Has a scientist discovered the key to eternal life?
They say money can’t buy you love. But can it buy you eternal life?
Authoritarians expect it. A bevy of billionaires are banking on it.
And the drive to deliver the holy grail of health care is a race against time.
Chinese chairman Xi Jinping, 72, has expressed a desire to live past 150 to witness his “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” bear fruit. He is celebrating his 73rd year on Monday.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin, 73, has been busy building up a stockpile of body doubles and spare parts. He turns 74 in October.
And big tech CEOs Jeff Bezos (62), Peter Thiel (58), Marc Andreessen (54), Bryan Johnson (48), Brian Armstrong (43), and Sam Altman (41) are also all feeling the march of time.
Now, controversial longevity scientist David Sinclair believes he has found the Fountain of Youth.
The Harvard Medical School genetics professor has his eyes on a $US101 million prize. That’s the reward offered by the XPrize Foundation (sponsored by the likes of Elon Musk, the Ansari family, Canada’s Dennis Wilson and Australia’s Andrew Forest) for the first researcher to demonstrate a 10-year reduction in physical age after a treatment lasting less than one year.
“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” Professor Sinclair states.
“It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”
His pitch involves a secret cocktail of drugs and health supplements.
“We’ve come a long way,” he insists.
“I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance …”
But others are pursuing the harvesting of replacement organs, tailoring stem-cells to revive bodily functions, and resetting – or even introducing – DNA.
We have the technology.
But not yet the knowledge.
And most of us will never have the money.
The great leveller?
President Putin has just injected an extra $US26 billion into Russian longevity research.
“The longer you live, the younger you become,” he proclaimed to state-controlled media last month.
“It is probably possible to reach 150. But, first of all, it will always be too few, just like with money. Always.”
The key to a long life is no mystery: Exercise, good food, low stress and healthy relationships.
But these can be inconvenient – if not impossible – to achieve in our fast-paced, productivity-centric, big-tech-dominated world.
One already has to pay to live.
And that struggle only increases as you slide down the income scale. The life expectancy gap between the well-off and the uncomfortably poor now exceeds a decade in the United States.
But important people want more.
President Putin committed his nation’s scientists to longevity research in 2024. The international $US101 million XPrize Healthspan Competition was established in 2023 under tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis.
Some progress is being made.
In baby steps.
President Putin last month told an AI conference he’d already received life-extension transplants.
“I went in during the afternoon and left the next day. Thank God, everything is fine,” he stated.
“Modern means of health improvement, medical means, even surgical ones related to organ replacement, allow humanity to hope that active life will continue differently than it does today.”
The average lifespan in Russia is 73 years. In Australia, it’s 81.
Meanwhile, more than 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The god projects
Professor Sinclair says his drug cocktail, codenamed SL-100, is “highly, highly confidential”.
So much so that he’s bypassing the usual scientific validation process.
“We’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published,” he told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review.
“But we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”
He says his strategy is to identify candidate chemicals with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Then blend them into a tablet.
Once in the bloodstream, this cocktail will be expected to reset DNA controllers known as epigenetic markers. These help govern a cell’s metabolic rate and function.
Professor Sinclair has already begun human testing of a similar gene therapy technique on age-related eye conditions, such as glaucoma. Full-body rejuvenation is the next step.
But he has competition.
Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong launched his own $US435 million NewLimit “age reprogramming” start-up this month. This one wants to supercharge the human liver.
Scientists at the University of Rochester are investigating the naked mole rat.
This rodent can live for up to 41 years. Your average mouse lingers no longer than three.
So a promising gene was extracted from the mole rat and injected into laboratory mice. These went on to live long, healthy lives.
“It took us 10 years from the discovery of HMW-HA in the naked mole rat to showing that HMW-HA improves health in mice,” says lead researcher Professor Vera Gorbunova.
“Our next goal is to transfer this benefit to humans.”
And the University of Tokyo is investigating the Greenland shark.
US President Donald Trump’s ambitions to annex the Arctic territory aside, harvesting its genes may offer another path towards longevity.
With a lifespan of up to 400 years, researchers say the shark has powerful “genetic traits associated with cancer, immune response function, genome stability, and cardiac function, deep-sea adaptations, and population size dynamics”.
And President Putin may get to transplant his brain into one of his body doubles. Or even a clone.
The Yale School of Medicine revived a pig brain in 2019 after it had been pumped full of drugs and preservatives and deprived of oxygen for four hours.
