Are You Rich Enough To Live Forever?
Immortality is one luxury the world's wealthiest are determined to buy—at any cost.
The Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village is in
the horsey part of western Los Angeles County, just off the 101 freeway
past the exit you’d take to go down to Malibu. It features all the
elements typical of a Four Seasons: tasteful marble floors, guest suites
with large bathrooms featuring deep tubs, obscenely soft sheets… You
get the picture.
I am experiencing none of
this. Instead I am in a building adjacent to the Four Seasons, sitting
in an airtight egg-shaped box about halfway in size between a regular
refrigerator and a refrigerator in one of those guest suites next door,
wearing only my underwear and a vermillion swim cap–like thingy of
uncertain material, surrounded by an organ-massaging whump-whump-whump sound somewhere below the vocal range of Barry White.
The box I’m in is called the Bod Pod, and it’s
designed to tell me the percentage of my mass that is composed of fat.
The building is the California Health & Longevity Institute (CHLI), a
combination spa, medical clinic, fitness center, and research
institution founded in 2006 by David Murdock, a 93-year-old billionaire
who made a fortune in real estate and later bought the Dole Foods
company, and who has something of an obsession with increasing his time
on this earth through the combination of science and lifestyle choices.
(He reportedly believes so fervently in the essentiality of consuming
fruits and vegetables that he eats banana and orange peels, and that’s
just the beginning.) Murdock is a sort of god-father to a breed of
California-based ultra-high-net-worth individuals who are focused on
increasing lifespan and staving off disease.
His successors are numerous. Oracle co-founder
Larry Ellison, who has said that “death never made any sense to me,” has
spent $430 million on anti-aging research; Google founders Sergey Brin
and Larry Page launched Calico, a secretive company that’s seeking to
extend lifespan through genetic research and drug development.
Ex-financier and philanthropist Michael Milken is funneling money toward
speeding up the development of drugs and other medical treatments for
the chronic diseases associated with aging, and Jeff Bezos has just
invested in a company called Unity Biotechnology that is “targeting
cellular mechanisms at the root of age-related diseases.”
Meanwhile,
PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s Breakout
Labs funds companies trying to extend the useful life of various body
parts; Thiel himself has reportedly given millions to a foundation
aiming to increase the human life-span.
The
single-mindedness of the high-net-worth live-forever crew is not just
theoretical. As they await the progress reports of their well-funded
research projects, these people have adopted a long and quirky (to say
the least) list of habits in their daily lives. My own experience at
CHLI—where the offerings include guided meditation in a thing called a
Somadome, a fitness consultation, a nutrition consultation, and various
spa-type treatments—is rather quaint compared with what those engaged in
this new space race to immortality are doing.
Take
Dave Asprey, a former top executive in a company that operated Google’s
and Facebook’s first computer servers and who later created Bulletproof
Coffee. He now spends three minutes five to six days a week in a
$50,000 tank of air chilled to –270 degrees Fahrenheit, which he says
increases the density of his mitochondria (the power plants in all
living cells). Asprey also enjoys doing cardio with various parts of his
body strapped into plastic sleeves full of ice water in a machine
called a Vasper, he breathes 100 percent oxygen, he sits in an infrared
sauna, and he plays ping-pong against a robot. “Rapid movement where
you’re crossing from one side of the body to the other re-patterns your
brain,” he says.
"We are going to crack this.
It’s not going to be simple. There’s a bunch of things that will need to
be done to achieve lifespans into at least hundreds of years. But we’ll
get there." — Brian Hanley
Or microbiologist
Brian Hanley. In his modest ranch house in Davis, California, 90 minutes
northeast of San Francisco, Hanley, who owns the biomedical company
Butterfly Sciences, describes to me the way he spent years of research
and more than half a million dollars: After receiving approval from an
accredited independent board that evaluates clinical trials, he enlisted
the assistance of a doctor colleague to (in what is clearly not a
practice currently approved by the FDA) shove twin needles into his leg
and, with a burst of electricity, install DNA of Hanley’s own design
that was supposed to encourage his organs to operate better. It proved
to be very painful (though less so the second time, after they had
modified the protocol), but to Hanley it was totally worth it. “I just
felt so fantastic,” he says with a smile. Hanley's white blood cell
count—a measure not particularly susceptible to the placebo
effect—spiked and his "bad" cholesterol plummeted, while his diet was
essentially unchanged.
Matt Kaeberlein, a
biologist at the University of Washington who is testing the effects on
aging dogs of a drug originally developed for human transplant patients,
reveals that several -superrich live-forever types have called to ask
him to give the drug to them. “There are more people than you’d guess
who are self--experimenting,” he says.
Over
the past century medical science has made tremendous strides in
increasing the lifespan of most humans. Antibiotics and reduced infant
and childhood mortality were two arenas in which doctors had dramatic
success in the early part of the 20th century. Advances in medical
technology in the latter part are a big reason someone must still sing
Happy Birthday to Dick Cheney every year. We’ve been adding about two
years to the average life expectancy every decade for the last hundred
years. And if you’re wealthy and educated and have access to decent
healthcare, you’re likely to live longer than someone without any one of
those things, and much longer than the billion or so people who have
none of them.
Still, while humans have been living longer on
average, the longest any individual has lived—the apparent maximum
life-span—has remained essentially unchanged. And to today’s titans of
cutting-edge industry, whose visions of the future are the very things
on which they have built their fortunes, not being around for said
future is simply unacceptable.
What people
like Asprey and Hanley are after is an increase in the healthy lifespan
far beyond anything we know about so far. “I’m going to live to
180-plus,” Asprey tells me. Hanley is equally confident. “We are going
to crack this,” he says. “It’s not going to be simple. There’s a bunch
of things that will need to be done to achieve lifespans into at least
hundreds of years. But we’ll get there.” The real question might be what
the word we means. Hanley’s treatment cost him well over $500,000. Asprey’s regimen costs him more than $1 million.
Human
Longevity Inc. is a La Jolla startup co-founded in 2015 by J. Craig
Venter, who spent $100 million becoming, in 2000, the first person to
sequence a human genome with private funding. At the company’s clinic,
Health Nucleus, you can get: your own genome sequenced; a full-body MRI
to look for cancer; microbiomial and metabalomic profiles; a
neurological exam; a bone-density scan; a body fat measurement more
accurate than the Bod Pod’s; and a 4-D picture of the inside of your
heart. It costs $25,000. It goes without saying that no health insurance
covers it.
Still, such expenses pale in comparison with the
moonshot-level funding that guys like Brin and Page are lavishing on
labs like Calico. Such facilities also come with billion--dollar ethical
questions. With simple healthcare still out of reach for much of the
world, some people, including Bill and Melinda Gates, take issue with
the longevity movement.
“It seems
pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people
to fund things so they can live longer,” Bill Gates told a Reddit
audience in 2015.
Egocentric, perhaps, but it
certainly displays a signature attitude of Silicon Valley. On my way to
Palo Alto for an interview for this story, I had lunch at the Battery, a
private club in downtown San Francisco, with Ty Ahmad-Taylor, who has
worked at, launched, and sold various tech startups and is today CEO of
the entertainment technology company THX Ltd.
I
wondered aloud why anti-aging research is happening in such
concentration around the city and why so much of it is funded with tech
money. “I think there’s a fundamental optimism here that doesn’t exist
in other places,” Ahmad-Taylor said. When he was looking for investors
for a social sports site he founded, he recalled, “I got turned down 43
times” before selling Samsung on the project. “Silicon Valley is full of
the kind of people who think that being rejected 43 times is not a
reflection of their likelihood of success.” That’s precisely the
attitude required to believe that death can be forestalled, or even
foiled.
“It seems pretty egocentric, while we
still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can
live longer” —Bill Gates
The first hole
was poked in the idea that aging equals an inevitable deterioration in
1983, when a mutant strain of a 1-millimeter-long worm called C. elegans
was discovered to have a much greater lifespan than nonmutant strains.
Then, in the early ’90s, a young University of California San Francisco
researcher named Cynthia Kenyon identified a specific mutation that
doubled the lifespan in C. elegans; it turned out to be the first of more than 100 gene variants now known to affect longevity. Kenyon now works at Calico.
“For
the first time, people realized that there is a subset of genes that
can regulate lifespan,” says Eric Verdin, M.D., CEO of the Buck
Institute for Research on Aging, in Marin County. “That really changed
everything. If you identify genes and pathways that control aging, this
means that specific proteins can regulate it, and that means drug
targets. People started to think, Maybe we can delay aging.”
The
Buck Institute occupies a modern building designed by I.M. Pei on a
hilltop an hour north of San Francisco. Here, 180 scientists work to
develop therapies to slow aging. One of them is Judith Campisi, a cancer
researcher who, years back, began studying senescent cells—cells that
have stopped dividing. Initially senescence wasn’t thought of as bad but
rather as the alternative to cells becoming cancerous. “When I started
studying senescence it was as an anti-cancer mechanism,” Campisi tells
me.
But she started to think the people in her
field had it all wrong—that senescent cells were dangerous because they
were oozing yucky stuff that caused inflammation in the body. (One of
the hallmarks of aging is that the body carries around more
inflammation, which is a major factor in, if not the cause of,
age-related diseases, including cancer and heart and liver disease.)
Senescent cells, Campisi and colleagues found, were essentially
polluting their neighbors, causing time’s ravages.
Last year Campisi helped found Unity Biotechnology,
a lifespan-enhancing biotech firm in San Francisco that had received
$20 million in financing even before Jeff Bezos jumped in. (As of
October the tally was up to $116 million.) She also continues to work at
the Buck Institute. As a storm that has pummeled the Bay Area breaks up
outside, I look through her microscope at a culture of fibroblast cells
from a human lung. They are of more or less uniform size and snuggled
tightly together; two of them appear to be on the verge of dividing, as
happy cells do.
Then I view senescent cells
from the same tissue that have been artificially aged using ionizing
radiation. These cells are grossly distorted, huge and spread out, and
they secrete inflammatory factors, with much bigger nuclei.
“We’re
trying to devise ways now to tame that secretory characteristic of the
cell,” Campisi explains. “The other next step is to make them go away.”
(Apparently Kenyon had also been trying all sorts of methods of killing
senescent cells before she joined Calico, according to Venter, who had
been thinking of hiring Kenyon at the time for his company, Human
Longevity Inc. The life extension world, being much smaller than the
tech universe, is even more competitive than its primary benefactor, it
turns out.)
The problem is that the idea
Campisi started with 30 years ago—that senescent cells are protective in
some way—remains, in a sense, true. “In very special circumstances
they’re good,” she says. “So we have to be very intelligent about how to
apply drugs designed to kill senescent cells.”
Campisi
is well aware of the scientific challenges of anti-aging research. But
there are other challenges as well. “There’s a misperception among
people in other fields that research in this field isn’t as rigorous,”
says the University of Washington’s Kaeberlein, the biologist who gets
calls from live-forever types hoping he’ll inject them with his
experimental drug, rapamycin, which in 2009 was discovered to increase
the lifespan of mice. Kaeberlein calls it “the most effective and
reproducible drug for extending lifespan in mice at this time.”
“I
think there’s a fundamental optimism here that doesn’t exist in other
places. Silicon Valley is full of the kind of people who think that
being rejected 43 times is not a reflection of their likelihood of
success.” —Ty Ahmad-Taylor
Across the country,
in New York, a former Israeli Defense Forces medical officer named Nir
Barzilai, who is now director of the Institute for Aging Research at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is trying to raise $70 million from
the National Institutes of Health and private funders to test the
effectiveness in slowing disease formation of another existing drug,
metformin, which is currently given to diabetics. Barzilai and a few
other heavy hitters in aging research had to, as he puts it, “cajole”
the FDA into letting him run the experiment, because the agency that
approves medical treatments hasn’t considered aging a treatable
condition (an “indication,” in its jargon).
So
Barzilai came up with a workaround. “We are working with the FDA to have
an indication that is similar to aging—to delay the onset of certain
diseases associated with aging,” he tells me. The idea is that if aging
is a major risk factor for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s,
preventing those diseases can be seen as a proxy for slowing aging.
“This
is going to be a breakthrough,” he says. “We have shown we can target
aging in a variety of animal models. That’s not the question. The
question is why pharmaceutical companies are not coming in and
developing drugs to increase our lifespan. And the answer is because the
FDA just hasn’t had aging as an indication.”
While
many of the privately owned longevity labs are engaged in the search
for anti-aging drugs, Venter is taking a different approach: using
genomics to identify genes associated with heart disease, cancer, and
other afflictions associated with aging. On the second floor of an
undistinguished building in a sea of them in northern San Diego, past
two security guards and a fingerprint scanner that restricts access to
the lab even for employees of Human Longevity Inc., 33 DNA sequencing
machines (each of which costs $1 million and is named after a Star Wars
character) run 24/7, going through 55 to 60 terabytes of data per week.
This work is part of a large-scale effort to gather as many human
genome sequences as possible from subjects, who also provide clinical
and phenotype samples.
“We’re trying to,
through the genome, predict causes of premature death,” says Venter, the
company’s chair. We spoke in his expansive office on the building’s top
floor as his miniature poodle, Darwin, sat under his desk. “We can
predict your risk for many types of cancer from mutated genes in your
genome.”
On the first floor of Human Longevity’s
headquarters is Health Nucleus, the company’s consumer-oriented
affiliate. It employs the most advanced diagnostic equipment and uses
detailed biological samples to provide a comprehensive examination of an
individual’s health status. “We look at the person as a whole and
measure everything in the genome, and everything we can in the clinic,”
Venter explains.
Around 500 people have had
the $25,000 service performed so far, and Venter says serious health
issues undetectable by any other means have been found in about 40
percent of them. Two and a half percent had early-stage cancer. One
55-year-old customer learned he had a 5-centimeter tumor under his
breastbone. If it hadn’t been discovered until he started experiencing
symptoms, he might have been dead within two years. Now he has as good a
chance as anyone of making it to 95. “It’s a shock at first, but then
you realize you just saved your life,” Venter tells me.
Still,
not everything Health Nucleus can detect presents as clear a course of
action as removing a tumor. As with everything in science, from
astronomy to microbiology, there’s a difference between being able to
detect something and being able to do something about it. There’s also
the question of false positives generating risky, expensive
interventions that turn out to be unnecessary. “With some of the things
we do now,” Venter admits, the scientific community is “at the 1 percent
level of interpretation. We’re trying to get better. In the future, for
$1,000 we’ll be able to tell you whether you’re at increased risk for
cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s.”
Health Nucleus’s services, along with treatments
like those at the California Health & Longevity Institute (never
mind the kind of expensive equipment Dave Asprey personally surrounds
himself with), are currently available only to the very rich. “These are
all huge accomplishments in terms of science,” says Laura Carstensen,
director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. But she
allows that they present their own set of societal problems. “If these
medical interventions remain this expensive, we will see social class
differences that pale in comparison to disparities today.”
Since
I began my research into longevity, my blueberry consumption has surged
and I’ve developed a high-intensity interval training habit. And when I
walked out of my meeting with Venter I was seized with anxiety that
lurking in my cells is a time bomb planted by my love-hate relationship
with tobacco, which I still struggle with in my forties.
Everyone
who quits says he has a moment when he realizes he is really, finally
done with smoking, and my interview with Venter was mine. My
great-grandfather died of oral cancer at 43—though he did smoke fat
black cigars from the moment he woke up in the morning to the moment he
went to bed at night. Does that count as a family history? As I Ubered
back to the Amtrak station for the trip home to my wife and two
daughters, I thought that maybe I need to drop $25,000 at Health
Nucleus.
I talked it over with
my wife when I got home, and we decided I should wait for the price to
come down. It turns out I’m not quite in the live-forever tax bracket.
But in the spirit of Silicon Valley, I try to remain optimistic. After
all, I may be only one insanely successful startup away from
immortality.
This story appears in the May 2017 issue of Town & Country.From prometheism.net:
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