Jeff Bezos’s quest for immortality is building quite a crew.
This week, Altos Labs, the anti-ageing startup that the Amazon founder is betting a big chunk of his $200bn fortune on, revealed that it has poached Hal Barron, 59, one of the world’s most respected scientists, to be its chief executive. That alone shows Altos means business – but the Silicon Valley biotech start-up also revealed $3 billion in funding and added a board of directors brimming with Nobel laureates.
Death, the real final frontier, is much colder and darker than space. So Bezos, 57, is taking time away from his rockets to futureproof his investments. Altos Labs, which will be based on the US West Coast and in Cambridge, is making waves by luring a host of fêted university professors with what have been described as “sports-star salaries”.
Yuri Milner, 60, a Russian-born internet mogul who is worth about $5 billion, is also reported to have stumped up vast sums of cash. Altos’s focus will be on “cellular programming”, a technique that can already be used to rejuvenate individual cells in a laboratory — and that some believe holds the key to prolonging human life by nixing age-related diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Just this week, researchers told MIT Technology Review that they are using the techniques to grow human hair cells in their labs and even on animals. No wonder Bezos is excited.
Something is clearly agreeing with Bezos. In December, a notably rippling Bezos was papped on the deck of his yacht. Gone is the weedy bookseller of yesteryore. Then there was that bulging Instagram fit pic from New Years’ Eve – Bezos, girlfriend Lauren Sánchez, and his tightly fitted printed silk shirt. Do we credit a healthy diet, a new PT, or is Silicon Valley really able to re-engineer the human body?
Bezos isn’t the only high-rolling tech mogul getting in on the action. The goal of Google’s super-secret biotech outfit Calico, is “solving death”. Its founder, Sergey Brin, 48, says he has no plans to die. PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, 53, is pouring millions into extending life (particularly his own) with chunky investments into several life-extending start-ups, including Unity Biotechnology whose founder reportedly once said he wanted to “vaporize a third of human diseases in the developed world.” Ray Kurzweil, 73, head of engineering at Google, takes 200 supplements a day and Jack Dorsey, 44, eats just a few meals a week.
In nearby Los Angeles, A-listers are just as keen to ascend. Goldie Hawn, 78, has been heard to ask after Glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy (in Hollywood, says the New Yorker’s Tad Friend, it’s excitedly talked up as the “God particle”). Anti-ageing used to be about lip fillers and Brazilian Butt Lifts. These days, stars view mortality as optional.
“It’s going to be a great six months,” says Dr Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the leading nonprofit in the field. Money is flooding into the “ageing space”, he says (billionaires like Bezos really are serious about delaying the inevitable). And decades of lab work is starting to pay off.
Since 1999, scientists at the Buck have studied ways to make organisms live much longer. Around that time, they discovered four cell mutations that, when present, tripled the creature’s longevity. Since then they’ve increased the lifespan of the laboratory worm C. elegans tenfold, and mice twofold. “We’ve identified the nobs and can tweak the rate of ageing,” says Verdin.
But I’m no mouse. What about humans? “If you look at every discovery in biology it takes 15 to 20 years to mature to become something useful,” says Verdin. Which is now.
Since 1900, as public health improved, life expectancy has increased by 30 years. Verdin and the Buck Institute aren’t interested in indulging “immortalists”, but they do see the hundred year life as realistic, even the norm. “Half of children born today will live to be centenarians,” says Verdin, a wonderfully telescopic way of thinking about this minute’s newborns.
The holy grail, however, is ensuring that you’re as spritely on your 100th birthday as on your 60th: heading cancer, heart diseases and Alzheimer’s off at the pass. As Kingsley Amis once observed, “no pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.” Accidents and violence are the leading causes of death up to age forty-four, then cancer rises to the top, and then, at sixty-five, heart disease.
A lot of people think they have the answer. At Unity Biotechnology in California (the company has raked in $200 million from investors like Bezos and Thiel), their drugs target senescent cells — cells that, as they age, start producing a colourless, odourless, noxious goo called sasp. Unity’s researchers call it “the zombie toxin,” because it makes other cells senescent and spreads chronic inflammation throughout the body.
Elsewhere, Verdin is willing to countenance the “great work” going on in parabiosis — denounced as quackery by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019 — the thorny practice of transposing an older mammal’s blood with a younger one’s supply. It sounds like the kind of apocalyptic DIY surgery you’d find in Mad Max: Fury Road (the San Francisco start-up Ambrosia has sold teenage blood infusions at £6,000 a pop).
But back to Altos Labs, which has enlisted the weighty mind of Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, as an unpaid advisor. Yamanaka’s breakthrough discovery was that with the addition of just four proteins, now known as Yamanaka factors, cells can be instructed to revert to a primitive state with the properties of embryonic stem cells. By 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish scientist also on board, had applied these factors to entire living mice in his lab, achieving signs of age reversal and leading him to term reprogramming a potential “elixir of life.” But some of the work backfired. Frighteningly, many of the mice developed ugly embryonic tumors called teratomas. There “are many hurdles to overcome”, Yamanaka admitted in the MIT tech review.
At which point, you might be tempted to call baloney. “If you try and talk to most people about spending lots of money on the biology of ageing they say ‘oh my god, it’s a crackpot’”, says the University of Michigan biogerontologist Richard Miller, who’s well-funded lab pioneered much of the work on anti-ageing in mice. He thinks about “90%” of research is poppycock, with only “10% of us doing hard science and making real progress”. He considers the likes of Aubrey de Grey, an early AI pioneer who claims humans will live more than a thousand years, a personal nemesis (De Grey was chief science officer of Silicon Valley’s sens Research Foundation, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence).
“15 years ago I was at a conference of 100 gerontologists and we were all asked how long humans could live for”, says Miller. “And the more responsible of us said it depends. And the less responsible said 200, 400 years. And the least responsible said 600.” Serious science is slow work — one of the major obstacles to gerontology is that ageing studies, by their nature, are lengthy and expensive. Pharmaceutical giants, who make a fortune shifting drugs for heart diseases and cancers aren’t willing to back the kind of preventative care revolution that would make many medicines obsolete, says Miller.
And the brightest young scientific minds want to work in flashier, better paid fields — not, say, tinkering around with lab worms. But some drugs look highly promising to Miller. There’s metformin, a diabetes drug, which seems to retard ageing — but may also blunt the benefits of exercising in healthy adults. There’s also rapamycin, which seems to switch off the repair signal mistakenly sent by senescent cells. These things work on mice, dogs, even horses, says Miller. “If we did have an anti-ageing pill, as I think we are likely to have one in five years …”, he says, growing twinkly eyed.
The field is getting flashier — and faster. The development of genome-editing tool Crispr by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna is an accelerant. Some experts think that government funding is not moving the game fast enough, which is where biotech companies like Altos steps in. A few years ago, a British start-up, Tiziana Life Sciences, bought the genetic data of almost 13,000 residents from a Sardinian province where an unusually large number of people live past their 100th birthday. Effective anti-ageing interventions, says Miller, would be expected to produce 112-year-old people with the same, highly variable set of abilities and disabilities seen in today’s 78-year-olds — “and some 70-year-olds are terrific, they’re running major countries.”
There are levels to this. A relatively DIY intervention is caloric restriction, or intermittent fasting, the kind of thing Chancellor Rishi Sunak goes in for. Cold showers — a “biohacking” favourite said to train your blood vessels to activate calorie-burning brown fat — is another. At the other end of the scale, nanotechnology experts are said to be developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses, kill cancerous cells, and even reverse ageing. Miller thinks this kind of elitism is one factor behind public apathy towards gerontology. “They think it’s a) hopeless and b) nutty.”
And the field does have a spotty history. In 16th century France, nobles would drink gold in a bid to extend their lifespans. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king at the heart of humanity’s earliest epic poem, found a magic herb said to grant immortality, but a snake ate it. The Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang sent his subjects off to bring him back the elixir of life. Apocryphally, what they returned with was potion containing mercury sulphide, leading him to an early grave.
And would anyone really want to live forever? For immortals, nothing is precious, and apathy is inevitable. Besides, the fates always have the last. As Elon Musk tweeted at news of his occasionally litigious rival Bezos’s speculative investment: “And if it doesn’t work, he’ll sue death”.
