If they could turn back time: how tech billionaires are trying to reverse the ageing process
Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are pouring huge sums into startups aiming to keep us all young – or even cheat death. And the science isn’t as far-fetched as you might think
"In the summer of 2019, months before the word “coronavirus” entered the daily discourse, Diljeet Gill was double-checking data from his latest experiment. He was investigating what happens when old human skin cells are “reprogrammed” – a process used in labs around the world to turn adult cells (heart, brain, muscle and the like) – into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate.
Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.”
A lot has happened since then. . .
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Altos emerged from stealth mode last month, with the Russian-Israeli tech billionaire Yuri Milner a confirmed backer. Bezos is rumoured to be involved, too. Clearly, they mean business.
The chief scientist and co-founder, Rick Klausner, is the former head of the US National Cancer Institute, while the chief executive, Hal Barron, left a role at GlaxoSmithKline that paid more than £8m a year.
But what is it with middle-aged male billionaires and anti-ageing research? Has the penny dropped that they, too, will one day fade away? Is rejuvenation science poised to swell their fortunes further? Or – and humour me for a moment here – could this be about the greater good?
Asked about the trend after Calico launched, Bill Gates was scathing: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” he told an “ask me anything” forum on Reddit. Perhaps the motivation doesn’t matter. Lord says: “We’ve got an ageing population, but we are living longer without living healthier. If you are going to do something with your squillions, it’s as good a target as any.”
Prof Lorna Harries, a molecular geneticist at the University of Exeter’s medical school, agrees. “There’s nothing like increasing age to make you aware of your own mortality.
I think the urge to extend your life as long as possible is something that’s behind a lot of this,” she says. “But I’m glad they’re putting their money into something that I think will have very tangible benefits down the line.
> “Apart from being silly at the moment, it raises all kinds of societal issues. I think it’s morally dubious. Huge things would percolate through society with a substantial increase in life expectancy brought about by human intervention,” she says. “We’re living longer and longer already. People are suffering from disability and loss of quality of life because of ageing. That’s what we should be trying to fix. We should be trying to keep people healthier for longer before they drop off the perch. Stay healthy then drop dead, die in your sleep. I think that’s what most people want.”
Thiel, who hopes to live to 120, is one of the more adventurous advocates of anti-ageing therapies.
One that caught his eye – although it is unclear if he has tried it – stems from a series of macabre experiments that found the muscles, brains and organs of old mice were partially rejuvenated when they shared the blood of a young animal.
(The younger animals, in return, appeared to age.)
Scientists are still trying to establish which blood components are behind the effect, with a view to slowing dementia and other age‑related diseases. But that didn’t stop a number of US firms from offering young blood transfusions for thousands of dollars – until the US Food and Drug Administration intervened, warning consumers that there was “no proven clinical benefit”.
[. ] Central to Altos’s vision is a procedure called cellular reprogramming. With every human birth, biology demonstrates its rejuvenative powers by turning the old cells from parents into the youthful tissues of a newborn. In 2006, Yamanaka created a similar effect in the lab. He found that activating four genes in skin cells transformed them into an embryonic state, from which they could grow into the body’s numerous tissues. The work fuelled a wave of interest in growing spare parts for patients. . ."
No guarantees of success, but no doubt a money-maker
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