tightly controlled and filmed for virality and probably featuring your favorite YouTubers—think Björnsson bench-pressing Jake Paul.
D’Souza’s initial idea has served its purpose by capturing the world’s attention. But that won’t necessarily translate into success either. Though the company has had plenty of hype over the last 12 months, SEC filings published as part of its stock exchange listing reveal that it generated only $2,755 in revenue from its enhancements business in the first three months of 2026. Would what happened in Vegas be enough to juice sales?
Martin, Enhanced’s CEO, cheers on athletes from the stands. Company leadership insists the competition will take place again next year.
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As the athletes gathered on the stage to receive their prizes, Martin took the microphone and addressed the crowd. “Enhanced is culture,” he said. “We are at the pulse of where the world is going.” On this, at least, he’s probably right. Testosterone replacement therapy is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and while the science may still not be there on peptides, they have certainly exploded in popularity in the two years since Enhanced launched. And there are undoubtedly more substances yet to be discovered that will promise to improve people’s lives, or at least hold their appearance in stasis. The enhanced age is upon us, whether we want it or not.
As the fireworks went off and the Killersclosed out the event with “When You Were Young” (“Congratulations to … whoever deserves it,” said frontman Brandon Flowers), I wondered what that might mean for us mere mortals. Invoking Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a story about drugs and Las Vegas may be a cliché, but it struck me that fear played a big part in all of this. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of never making a dime on your life’s pursuit. Fear of waking up one morning and seeing your flabby, sunken face in the mirror while everyone around you shines and grins and thrives with white-toothed, alien smiles.
Before joining Enhanced, Romano had not swum competitively in almost a decade.
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But the big problem with Enhanced’s vision of superhumanity is the question of who gets to join in. “People will be able to enhance themselves if they have enough money,” Sagner had told me the night before the games. The rest of us, I fear, will just have to function as normal human beings.
Amit Katwala is a journalist and author covering science, culture, and where they collide. His latest book is Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based in London.
