Better Living Through Science, Technology & Nature

Opening Remarks

Hannes Sjoblad (SWE) Human Augmentation Activist, Co-Founder @ BioNyfiken, the Swedish Biohackers Association As the co-founder of Bionyfiken, Hannes unites DIY-biologists, hackers, makers, body modification artists and health and performance devotees. Hannes work and insights into near- and in-body technology has been internationally recognised by among others Wired, Motherboard, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, CNN, BBC, Daily Mail, Le Figaro, Nouvel Observateur, Heise and others. His vision is that in the future the human body has radically different capabilities than it does today. Teemu Arina (FI) Curator @ Biohacker Summit, Author @Biohacker’s Handbook Teemu Arina has a professional career of over 15 years as a technology entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is one of the forefront thinkers on the intersection of the human and the machine, social media, digital work and online learning. He is a Leonardo Award laureate under the patronage of European Parliament for "Humanity in Digitization". Mr. Arina is the founder of three award winning technology companies, co-founder of Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook for optimizing health and wellbeing with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is a popular keynote speaker who has presented internationally in countries such as USA, UK, Japan, Hongkong, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany.

This talk explores better living through science, technology, and nature, emphasizing that

Biohacking is better living through science, technology, and nature. Our biology is the technology; we are already technology. Through systems thinking, we can optimize this system and take our performance and well-being to a completely new level.

Summary

- Biohacking is defined as better living through science, technology, and nature, treating human biology as a complex technological system that can be optimized for health and performance.

- Understanding the human body requires a systems-thinking approach that accounts for atoms, microorganisms, environment, and evolutionary history to influence epigenetics and longevity.

- True optimization requires balancing activity with recovery; activating the parasympathetic nervous system through rest is essential for maintaining immunity, creativity, and focus.

- Quantified self-tracking using sensors and data creates a feedback loop that allows for faster learning and a better understanding of individual biological responses to various stimuli.

- Biohacking focus should be on behavioral patterns and routines, identifying and repeating beneficial habits while eliminating detrimental ones to resolve specific health or performance issues.

Article

Biohacking’s Promise Was Bigger Than Gadgets

At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Hannes Sjoblad And Teemu Arina Framed Human Optimisation As A Return To Biology, Not An Escape From It

The opening remarks at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm** began with a small comic failure of technology. Slides misbehaved, monitors faltered, the clicker hesitated. It was an apt prelude to a talk titled **Better Living Through Science, Technology & Nature**, because the central argument, delivered by **Hannes Sjoblad** and **Teemu Arina**, was that the most important technology in the room was not on the stage at all. It was the human body.

That was the provocation at the heart of the event in **Stockholm, Sweden, on 19 May 2017**. Biohacking, Europe’s largest conference of its kind argued, was not merely about devices, wearables or sleek dashboards of data. It was about seeing the self as a living system, layered with cells, microbes, signals, habits and histories, and then learning how to work with that system rather than against it.

In a culture mesmerised by metrics, the opening session offered a subtler claim. The point of optimisation was not endless monitoring. It was fluency. It was not the worship of tools, but the possibility of outgrowing them.

A Movement That Sought To Scale Up

Arina, curator of the summit and co-author of the *Biohacker’s Handbook*, used the opening to mark the summit’s rapid rise. What had begun as a niche gathering had, he said, grown steadily into the largest biohacking conference in Europe, perhaps even Eurasia, doubling in size year by year. Helsinki remained its anchor, but Stockholm was its latest satellite expression after London, with future expansion already in view.

There was, in his remarks, the tone of a movement taking stock of itself. Sponsors, exhibitors and international speakers were thanked, but the deeper subtext was that biohacking had moved from the margins toward a more public legitimacy. The room was no longer filled only with tinkerers and obsessives. It was populated by entrepreneurs, wellness seekers, quantified-self devotees and the merely curious, all drawn by the same suspicion that modern life had made people both more informed and less embodied.

The summit’s language reflected that tension. It celebrated DNA testing, biometric shirts, rings that tracked sleep and temperature, and heart rate analytics sophisticated enough to map stress and recovery. Yet it also praised foraging, wild foods, circadian rhythm and the need to stop living as though every waking hour were an emergency.

The Body As A System, Not A Machine Part

The strongest idea in the session was also the oldest. To understand health, Sjoblad argued, it was not enough to isolate a symptom or a single organ system. One had to look both deeper and wider.

Biohacking, in this account, meant recognising the body as a complex system built from atoms into molecules, cells, tissues and organs, but also shaped by its microbial passengers, ecological surroundings and evolutionary inheritance. It was an attempt to replace reductionism with systems thinking.

“The DNA affecting who you are and what you think is not just your own code of life, but also the code of life in the bacteria that lives in your gut,” the audience was told.

That line was more than rhetorical flourish. It captured a worldview now familiar in frontier health circles but still startling in its implications. The self was not singular. Human identity, even thought itself, was entangled with the microbiome, that invisible population of organisms living in and on the body. The individual was recast as an ecosystem.

Sjoblad pushed the idea further, insisting that what people absorbed from the world mattered at least as much as what they consumed. Food was not static fuel. It was a chain of transformations stretching from oceans and phytoplankton to plate and bloodstream. To eat was to participate in an ancient biological relay.

Star Stuff, Mushrooms And The Strange Humility Of Optimisation

There was a curious grandeur to the language of the session, and that grandeur served a purpose. Invoking Carl Sagan, the speakers reminded the audience that “we are made out of star stuff”. The phrase, often overused elsewhere, felt here like a check against the vanity that can creep into self-optimisation culture. If biohacking promised mastery, it also demanded humility.

The point was not only cosmic. It was molecular. Cells divide, tissues renew, and the person standing before the mirror is never biologically fixed. “Whatever experiments you do to influence your epigenetics is creating a new version of yourself,” the audience heard.

This was the summit’s more philosophical turn. Biohacking was not presented as a cynical productivity scheme, nor solely as a path to aesthetics or endurance. It was framed as a way of participating consciously in one’s own becoming. The body was not a sealed inheritance but an ongoing negotiation between genes, environment and behaviour.

Even the more playful claim that humans are “sixty per cent portobello” carried that same destabilising message. We are closer to our food chain than our egos would like to believe.

The Forgotten Virtue Of Recovery

If the summit had a corrective theme, it was recovery. In a market saturated with advice on performance, stimulation and output, the speakers insisted that restoration was not a luxury but a biological necessity.

The talk drew on data from heart rate monitoring to show the cost of prolonged sympathetic activation, the state associated with stress, vigilance and fight or flight. Too much of it, sustained over time, did not make a person sharper. It eroded immunity, compressed creativity and narrowed the body’s ability to learn.

By contrast, parasympathetic activation, the state linked to rest and digestion, was described as the condition in which cognition could broaden and insight could emerge. In that framing, calm was not idleness. It was a productive biological mode in its own right.

This was one of the event’s quietest but most important interventions. Modernity has trained people to see fatigue as a moral weakness and stillness as wasted time. The opening session suggested the opposite. A life of uninterrupted activation was not high performance. It was systemic imbalance.

The Quantified Self As A Mirror

The summit naturally returned, again and again, to data. There were biometric shirts, DNA analysis, blood tests, sleep rings and recovery dashboards. But the speakers were careful to describe these not as ends in themselves, but as instruments of reflection.

“The system is you,” the audience was told. “The faster the feedback loops, the faster the learning. That is the key to quantified self.”

That sentence distilled the event’s technological optimism. Sensors could accelerate understanding by making the invisible visible. They could show what stress felt like in numbers, what poor sleep looked like in patterns, what recovery required in practice. Data could shorten the distance between action and consequence.

Yet there was restraint in the argument too. Tools were useful because people had become estranged from their own rhythms. Devices helped adults relearn what modern life had dulled: how to sleep, breathe, eat, rest and notice.

This was perhaps the opening session’s most resonant paradox. The future of self-knowledge, the summit suggested, might pass through gadgets only to arrive back at intuition.

Beyond The Device

“The ultimate mastery of quantified self is to let go of the tools,” the speakers said. “You don’t need them anymore because you feel it and you know it. You become a Zen master.”

The line drew laughter, but it also carried the session’s deepest challenge. Technology could reveal patterns, but mastery meant embodiment. The mature biohacker was not the person with the most sensors. It was the person who had internalised the lesson those sensors taught.

In that sense, the summit’s worldview was less mechanistic than it first appeared. It did not imagine the ideal human as a permanent dashboard. It imagined someone who could move through the world with enough awareness to know when to push, when to stop, when to eat, when to fast, when to work and when to disappear into recovery.

That was a vision of optimisation that edged unexpectedly close to wisdom.

You Are What You Repeat

Perhaps the most practical part of the opening remarks concerned behaviour. Grand theories of microbiomes and epigenetics gave way to a simple truth: habits shape outcomes.

“You are what you repeat,” the audience was told. “Identify the patterns that are holding you back and those are the things you want to hack and optimize.”

This was where biohacking shed some of its glamour and became almost stubbornly ordinary. The real work was not exotic. It was routine. Morning rituals, fasting windows, sleep schedules, movement patterns, work cycles, food choices, rest practices. Some routines served health and performance. Others quietly sabotaged them.

Where should a newcomer begin? The answer offered from the stage was disarmingly direct: start where the problem is. Start with the bottleneck, the symptom, the repeated friction in daily life. If the problem was not visible, data might help expose it. But the target was always behaviour.

For all the summit’s futuristic sheen, this was its most grounded lesson. Improvement did not begin with fantasy. It began with pattern recognition.

A Conference About The Future That Pointed Back To Nature

The title **Better Living Through Science, Technology & Nature** might have sounded like a manifesto for techno-utopianism. Yet the opening remarks at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm** landed somewhere more complex and more compelling.

Science mattered because it revealed the system. Technology mattered because it tightened feedback loops. But nature mattered because it remained the original architecture. Evolution, circadian rhythm, nutrient density, microbial life, rest, movement, environmental cues: these were not nostalgic add-ons to progress. They were the ground truth.

Sjoblad and Arina did not ask the audience to reject modern tools. They asked them to use those tools in order to remember something older.

That may be why the opening session lingered after the novelty of gadgets had faded. Beneath the branding and the quantified allure, it described a distinctly human aspiration: to understand oneself clearly enough to live better, and eventually to need fewer intermediaries between body and mind.

For a conference devoted to hacking biology, it was a surprisingly elegant idea. The highest form of optimisation was not domination. It was attunement.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm