pig brains and Austrian pharmacology
1949-1954
The "brain drug" that longevity influencer Bryan Johnson injected on camera in 2024, sending it viral among biohackers, is at its chemical core a 1950s soup of enzymatically digested pig brains.
Cerebrolysin's inventor didn't stumble onto it by lucky accident — the more remarkable thing is that his career sailed through 1945 completely intact. Gerhart Harrer (1917–2011), an Innsbruck-born neurologist and psychiatrist, had joined the Nazi Students' League as a teenager in 1932, enlisted in the Vienna SS (Standarte 89, part of the milieu behind the 1934 Dollfuß putsch), and belonged to an SS study group at the University of Vienna devoted to 'racial hygiene.' After the war, a Social Democratic politician helped smooth his denazification, and by 1947 he was quietly back on staff at the University of Innsbruck's psychiatric clinic.
It was there, around 1949, that Harrer began tinkering with an extract made by digesting pig brains — centrifuged, hydrolyzed with enzymes, then quenched with sodium hydroxide to stop the reaction. He was refreshingly plain about what it was: not a miracle biologic but 'an amino acid mixture containing all biologically important amino acids,' and his own 1959 analysis pegged the dried powder at roughly 57% amino acids, the rest phosphates and salts. First published and approved in Austria in 1954, it was tried on comatose patients and head-trauma soldiers, with early reports of faster waking that were entirely uncontrolled.
Then the marketing outran the chemistry. Decades later, with no disclosed change to the recipe, Cerebrolysin's promotional language quietly upgraded from 'amino acid combination' to a wish-list of prized growth factors — BDNF, GDNF, NGF — the vocabulary of modern neuroscience bolted onto a 1950s product. The one rigorous independent analysis, a 2015 mass-spectrometry study by Gevaert and colleagues, cataloged 638 unique peptide fragments in commercial vials, but they traced to ordinary structural proteins like actin, tubulin, and myelin basic protein, with no fragments of the famous factors (BDNF, GDNF, NGF, CNTF). The authors did wonder whether some leftovers might be unknown 'cryptic peptides,' yet the marquee ingredients on the label simply weren't there.
The strangest chapter came in 2024, when longevity influencer Bryan Johnson filmed himself injecting the obscure Eastern-European stroke drug and racked up over a million views, yanking it overnight into Western biohacker culture. Scientists pushed back that the mechanism was biologically implausible; Johnson countered that 'our understanding of how the brain absorbs medications is emergent.'
Nearly all of this holds up — Harrer's SS and Nazi-party past, the digested-pig-brain origin, the later growth-factor marketing drift, and the modern misconduct scandal all independently check out. The one embellishment: he wasn't a "Waffen-SS volunteer" — he belonged to the earlier political (general) SS, and the only Waffen-SS link on record is a 1943 transfer order he actually tried to dodge.
Cerebrolysin is still a prescription drug — used for stroke, vascular dementia, and traumatic brain injury, and made by EVER Neuro Pharma in Austria — but almost entirely across Russia, Eastern Europe, China, and other Asian markets; it has never won FDA approval and remains a gray-market curiosity in the US and Western Europe, reachable mostly through import or online vendors. Its evidence base is genuinely contested: a 2023 Cochrane review in acute stroke found no survival benefit and more serious adverse events, while its vascular-dementia review saw only weak, high-bias-risk hints of cognitive help. And a 2024 research-integrity investigation flagged widespread image manipulation and fabrication across a cluster of Cerebrolysin studies — so the biohacker revival arrived just as much of the drug's published "evidence" was falling under a cloud.
