How The Ultra Rich Are Trying To Live Forever

The French playwright Jen Ionesco once asked me why I was born if it wasn't

forever

, but life, if something is impermanent, the flowers, the stars die and you will die, so if you can't beat death, what if Could you postpone it or at least postpone it? diseases commonly associated with aging many people, especially the

ultra

-

rich

in Silicon Valley, are investing money in companies that try to answer exactly those questions. The world's

rich

est man Jeff Bezos and billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested in this space in 2013. Google formed the aging research company calico, there is also bio age bio Viva, the age longevity fund X, the Matusalem Foundation and many others, provided that a fundamental human need is satisfied, there is a market and, in this case, the market of age -related diseases and aging is worth a billion dollars.

Market billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to aging research. Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey has spent over a million dollars hacking his own biology. Right now I hope to

live

to be one hundred and eighty years old. I think that's very doable assuming I don't get hit by a truck. People claiming to know what to do to

live

longer is nothing new historically, as is still the case today. Many things just don't work. The medicine is fake. I'm a fake, yeah, fake officer, this is not good, I'm telling you mom was fooling all the people, don't you see?

From selling dietary supplements to stem cell injections, there's already a lot of money being made right now in San Francisco for $8,000. one liter of blood from people between 16 and 25 years old can be injected into the body, according to one estimate, the global anti-aging market could exceed $271 billion by 2024. Goals range from

trying

to add decades to your life to simply treating to extend life. For years your body remains healthy, so what is real? Because there really is new science worth getting excited about and what is just wishful thinking or just snake oil. If you are looking for ways to live longer or look younger, you will be offered tons of activated charcoal solutions. is the overall leader in longevity in research and extension of lives and animals I take about a hundred and fifty supplements a day this could lemonade all diseases this maybe immortality like snake laws and some people, especially in places like Silicon Valley , are already taking sometimes elaborate measures to fight their own aging bodies, it's our job to disrupt things, we literally come out and say: isn't there a better way to do this?

So why wouldn't we stop the medicine? Because, frankly, medicine has failed us. Some of it comes from technology and the The engineering mentality that many of the people who have become rich in Silicon Valley have see human biology as something that can be engineered, so I think many of us who are biologists training, we can analyze some of the strategies with which money is being spent. He jumps in and just says that's not going to work. The science of aging, gerontology, is not new, but fairly recent advances have changed what scientists suspect might be possible today.

If the question you are asking is what science has proven, we will certainly help you. you live longer the answer won't surprise you if you wanted to ask me for sure what I could tell you we can do to help you live longer are the things we more or less already know not eating too much exercise regularly no We don't smoke, but scientists are working on much more radical approaches but promising to attack aging. There has been a breakthrough in longevity research in the past two decades, starting in the 1990s. UCSF scientists, for example, discovered that individual genes could be changed in a tiny worm. and obtain increases in life expectancy, this opened the possibility that evolution actually controls aging in some sense.

We are beginning to learn a lot about the biological mechanisms of aging and the possibility of going beyond what we already know works to slow the aging process or in some cases even functionally rejuvenate aging animals and, hopefully, elderly people. advanced. We now have hypotheses that have been tested in animal models, but have not yet been shown to have those effects in people. For the most part, researchers focus on increasing the duration of your health. of time you are not only alive, but alive and healthy, living longer could be a consequence, but they say that it is not the main goal, well, you know, many people think that scientists who work on aging aim to extend life human to make people immortal or stop aging itself.

I wouldn't say that's not our goal, but our main goal is to improve the quality of life in our later years so that we are free of debilitating chronic diseases later in life, you know, if people live. up to a hundred and ten years or more if they had the functionality of a 20 year old, that would be better for them, probably better for everyone around them, so how do you do it if your goals may be similar? Scientists are approaching this in different ways. There are two schools of thought, either one is for Paris regulations, so if you take a young sale and an old sale that has the same DNA, then there are just differences that regulate it differently and you can reprogram an old self to become in a young cell and it is becoming more and more. routine which is one category of aging reversal, but others are just things that flow in your blood, a lot of the essential components that your body loses with age and if you just increase them then your body says oh yeah, me.

I'm young again and we're not literally designed, you know, this is evolution, but mice die at two years old and bowhead whales die at two hundred years old, so it's clearly negotiable. One prominent company working in the space is Unity Biotechnology, it has raised over $300 million from investors like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel Unity focuses its research on specific types of cells called senescence cells. Cellular senescence is the buildup of cells in our bodies as we age that no longer divide and when cells do this, we now call them senescent cells. Stopping dividing is not bad for you, the bad thing is that when the cells do this and pull this emergency brake, they start to expel all these factors, these inflammatory factors and factors that destroy the tissue and it is these factors that end up driving the aging. particular characteristics and diseases and if you could understand what those mechanisms were, if you could intervene in those mechanisms, you could get us all living vibrant, healthier lives in 2019, the unit published the first data of its kind from a randomized, double-blind trial, placebo-controlled in humans that specifically uses anti-aging mechanisms.

The study was on osteoarthritis of the knee. The patients received an injection of a drug into the knee that was intended to destroy senescence cells. Our human data was the first. It was a small study of 48 patients that this year in 2020 will have one hundred and eighty patients, it will be the first of its kind. I think if that data is positive, we take a characteristic of aging and turn it backwards in almost 200 patients. That's when things would start to change. Unity is developing its treatment the traditional way, going through rigorous steps to gain FDA approval.

I think what all of us in this field should try to do is make drugs that benefit as many people as possible. As possible, the best way to do this is to use the classic development path. The downside is that it is time-consuming and expensive. The advantage is that if it gets FDA approval, you can be sure that there will probably be a real benefit and we know it. what are the risks the venture capital firm the longevity fund that invests specifically in aging related companies also invests in unity people often ask us how big the market is motivator we have no earthly idea i mean a couple of hundreds of billions is a number for a single age-related indication imagine drugs that combat all those another company working on aging is age What he calls short-term induced tissue regeneration is working on a topical hydrogel that would facilitate healing and minimize scarring in the long term.

The same basic ideas are expected to apply to age-related diseases early in life. If you have a heart attack, your body simply regrows the heart and So we believe that if we turn the cell clock back far enough in time we can unlock this regenerative potential and allow the aging human body to repair itself. The basic science is already on the lab bench here and we plan to do this with the FDA. Hand in hand we want to develop delivery technologies to introduce these therapies into the body, we need to test them in animals and we hope that within a few years we can begin clinical trials in humans, but even if a company operates with scientific rigor there are important ethical and social issues that need to be considered, even if we can one day make people live longer, what does that mean for the cost of health care?

What does that mean? for quality of life, how can we make sure that those years win over our years when people would really like to be alive and enjoy being alive and participate fully in their existence when I was in the prime of my workday? There were five workers for every retired person. When the baby boomers retire, there will be three workers for every retired person. If we live to be one hundred and fifty years old, we will drop to almost parity where there will be one worker for every retired person over 85 years old. It is the fastest growing group. large number of Americans and that will be a burden on our health system, it will be a burden on our Social Security system.

Older people are richer than young people can say they have disproportionate power in the market and all of that tilts everything towards older people. The concern for many is that anti-aging interventions are being developed as a tool for the wealthy. Investment in this type of research by the

ultra

-rich can be seen as an attempt to buy the one thing that money has not yet been able to buy them: immortality, this utopian dream of living

forever

and I think anti-aging advocates Not only are they interested in adding another 10 or 20 years to their lifespan, they are actually seeking immortality.

Immortality has been the dream of human beings and has been a story that is part of our mythology. since the early days, but it's a narcissistic dream because I have yet to hear a single social good that that will bring, but again most companies in this space say they're not actually

trying

to increase life expectancy, they say they're trying to increase the number of years people stay healthy is the drive, trying to help people live forever first, we don't know how, and even if there was a way, it's not the business, I think the reason why The one we live and operate in your Silicon Valley has something to do with this idea that the powerful in Silicon Valley want to live a long time, that is not an easy or entertaining idea.

I never received an email from one of those people asking, actually, that's not true. I received one, but he I am not an investor. OK, increasing the length of a person's health has perhaps fewer ethical consequences than significantly increasing their life expectancy, but there are still important questions to ask. You can know based on the socioeconomic resources that a person has, the level of education they have, the amount of money they earn. their job, whether they have health insurance or not, whether it's state-funded health insurance versus private health insurance, all of those things are things that currently also affect both our health and our lives, so there are a lot of modifiable factors. of human existence right now.

They are not as attractive as biomechanics or life-prolonging medical treatments, but they should all be on the table if we are really talking about improving the health of humanity. These ethical concerns are not necessarily reasons not to fight aging. therapies, but they highlight how important it is to have conversations about ethics while doing so. The United States is a country whose poorest mendied 15 years earlier than the richest is 10 years for women the richest Americans lived on average 3 years longer in 2014 than they did in 2001 and the poorest Americans gained no years of life expectancy is much longer than Science knows that it is possible, it does not mean that these companies should not exist, but it does mean that the inequality around the moment of death cannot be solved only with pharmaceutical products.

There are scientists in universities who understand more and more every day. how aging works there are companies developing real science-based drugs and techniques that could one day be shown to successfully help humans combat aging these companies may be confident, but they are also careful and are not yet selling Nothing, there is a highly regulated path one has to follow to get to market as a medicine and longevity companies are not exempt from that, but there are loopholes for things like supplements that are considered natural or procedures that involve taking stem cells of your own. body and inject them again, allowing companies to sell products without FDA approval.

Products that exploit these loopholes far outnumber companies carefully developing aging-related drugs. Basic science is so exciting that it is inevitable that the public will find out about it and it is inevitable that charlatans will try to offer the public false versions of real science. A little anecdote that is, "Oh, my friend took stem cell therapy and he feels great. You can probably find hundreds of examples where the opposite happened." You can't use anecdotes, you have to use clinical trials, there's nothing illegal about what people do, so I think it becomes more of a personal question of whether or not it's ethical as a scientist to start recommending people take something. about which there is little or no data that really benefits them.

There are definitely a lot of people who are quick to apply what they think they know about mouse studies to themselves. They have read the literature to the extent that they are able to understand it and immediately try to apply any most recent discovery of basic science. Science is very difficult and it takes years to achieve the knowledge and progress necessary to build one. On the other hand, if you think about the ideas that animate it, it is that this is not complicated but it is not difficult, and what could go wrong , what you find is that if you examine each of the underlying beliefs, they are not considered correct, so there will be incredible science fiction?

Ask about longevity advances in your life, there may be them, but you will hear about them, they will be clinically validated and FDA approved and you won't have to track them. them on websites trying to sell you things, we are not going to add decades to human life because of those drugs, it is more likely to be years, if anything we will see only virginal impacts on life expectancy from now on and the presumption would be that will increase. Over time, so you won't see a big leap toward a better future, you'll see your reviewer small changes that add up.

My expectation is that there could be half a dozen drugs, I'm talking, within three decades, widely used, the goal. differences and mechanisms that point to agents in a number of diseases that are now inescapable, these will be characteristics of aging that you will read about in books, in the same way that a public payphone is now, it's like, oh my God, look, it's a phone booth, right? It is this vestige of the old. I think this knowledge and these future medicines will drive that kind of future