Secret Immortality Experiments by American Billionaires
Author: Victoria Nikiforova
Crazy scientists, speculators, fraudsters, and real geniuses – all of these people have gathered on the West Coast of the United States, responding to a simple request from American billionaires: create an "immortality ticket." Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in these fantastic and highly confidential experiments to extend life. What are the prospects for these studies?
"In our world, there are only two things that are inevitable – death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin once said, whose portrait has appeared on $100 bills for over a century. The tech giants of Silicon Valley have found many ways to avoid taxes. Now, they're also searching for a way to escape death.
In 2013, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page invested $1 billion in Calico, a company fully named "California Life Company." At the time, Bill Maris, then head of Google Ventures, stated that Calico would at least double human lifespan. Headlines like "Google is about to 'crack' death" emerged. However, the hype around this promise soon subsided.
This isn't surprising: Calico still exists today, with over $1.5 billion already invested, but its activities remain confidential. The research laboratory is hidden in an underground bunker in the San Francisco suburbs. Media is not allowed access, employees do not publish scientific papers, and every visitor must sign a confidentiality agreement. Neither Google's management nor public relations personnel make any comments on this matter.
"This makes other scientists uneasy," Felipe Sierra, director of the National Institute on Aging, frankly told MIT Technology Review. "We want to know what they're doing. That way, we can conduct research in other directions or collaborate with them on their research topics. After all, they are a research lab – so what exactly are they researching?"
Calico employs renowned experts in genetics, biology, and artificial intelligence, yet they speak vaguely about their work. The only thing certain is that they are conducting experiments on naked mole-rats – these small rodents do not feel pain, rarely develop cancer, and live ten times longer than other rodents.
David Botstein, Calico's director (photo: Jane Gishyer)
It's important to understand that these mysterious experiments aren't just whimsical ideas of billionaires. Immortality is the latest trend in Silicon Valley. CEOs of major companies are investing in it. Many startups are researching longevity and eternal health. Open tech tycoons also cultivate some odd habits, genuinely believing these habits will keep them youthful. Even a "Palo Alto Longevity Prize" has been established, offering $500,000 to anyone who can significantly extend the lifespan of a mammal.
Despite positioning themselves as modern intellectuals, the pursuit of immortality among Silicon Valley tycoons stems from common, purely human emotions that were previously satisfied by religion.
Sometimes this manifests as sentimentality. For example, Ray Kurzweil, Google's engineering director, is 69 years old and cannot accept his father's passing. He keeps all of his father's belongings – photos, letters, bills – hoping one day he can create a virtual avatar of his father. He believes that scientists will soon be able to transfer human intelligence to "non-biological" carriers. In this way, the body may perish, but personality can continue to exist in a computer. Thus, young Kurzweil could live forever with his father in an information "cloud."
The problem lies in the fact that scientists don't even roughly understand how human intelligence operates within the intricate network of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. There is currently no plan to transfer this extremely complex system into a computer, and predictions about this are not optimistic. But just in case, if things go well, Kurzweil has arranged to freeze himself in liquid nitrogen, then thaw and extract his brain when technology finally overcomes death.
Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, was motivated by grief over the loss of his adoptive mother, who died of cancer while he was still in college. After amassing wealth, he donated $335 million to aging research.
Bill Maris, head of Google Ventures, was driven by fear of incurable diseases. At age 26, Maris experienced trauma when his father passed away from a brain tumor. Now Maris lives a healthy lifestyle, exercises daily, avoids meat, and regularly visits doctors. "But when I'm alone, my thoughts are very pessimistic," he confessed to The New Yorker magazine.
It was Maris who persuaded Larry Page and Sergey Brin to launch Calico. According to him, Brin's discovery of genes associated with Parkinson's disease susceptibility played a significant role in this decision.
Both open fraudsters and serious scientists capitalize on the interest of super-rich IT tycoons in extending life. Regarding Calico itself, for geneticists and biologists, this is an excellent opportunity to focus on basic research without pressure for immediate returns. David Botstein, Calico's director and a renowned American biologist, has stated that his lab will not release any results in the next decade.
At the University of Illinois in Chicago, serious gerontologists are also raising $65 million for their research. During a six-year volunteer trial, they want to find out whether metformin – a diabetes drug – can truly extend youth. For IT industry investors, they crafted a catchy slogan for their grant applications: "This is your ticket to immortality."
However, various speculators effectively exploit the emotions of wealthy investors, understanding that they can only raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the most incredible startups in Silicon Valley. Jun Rong, founder of the biotech startup Unitu Biotechnology, attracted numerous tycoons by using their favorite jargon. "I believe aging is encoded within us," he declared at a banquet awarding prizes for health and longevity. "If something is encoded, it means there is code that can be cracked. Once the code is cracked, the limits of aging can be overcome!" The audience, composed of IT industry bosses, erupted in applause.
Often, IT tycoons who rapidly accumulate vast fortunes and become smug about their intelligence are swayed by charming, articulate individuals to invest. In 2016, Nathaniel David, founder of the biotech startup Unitu Biotechnology, successfully persuaded the progressive gay billionaire and PayPal founder Peter Thiel to invest. David's company offers drugs that slow down cancer development in mice and extend their lifespan by 35%. However, there's a subtle point here: these drugs haven't been tested on humans, nor has the issue even been discussed. How did David persuade the experienced investor Thiel to pour tens of millions of dollars into such a startup?
In an interview with The New Yorker, he said his appearance helped – the "Dorian Gray effect" came into play. At 49, David "looks only 30. He has thick black hair and not a wrinkle on his face." The New Yorker described him thus. "My youthful appearance makes some investors uneasy," David humbly admitted. "And someone like Peter Thiel in Silicon Valley feels uneasy around those who look older than 40."
Soon, the world's richest man – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – joined Thiel's ranks. This young David raised $116 million in Silicon Valley.
While the drugs are still being tested on mice, Thiel practices a more widely known anti-aging method. It is rumored that he frequently undergoes blood transfusions. For people like him, a specialized startup called "Ambrosia" has emerged in Silicon Valley, founded by Dr. Jesse Karmazin. The company's experts transfuse young blood into older patients. The medical effectiveness of these procedures has yet to be proven, but older patients claim they feel younger after receiving the transfusions.
Unconfirmed rumors suggest Thiel spends $160,000 annually to have blood from 18-year-old donors infused into his body. He denies this personally, but "Ambrosia" lacks for customers. Despite Dr. Karmazin setting the price for a single transfusion at $8,000, blood donors are not lacking – local youths enjoy donating blood at "Ambrosia," which provides a decent part-time job for students.
Biologists, pharmacists, and public humanists are all actively promoting the concept of immortality.
For instance, Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari's book had a profound impact on Sergey Brin. In his book, Harari claims that in the near future, super-rich individuals will successfully ensure their own immortality and new intellectual capabilities. In this way, they will create a race akin to gods or superheroes, leaving the rest of the population on Earth in an inconsequential state.
At present, there are no tangible results in this battle for immortality. Like ordinary people, billionaires also die of cancer and dementia. People with great intellect and immense wealth appear as naive as those Chinese emperors who swallowed mercury pills believing it would grant them immortality.
But there is another side to these fleeting thoughts – the oligarchs of Silicon Valley are changing the direction of medical science as a discipline. Over the past two centuries, the latest achievements in medicine have quickly spread worldwide, improving the lives of all humanity. All those great discoveries that greatly changed the lives of large populations were inexpensive and accessible to the masses. Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin quickly spread across the globe. Vaccines against dangerous diseases were almost forcibly imposed on the public and, of course, free. Contraceptive pills are available to any female student.
Modern medicine takes a different path – its research outcomes are privatized by investors in advance. Among the sponsors supporting immortality research, not only are there sentimental billionaires who don't know how to dispose of their wealth, but also calculating entrepreneurs who plan to profit immensely from potential discoveries. Therefore, if the mysterious Calico company really finds a "drug to cure death," it is certain that its investors will try every means to monopolize it. For others, the price of the "ticket to immortality" will be prohibitively expensive.
Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7503871384596791862/
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