Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 20 January 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 January 2026.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); George Freeman; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Samantha Niblett; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Martin Wrigley; Daniel Zeichner.
Questions 47 - 48
Witness
I: John Hemming, Representative, Biohacking to Improve Everyone’s Health Team.
Witness: John Hemming.
Chair: Welcome to today’s innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, we select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session every week. Martin Wrigley suggested this week’s innovator, who is from the controversial but fast-growing field of biohacking. I hand over to Martin to introduce him.
Q47 Martin Wrigley: Thank you, Chair. I have always had difficulty with the idea of planning and formally structured innovation. Most of my experience in big business has proved it to be less fruitful than hoped. We know that many innovations and discoveries come from unusual beginnings, be that super glue, bubble wrap, Post-it notes or even penicillin. Sometimes, we see highly unorthodox work, such as that of Professor Kevin Warwick putting silicon chips in his own arm.
I recall a conversation as a teenager with a friend who was in the school computer club with me—yes, of course I was in the school computer club. Long before PCs or home computers, we had a very early computer in the school. My friend said he wanted to write a program to predict the next word in a sentence. Now, this seemed utterly impossible, and orthodox thinking said so.
Fast forward to 20 years ago, some years before the iPhone, I found myself working on App Store roll-outs for Orange across Europe with a former university friend and colleague, Ronjon Nag. Ronjon had made his first fortune by selling the SMS text prediction software to Motorola, and settled down as a Silicon Valley tech investigator. Today, we have generative AI systems that predict complete speeches, so how wrong were we when I was a teenager?
Working with Ronjon, he told me what he was looking at next: ageing and biohacking. Since then, I have followed with fascination the efforts of a good number of former tech entrepreneurs who have joined in the longevity search. While many longevity investigations use unorthodox ideas and testing methods, I wonder how we balance thinking-out-of-the-box innovations with academic orthodoxy, and of course consumer safety. Over the weekend I was listening to Currently, Inside ARIA on Radio 4, about the beginnings of ARIA, which also brought this to mind.
My innovator this week is John Hemming. John has a been a serial tech entrepreneur in the UK, with several very successful and innovative companies under his belt. We got talking about his latest project in biohacking, and while the Committee may not support his unorthodox techniques, I wanted to explore his mindset that clearly follows a significant Silicon Valley trend. Over to you, John.
John Hemming: Thank you. I am 65 and have a track record in innovation. In 1983, I created John Hemming & Co, which became JHC Systems Ltd, a software house, the product of which at one point was responsible for processing about 10% of UK equity trades. This we sold in 2019. In 1994, I launched a number of businesses on the internet under the heading of MarketNet. More recently, I have created Cirrostratus Exedra, a provider of MTD software, and, together with Samuel Collingwood Smith, On Time Under Budget Al Limited. Unsurprisingly, this is an Al business.
I am here today to present Hemming Biohacking, a business that works to develop small molecule interventions that provide a cost-effective way of improving health.
My academic scientific background was a scholarship in natural science at Magdalen College, Oxford, where I specialised in atomic, nuclear and theoretical physics. I moved into commerce after my first degree; I do not have a second degree.
I am criticised because a lot of the experimental work I do is self-experimentation. However, Werner Forssmann, Barry Marshall and Ralph Steinman are among people who have won the Nobel prize as a result of self-experimentation and it has a solid track record of getting replicable results. In the end, replicability is the key scientific test.
Oddly enough, the first publication I had in a peer-reviewed journal was in November 2025, when I was a junior co-author of a paper entitled “Open problems in ageing science: a roadmap for biogerontology”, which was published in GeroScience. My part in this concentrated on mitochondrial function.
The underlying scientific thesis behind the company is one I presented at Imperial College also in November 2025 at a conference entitled “Emerging Technologies for Healthy Ageing in the Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases”. My presentation was entitled “Ageing a feature, not a bug, of evolutionary software, arguments for acetylation being upstream of methylation”.
The time is not available to go into all the details of the molecular biology behind this. I have a website called citrate.science and a YouTube channel unsurprisingly called John Hemming, which have further details for anyone interested. I am happy to do further presentations and answer any questions if that is useful. Obviously, I know I am not answering questions here.
The principle, however, is that within the nucleus of the cell there are splicing factors, histones and other proteins. By adding and removing acetyl groups to those proteins, there are changes to gene expression. The process of adding an acetyl group is called acetylation.
What is interesting is that there are small molecules with a size of under 1 kilodalton that can be used to intervene in those pathways. These have well-known safety profiles and it is essentially a question of managing the combinatory effect to improve health and wellbeing.
A good example of how food can change gene expression is how royal jelly changes the gene expression of bees so that the queen is the queen only because she eats royal jelly.
Around the world, many organisations are working out how to handle the diseases of ageing. At this stage, I cannot be certain how much progress we have made, but, given the nature of the geroscience hypothesis, it looks like a useful pathway to adopt.
Interestingly, the main source of citrate in cells comes from mitochondria via a transport protein called the citrate carrier. It is quite interesting how the translocation of the ATP citrate lyase enzyme to the nucleus effectively maintains a separate pool of nuclear acetyl-CoA to maintain the acetylation of nuclear proteins. This, then, is linked to the state of the mitochondrial DNA, as the membrane potential is reduced by the damage to the mitochondrial DNA which occurs gradually over time. Interestingly, therefore, it is possible—we do not have time to go into the details—to see how this links to both neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders as these are, at least in part, driven by the mitochondrial issue. Similarly, fertility is affected by mitochondria as the process of follicular atresia can only go so far in terms of maintaining mitochondrial quality.
Using small molecules has the advantage of there normally being a known safety profile. They are also not that expensive as they are often molecules found as part of food and the normal metabolism. This is useful to the end user. However, it raises a problem in that the essential absence of IP rights—although I have some patent applications going through the system—limits the availability of funds for complex regulatory processes.
If the regulatory system was focused on safety and less concerned about the potential risks of expensive urine, then more progress could be made with small molecules.
On the other hand, as there is a global market, it does not prevent progress being made in other markets and that can then feed back to the UK at a later stage. I am in discussions with potential partners in various global regions about launching outside the UK. Thank you for hearing me.
Chair: Thank you very much, John. It is good to hear different and indeed unorthodox voices in this important area of ageing. We know that this is something of great interest to many groups around the world, in particular in Silicon Valley. Martin, would you like to close?
Martin Wrigley: Well, most of the science goes completely and utterly over my head. I think it is fascinating. The old axiom, “You are what you eat,” clearly has something to it.
Chair: Thank you.
Q48 Dr Gardner: I have a very quick thing to say. My master’s and PhD were on ageing and neurodegenerative diseases, so I did follow the science. I am quite interested to read up on it and I can see that Lauren feels similarly.
John Hemming: I know some of you follow the science because I looked up your CVs. Parliament has got a bit more scientific since I was here, which is good—but only a bit!
Dr Gardner: A copy of your speech would be lovely.
Chair: We will share it with members.
John Hemming: I will just leave it here.
Chair: We will share the contacts so that others can get in touch.
John Hemming: If you don’t mind me saying, look up the website citrate.science. I have my posters from 2024 and 2025 there. I am very happy to come along on another occasion to discuss things, in either a formal or informal session. There is no difficulty there at all.
Chair: Thank you very much, John Hemming.