Biohacker Bryan Johnson is keeping his girlfriend’s menstrual blood in his freezer | Arwa Mahdawi

The tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has devoted his life to dodging death. The 48-year-old is obsessed with becoming the healthiest person in the world and is on a quixotic quest to reverse his biological age and live forever. As such, Johnson is disciplined about what he eats, takes dozens of supplements a day, and measures every single biomarker possible, boasting that he is “certainly the most biologically measured person ever”.

In short: good luck finding any ice cream in his freezer. But you know what you will find? His girlfriend’s menstrual blood. On Thursday, Johnson, a chronic oversharer, posted a photo of his 30-year-old girlfriend, Kate Tolo, on X with the caption: “Kate’s period blood is in my -80 °C freezer. Around 10 mL.”

This isn’t the first time Johnson has collected a loved one’s bodily fluids: a few years ago he boasted about infusing himself with a liter of his “blood boy’s” plasma. What in God’s name is a blood boy? Oh, that’s just what Johnson calls his son Talmage, who was 17 at the time. Johnson also donated a liter of his own blood to his own father.

This also isn’t the first time Johnson has taken it upon himself to share personal information about his loved ones on the internet. Last year, he posted data comparing his and his teenage son’s nocturnal erection metrics. “Nighttime erection data from my 19-year-old son ... and me,” he wrote on X, tagging Talmage. “His duration is two minutes longer than mine. Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright.”

Once we’ve all taken a moment to recover from that, we can move on to the menstrual blood in the freezer. What is Johnson planning to do with it? Study it, apparently. “Menstrual blood is valuable and underutilized … It’s a non-invasive look into the uterus,” Johnson explained on X. Tolo and Johnson intend to examine the blood for everything from endocrine disruptors to microplastics. “I like that Kate is a science experiment with me,” he added.

OK. But does she like it? Well, she hasn’t said she doesn’t. Rather she replied to his post with a message saying: “Thanks for looking after me bby.”

Tolo hasn’t just given a one-off blood sample. Johnson has said that she is collecting “14 million data points on her menstrual cycle”, which he touts as a “world first for female health”. Her protocol involves “100+ tasks a day” and “50+ devices”, all of which is being monitored by a “12 person medical team”. Tolo has to take regular urine samples, swallow a temperature pill, and blow into a metabolism tracker. At exactly 9.42 pm, he writes, she has to “insert techno tampon device”. When the Independent asked for more information about the techno tampon, Johnson said: “We will be sharing more on that soon.”

Tolo has done some sharing of her own. In mid-July, she was featured in a Wall Street Journal piece titled: “Bryan Johnson’s girlfriend wants to share her body with the world,” where she explained that she’s doing all this data-tracking for the good of womankind. “I’m really doing it because I think that this is our path toward women being understood in the world and being seen,” Tolo told the Journal. On a personal level, Tolo has said she has polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, and is hoping to find treatments that might help her symptoms. Helping her out with that is the famous techno tampon: the Journal’s piece features a photo of Tolo looking very intently at a small tampon-shaped device which will track her blood-flow variations.

As Johnson has said: “Women are not well understood medically.” It wasn’t until 1993, when US Congress passed a law requiring that women and minorities be included in clinical research, that we began to be properly represented in medical trials. Menstruation has also been understudied. Indeed, until 2023 there hadn’t been a published study testing period products like tampons using human blood. They’d used saline solution instead. This sort of “medical misogyny” has impacted the quality of care that women get, and resulted in women’s pain not being taken as seriously as men’s.

In many ways, then, Johnson and Tolo’s new women’s health initiative is to be applauded. It’s helping break down the stigma attached to menstruation, and it’s raising awareness about women’s health.

All that said, I think a smidgen of skepticism is warranted. It’s important to remember that Tolo (who has a background in fashion) and Johnson (whose background is in tech) are not exactly highly credentialled medical researchers. They own a company called Immortals that sells supplements. And guess what? According to the Journal: “The company is on the verge of launching products for women.” Which makes all of this feel a lot like a marketing campaign. I don’t know if the techno tampon will end up being a giant step forward for womankind, but it might well provide a healthy boost to the Immortals balance sheet.

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The week in pawtriarchy

The Trump administration has slashed environmental research funding, meaning cash-strapped scientists are having to get creative. Enter an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms, promising “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies!” While OnlyFans is known for risqué content, you’ll be glad to hear this is G-rated. “We’re not trying to sexualize marmots,” the marmot researcher Daniel Blumstein said. “Although I was just at an international conference and three people came up to me and said: ‘Oh, you have to have more pictures of Marmot feet.’” So far the site has only raised about $3,000, but let’s hope it builds marmentum.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist