From The New Yorker, August 4:
As researchers work to make death optional, investors see a chance for huge returns. But has the human body already reached its limits?
Peter Diamandis is five feet four and has pipestem legs, but his torso widens into broad shoulders, powerful biceps, and a craggy, Homeric head. The composite effect is of a genie emerging from a lamp. Our wish is his command, and our wish, surely, must be for more time to make wishes: for limitless life. In December, Diamandis stood before two hundred doctors and scientists and vowed that in the coming decade our wish would begin to come true: “It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem—and we’re going to be able to fix that!”
Diamandis was at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, north of San Francisco, to address the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics. He wore his customary outfit: black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. Having one look and one message—Life just gets more abundant!—spares him decision fatigue. An ebullient spirit whose confidence is tempered, at times, by his reverence for data, he acknowledged that the task was immense. “We have forty trillion cells in our body, and every cell is running one to two billion chemical reactions per second,” he said. “It’s not possible for any human to understand this. We are linear thinkers in an exponential world.” Yet with robots soon able to run a million experiments a day, and with A.I. poised to parse our cellular code, how long could immortality take?
He observed that his clients at Fountain Life, a longevity clinic he established, were already on their way to freedom from disease. They’d have early access to emergent tech, such as a blood filter that can “filter out metastatic cancer” and a transmitter that uses high-frequency waves to diagnose strokes and zap depression: “Remission in a week with ten-minutes-per-day therapy!”
Diamandis, who is sixty-four, has a bachelor’s in molecular genetics and a master’s in aerospace engineering from M.I.T., as well as a medical degree from Harvard. But he’s not a practicing doctor, engineer, or scientist. He’s an emissary from the realms of possibility. After growing up on Long Island in a family of Greek immigrants, he began making his dent in the universe by founding some two dozen businesses, many of which involved voyaging to space. As a young entrepreneur, he formulated Peter’s Laws, which included “If you can’t win, change the rules” and “When forced to compromise, ask for more.”
He promotes the inevitability of longevity through a multitude of channels. There’s the clinic, which he started with two doctors and the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. There’s a newsletter, two podcasts, and books on the future and how to stick around for it. There are partnerships in venture funds devoted to A.I. and biotech; an annual conference, Abundance360, which showcases advances in nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces; and a semi-annual Platinum Trip, where, for seventy thousand dollars apiece, people get to meet eminent longevity scientists, invest in their experimental therapies, and secure those therapies for personal use.
Diamandis’s network, known to its constituents as the Peterverse, is largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes. America’s richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead; Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, and Sam Altman have all funded anti-aging research. Joel Huizenga, the C.E.O. of Egaceutical, a startup whose “water-based drink” aims to reverse cellular age, told me, “We don’t work in mice. We work in billionaires.”
Near the back of the Buck sat the biological theorist Aubrey de Grey, stroking a beard the size of a beagle. In 2004, de Grey coined the phrase “longevity escape velocity” to describe the moment when science stops us from getting older, so that, with further advances, we can begin growing younger. At the time, de Grey was viewed as a brilliant crackpot. He is now seen as a sort of Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift lacked only a practical understanding of how it might work.
The rise in de Grey’s reputation corresponds to Diamandis’s long struggle to encourage longevity research by establishing a prize—his favorite promotional device. In 1996, Diamandis launched the XPrize, a ten-million-dollar award for advances in commercial spaceflight. Eight years later, a team funded by the Microsoft founder Paul Allen sent a manned rocket aloft and won. XPrize went on to establish lucrative awards in domains as diverse as carbon capture, deep-ocean exploration, and literacy software for children.
In 2007, de Grey suggested a longevity prize. Diamandis loved the idea: ever since med school, when he learned that Greenland sharks can live for five centuries, he’d wondered, Why not us? But impediments loomed. There was no agreed-upon framework for interventions; aging isn’t even classified as a disease by the F.D.A. And there was no obvious way to measure competing therapies, short of running a protracted competition to see how long it took participants to die. Perhaps most important, none of the more than fifty billionaires whom Diamandis approached to fund the prize seemed to believe you could turn back time.
The field gradually caught up to him, though. Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarker-based “clocks” that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.
So, at the Buck Institute, Diamandis declared that he’d finally been able to establish a prize in longevity. The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients’ muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars. David Sinclair, a prominent geneticist whose lab recently reversed the effective age of cells in lab animals, told me that the prize had galvanized the field: “It’s helped change the focus from mouse studies to ‘Let’s do something in humans!’ It’s our Wright-brothers moment.”
Many of the clinicians I talked to seemed skeptical about hitting such a difficult target. At the Roundtable, the C.E.O. of the Buck, Dr. Eric Verdin, cited a recent paper in Nature Aging which concluded that we’re already bumping against our biological ceiling. He warned about overpromising: “I do worry for the credibility of our field!”
Diamandis was undeterrable. (Peter’s Law No. 22: “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”) From the stage, he exhorted his colleagues to rise to his level of certainty. “Mind-set is very important,” he said. “Optimists live fifteen per cent longer than pessimists.”....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:- "The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots"
- Why We Die: "A New Chapter in the Quest for a Longer Life"
- Ray Kurzweil: "Humans will achieve immortality in eight YEARS..."
- Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science
- Speaking Of Sam Altman, His Life Extension Injections Could (Maybe) Accelerate Cancers
- "Do Older People Have a Duty to Die?"
- Debate: Does Longevity Put a Strain on the Economy?" (GE)
- "How Long Can We Live?"
One of the most human of all the comments from the very old was made by the 10th longest lived person, Misao Okawa (born 1898)
Said about her life the day before her 117th birthday:
"It seemed rather short"
She died four weeks later at 117 years, 27 days
