Inside Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam: where fundamentals met the frontier

By Teemu Arina · October 16, 2023 · Updated August 23, 2026

Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam gathered clinicians, athletes, artists, herbalists and indigenous healers inside The Kromhouthal for two days that refused to settle into a single register. Across 14 and 15 October 2023, the programme moved between photobiomodulation research and Amazonian ceremony, between metabolic psychiatry and stand-up satire. The through line was an argument the summit kept making from different directions: that optimisation without foundations, or without meaning, is a poor trade.

The fundamentals came before the gadgets

The most consistent message in Amsterdam was also the least glamorous. Tim Gray opened his session by arguing that cognitive performance is not built in an app but in the ordinary decisions of a household, from what sits in the bathroom cabinet to what a pan is coated with. Jan Rein made the same case from a nutrition scientist's chair, placing six daily behaviours at the base of a foundational health pyramid before any supplement earned a place above it.

Kasper van der Meulen put the sharpest edge on it. Against a culture selling the identity of the superhuman, he offered a plainer proposition. "Being human is enough," he said. "Just the fact that you are alive is a miracle." He also warned the room against taking any of it on authority, his own included: "Don't believe anything I say, especially not because I say it."

Wade Lightheart turned the same scepticism on diet culture, arguing that the failure rate has little to do with willpower. "Ninety-seven percent of dieters regain everything they lost because they are not developing a diet based on their individuality," he said. Henry Liiv, arriving by way of opera singing and electronic music, made the case for productivity without the tyranny of perfection.

Light became a serious subject

If one field dominated the technical programme, it was light. Matt Maruca argued that chronic illness cannot be understood through food or pharmaceuticals alone, describing mitochondria as engines that premium fuel cannot rescue: "If your mitochondria are damaged, it is like a car with worn spark plugs. You could put in premium fuel, but the engine won't burn it."

Alex Fergus brought eight years of hands-on experience and a spectrometer, testing what actually reaches the skin. A black T-shirt, he found, blocked around 98 percent of the light, a detail that quietly undoes a great deal of expensive practice. James Carroll reduced the mechanism to a single sentence: "If you apply light at the right wavelength and intensity, you can tip the balance of your cells to produce more energy and fewer reactive oxygen species, triggering the body's natural healing mechanisms." Sarah Turner extended the argument downward, making the case that brain health runs through the gut, while Martin Junggebauer argued the frontier had moved from the clinic to the living room.

Female physiology stopped being a footnote

Angela Foster used her session to dismantle a habit the wellness industry has never fully shaken: building protocols around men and offering them to everyone. Women, she argued, live on two clocks rather than one, and the monthly infradian rhythm deserves the same attention the daily circadian rhythm receives. Her nutritional advice followed the cycle phase by phase rather than flattening it into a single rule.

Silvena Rowe made the culinary case for the same idea, treating food as the most accessible preventive tool a woman has. Susan Bratton took the argument into territory conferences usually avoid, framing intimacy as a longevity practice rather than a private indulgence, and insisting that "orgasms are a learned skill."

Measurement matured, and so did its limits

Siim Land framed the central problem of ageing as a gap rather than a ceiling. "The goal to extend your healthspan is to ensure you delay chronic diseases for as long as possible," he said, drawing on centenarian research that sorts long-lived people into survivors, delayers and escapers. Zorrie Dimitrova offered a way to see the process early, describing glycans as a molecular warning system for the slow fire of inflammaging: "Glycans tell you a story. The long ones help us repair and rebuild."

Chris Moore reduced personalised medicine to an equation he called the most important in the field, N equals one, arguing that a treatment helping ninety-nine percent of people means little to the one percent it harms. Olli Sovijärvi supplied the clinical reality that makes such personalisation hard, recalling a day of ninety-four consultations, and noting that patients who fail to follow through are not simply short of willpower: "It is not really about willpower; there is something deeper going on."

Metabolism, trauma and the brain's energy budget

Dorian Greenow drew the metabolic argument in two colours, contrasting a glucose-fuelled day of spikes and crashes against ketosis, noting that human glycogen reserves amount to only around 2,000 kilocalories. Simone Koch took the same biochemistry somewhere more urgent, arguing that PTSD and anxiety are not only psychological conditions but systemic metabolic ones. Her image stayed with the room: "The brain is the canary in the coal mine, telling us that there is something on a very deep basis wrong with our energy supply. It is such a demanding organ that it requires twenty percent of the energy we produce."

Consciousness, ceremony and the limits of the machine

The summit gave as much stage time to inner work as to instrumentation. Anna Catharin Heil argued that change begins where comfort ends: "It must feel weird because otherwise it would not be new. Weird is the name of the game." Garnet Dupuis proposed that microdosing was never fundamentally about drugs but about loosening the personal myth a brain keeps rewriting about itself. Janika Ruuska brought the same pharmacology into one of psychiatry's hardest problems, examining psilocybin as a route into the cognitive rigidity of anorexia.

Ceremony framed both days. The opening brought together traditions from four directions, and the closing asked a room full of technologists to move their attention from the head to the heart. Agustin Grefa, a Kichua healer from Ecuador, delivered the weekend's blunt moral test: "Go and feel, go and practice. Not just talk. Understanding is easy, but to put into practice what we understood, that is a different level."

Nature was treated as infrastructure, not scenery

Yarrow Willard named the condition he saw in the room as nature deficit disorder, and offered a correction of emphasis: "When the heart is our primary organ of perception, the brain will naturally entrain." Eric Puro traced his own route from corporate consulting to permaculture and fungi, arguing that the fracture beneath modern symptoms is a broken relationship rather than a missing compound. Jaakko Halmetoja described plants as carriers of memory rather than ingredients: "Whenever you consume a plant, it is carrying the knowledge of its ancestry and history." Maximilian Endter made the biological case for fungi as kin.

Technology, and the mirror it holds up

Teemu Arina closed the intellectual circle by refusing the usual framing of artificial intelligence as an external threat. "AI is a reflection of our collective consciousness," he said. "What determines if it is going to be an enemy or an ally is actually humans. It depends on whether we use technology with consciousness." He returned repeatedly to the holobiont, the body as a consortium rather than a fortress: "There is an intelligence in you that is not you."

That framing gave the weekend its shape. Sensei Zen Takai, carrying sixteen generations of samurai lineage, had already offered the older version of the same lesson, that power comes from releasing the self rather than asserting it: "Catch the feeling from your opponent before the conflict and try to create a good relationship." Between the spectrometers and the ceremonies, Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam kept arriving at the same place, that the most advanced tool in the room is still the person holding it.

Session recaps

Every session from Amsterdam has its own written recap:

Frequently asked questions

When and where was Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam held?

It ran on 14 and 15 October 2023 inside The Kromhouthal in Amsterdam, gathering clinicians, athletes, artists, herbalists and indigenous healers across a programme that moved between photobiomodulation research and Amazonian ceremony.

What was the summit's recurring argument?

That optimisation without foundations, or without meaning, is a poor trade. The point arrived from several directions: Tim Gray on ordinary household decisions, Jan Rein on daily behaviours before supplements, and Kasper van der Meulen with the plainest version of it, that being human is enough.

Who spoke at the 2023 Amsterdam summit?

Speakers included Matt Maruca and Alex Fergus on light, Angela Foster and Silvena Rowe on female physiology, Siim Land and Chris Moore on longevity and personalised medicine, Simone Koch on metabolic psychiatry, Yarrow Willard on nature, and Teemu Arina on the future of biohacking.

About the event

Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam took place in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 October 2023. The series continues at HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam on 14 and 15 November 2026.

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Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam