I remember a film from decades ago, when I was young enough to have had few worries about ageing. It was called Zardoz, and it starred Sean Connery. The plot swirled around a glass-domed city in some future world, peopled by those wealthy enough to have purchased eternal youth and health.
The ragged unfortunates living outside the protected cities would crowd outside the smooth walls, wailing and crying, desperate to get in. The plot then revealed that inside the city there was a small band of activists trying to get out – they had no interest in living forever – they wanted to live and die like their forefathers. They were as eager to die as the outsiders were eager to live forever. I remember coming out into the sunlight after the movie, deeply troubled in my innocent little boy’s heart. Is wanting to live forever a good thing? I asked myself, without getting an answer.
Which brings us to today’s tech billionaires who indulge the same fantasy as everyone else – to escape the ravages of age. To live long and even longer, without loss of function and attendant indignities. Who among us (at least those of us past the half-way point) hasn’t wished for that, right?
The difference is that today’s billionaires possess something their predecessors lacked. They command fortunes large enough to fund entire scientific disciplines. Having conquered software, social media, electric cars and private rockets, Silicon Valley’s elite has settled upon perhaps the last truly unconquered frontier – ageing itself.
The acronym bandied about is LEV – longevity escape velocity. Here is the theory – in the last 100 years or so, science, better nutrition and health education have added about 6 months to every year lived (global lifespan has nearly doubled in that timespan). When science reaches a point where it can add more than an extra year of life to every year, we have lived, mathematics says we start living forever. When are we supposedly going to get to this pivot point? The mid-2030s, at least according to Peter Diamandis of Singularity University and one of the billionaires investing in the field.
It seems as though entrepreneurs who have already won at capitalism are conspicuously and unashamedly unwilling to accept death. Apparently, life has been pretty darn exciting, and they are willing to pay to continue the party. And so having bent markets, media and, latterly, AI to their will, they have arrived at the one last earthly adversary that they will fork out fortunes to defeat.
Their approach? Treat death as a bug in a legacy system – an engineering problem awaiting sufficient capital and compute.
Jeff Bezos is among the principal backers of Altos Labs, a rejuvenation venture launched in 2022 with a reported $3bn and a Nobel laureate who has made breakthroughs in the field, Shinya Yamanaka, on its masthead. Sam Altman has sunk $180m of his own money into Retro Biosciences, whose stated ambition is to add a decade of healthy life. Peter Thiel, the field’s most ideologically committed patron, seeded the Methuselah Foundation (and its cringey slogan “make ninety the new fifty”) – and has mused publicly about the transfusion of young blood. Larry Ellison has directed hundreds of millions towards ageing research; biohacker Bryan Johnson has turned his own body into a social media spectacle, spending some $2m a year and, this year, hiring a chief executive for his Blueprint venture so that he might, in his own narcissistic phrasing, concentrate on not dying.
It is easy to dismiss this as the latest billionaire eccentricity, somewhere between Mars colonies and underground bunkers. Yet something rather more interesting is happening. For the first time, the science is beginning to catch up with the money.
The central insight driving this new industry is simple. Medicine has spent the past century attacking diseases individually. Cancer occupies one laboratory, Alzheimer’s another, heart disease a third. But what if these are merely different manifestations of the same underlying process? What if ageing itself is the disease? Can it be reversed or slowed or otherwise mitigated?
This would all be easy for a sceptic to dismiss, except for this startling fact that I heard on a recent Moonshot’s podcast. It is this (excuse my layman’s paraphrasing). Two 30-year-old humans’ mate and conceive. Everything in the newly fertilised egg is obviously 30 years old. Now here’s the shocker. About 7 days after conception the clock is somehow reset to zero, and the zygote is as good as new. It is no longer 30 years old. Nature has a way, at least in this case, of reversing ageing – it is not an impossible process. Can this be extended to the rest of our bodies and summoned by science?
This idea, once confined to scientific fringes, has steadily migrated towards the mainstream, helped along by private investment. Researchers increasingly distinguish between chronological age – the number of birthdays celebrated – and biological age, which measures the actual condition of cells, organs and tissues. Two seventy-year-olds may differ biologically by decades. One possesses the physiology of someone in their fifties, while the other resembles an octogenarian. Modern “ageing clocks”, based on molecular changes inside our DNA and cells, are becoming remarkably good at measuring that difference.
Only a decade ago, that question of whether age can be modified bordered on heresy. Today, the difference between biological and chronological age occupies some of the world’s best-funded laboratories.
So down the rabbit hole I went, discovering along the way that there are several promising areas of research with intimidating names like partial epigenetic research (genetic clock reversal), senolytics (drugs that selectively cull bothersome and destructive retired “senescent” cells) and a host of others. I pulled myself out of those weeds before I got lost, but here is the takeaway. This sort of research is now well and sharply differentiated from a host of seductive snake oils and unguents (which some of my best friends consume in great measure), and it is backed up by academic papers, labs, controlled tests and the rest of the scientific method.
Results are starting to trickle in. Animal experiments have already rejuvenated damaged optic nerves, improved muscle function and reversed aspects of ageing in multiple tissues. Human clinical trials have now begun in carefully selected diseases, with safety understandably taking precedence over grand hopes and promises.
Unsurprisingly, AI has become one of longevity’s greatest accelerants. Previously, identifying molecules capable of rejuvenating cells resembled searching for a specific grain of sand on an endless beach. AI systems can now sift through astronomical combinations of genes, proteins and drug candidates in days rather than years. Companies working on age reversal, such as NewLimit, increasingly describe themselves as AI companies as much as biotechnology firms, using machine learning to identify cellular interventions that human researchers might never discover unaided.
So, it seems that serious medicine is in the room, with the question no longer being whether ageing biology can be manipulated but which interventions will prove safe, effective and sufficiently powerful to matter clinically.
But as in all new applied science, scepticism remains entirely justified. Nearly every early longevity ‘breakthrough’ has worked beautifully in mice. Mice, unfortunately, have a habit of not being human, and approximately 95% of successful trials in mice do not translate to humans (and even worse stats with prospective cancer treatments). Partial cellular reprogramming also carries obvious risks. Push rejuvenation too far and cells may lose their identity altogether, creating the very tumours that are associated with ageing.
Still, this is the way science progresses – in fits and starts and disappointments and victories. One also needs to be appropriately sceptical of scepticism. Hard, real work is underway, courtesy of a small band of rich men who don’t want to die anytime soon.
While “longevity escape velocity” sounds exciting on a podcast, the field’s leading scientists rarely speak that language. The ambition is considerably more modest and far more plausible. Delay frailty by ten or fifteen years. Postpone dementia. Keep hearts, kidneys and immune systems functioning as though they belonged to someone substantially younger. Extend health span rather than simply lifespan. Even those modest goals would reshape society, requiring reinvention of labour markets, healthcare spending and family structures.
Silicon Valley’s billionaires may indeed be motivated by the oldest impulse imaginable, and they may deploy billions to satisfy that impulse. And there is something faintly comic about men who have accumulated enough wealth to purchase almost anything finally discovering the one commodity not yet unavailable.
But history occasionally rewards vanity. The medieval alchemists failed to create gold, yet helped invent chemistry. It is entirely possible that today’s billionaire obsession with eternal life will end in disappointment for its patrons, yet give them, and us, extended and healthier lives.
And so let the tech barons have fun with their fortunes and their fear. Be grateful that laboratories are along for the ride. It would be prudent to watch what they build and to cheer their successes. Just as it would be foolish, just yet, to read the eternity brochure without a slightly raised eyebrow.
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at (ex-JBS, University of Johannesburg) and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, Daily Friend and Currency News. His new book “It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership” is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.
[Image: Vitaly Gariev for Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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