Having chosen a climate-change denier to head the US government's environment agency, an opponent of minimum wage for the Labor Department, a creationist for Education Secretary, a mine-owner for Commerce, and a wrestling exec to oversee small businesses – president-elect Donald Trump is now considering putting a man with very strange ideas about medicine as head of Uncle Sam's Food and Drug Administration.

It is probably no coincidence that Jim O'Neill is a close business associate of gay contrarian Peter Thiel, aka the Only Man in Silicon Valley to Support Trump. Having taken a wild punt on Trump to win, Thiel has now become one of the Donald's advisors.

O'Neill is managing director of one of Thiel's investment funds, Mithril Capital Management, having previously been MD of a different Thiel hedge fund, Clarium Capital. He also launched the Thiel Fellowship, which pays students to drop out of college to take a stab at becoming entrepreneurs. And like his billionaire pal, O'Neill has some peculiar beliefs.

For example, he is on the board of the Seasteading Institute, which envisions setting up independent societies at sea, imbued with libertarian philosophies. That would ensure "freedom," according to O'Neill.

Far more relevant in relation to a possible FDA role, however, is the fact that O'Neill, like Thiel, believes that it is possible to reverse the effects of aging by, um, taking the blood of young people and pumping it into old people like them. Scientists think it's not that simple.

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O'Neill also seems to think that setting up a market for kidneys is a good idea. As opposed to an absolutely terrible, appalling idea. "There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused," he told his Seasteading Institute in a speech.

And specifically on the FDA, O'Neill said in a speech in 2014 that he feels the FDA's checks on new drugs before approving them were actually killing a lot of people rather than, you know, saving a lot of people from being killed.

"The regulatory costs that the FDA impose kill a lot of people and provide a lot of harm to the economy," he noted, before going on to explain that when he entered the real world, he found out that insane ideologies dreamt up by rich white men were not all they are cracked up to be. "One thing that surprised me is that the actual human beings at the Food and Drug Administration like science; they like curing disease and they actually like approving drugs and devices and biologics."

Yes, amazing. Who'd have thought it? And it's just that kind of insight that we need in a future head of the government agency that oversees the safety of products that millions of Americans put into their bodies every day.

O'Neill does at least have some government experience – he was an associate deputy secretary at the department of health in the Bush Administration – but he doesn't have any medical or scientific experience.

Of the 22 FDA commissioners since it was created in 1907, only three have not been doctors or scientific researchers, but every one of those three had spent their adult working lives focused on food and drug inspections. The last non-medical professional chosen as FDA Commissioner was George Larrick in 1954. ®