Imagine you’re the chief of one of the crucial highly effective nations on this planet. You could have every part you may need at your disposal: energy, affect, cash. However, the issue is, your time on the prime is fleeting. I’m not speaking concerning the prospect of a coup or a revolution, or perhaps a democratic election: I’m speaking concerning the factor much more sure in life than taxes. I’m speaking about loss of life.
In early September, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin had been caught on mic speaking about methods to remain younger. “With the event of biotechnology, human organs could be repeatedly transplanted, and folks can stay youthful and youthful, and even obtain immortality,” Putin stated through an interpreter to Xi. “There’s an opportunity,” he continued, “of additionally residing to 150 [years old].” However is that this even attainable, and what wouldn’t it imply for the world if the individuals with energy had been capable of stay for ever?
Over the centuries, now we have used ever extra refined know-how to heal ourselves into unprecedented longevity. Within the twentieth century, it was improvements in public well being and drugs that effected this transformation, permitting right now’s youngsters to stay longer, more healthy lives than at any time in historical past. But that’s nonetheless not sufficient for some.
I’ve been a know-how reporter for 25 years, chronicling the rise of the online from its early days. I’ve reported on the way it has reworked our social world, and I’ve railed in opposition to overzealous builders pushing disruptive improvements that inevitably come into battle with society at giant. I received curious concerning the rising cadre of billionaire traders coming from Silicon Valley who wished to stay for ever. What world had been they imagining and constructing, and the way would the remainder of us match into it? I’ve met individuals who have tried radical life-extending experiments and biohackers who swear the numbers will hold them for ever younger, and seen inside Silicon Valley labs the place technologists are planning a long life revolution. I uncovered the motivations, moral conundrums and doctrines that drive the assumption that we’re getting ready to everlasting life, and that these immortalists are the individuals who will give it to us.
There are a number of various kinds of immortality on this motion. There’s the literal live-for-ever form, dominated by extremely smart, mathematically minded pc scientists, philosophers and hopefuls who’ve an unwavering religion within the life-giving energy of know-how. They think about that they’ll in the future merge with synthetic intelligence and grow to be post-human, and can stay for ever in a state of bliss and delight.
Then there are the immortalists who wish to reconstruct the infrastructure of the world we stay in in order that they will stay for ever. Already, and in plain sight, they’re restructuring sovereign nation states, pushing an agenda of technological acceleration at any value. These highly effective individuals aren’t looking for the fountain of youth – they’re constructing it.
And nonetheless one other model of immortality is parroted by individuals like Xi and Putin, who consider within the certainty of exponentially accelerating science and know-how. Life will proceed not by merging with tech, however by utilizing it to decelerate the onslaught of time, thereby permitting medical science to develop therapies that can heal us. They consider they’re residing proof of age reversal, bodily rejuvenation and the flexibility to cease time.
Imagine previous age. What involves thoughts? For a lot of, it means shedding colleges, and shedding operate. Ageing is one thing all of us expertise, at totally different charges and in numerous methods. In 2015, within the World Report on Ageing and Well being, the World Well being Group outlined wholesome ageing as “the method of creating and sustaining the useful capability that maintains wellbeing in older age”. Key to this definition is useful capability, or “intrinsic capability” – “the health-related attributes that allow individuals to be and to do what they’ve cause to worth”.
That’s as a result of what you wish to do while you’re 80 is just not what you wish to do while you’re 20, nor do you essentially wish to do the identical issues that another person does. Say you wish to go skydiving at 80, however can’t get on the airplane as a result of it’s grow to be harder to get upstairs, your useful capability has declined. In case you’re 80 and you haven’t any bodily bother getting on the airplane, however you will have cataracts and also you’d moderately learn than parachute, your useful capability has additionally declined. So it’s not simply the presence, relative encroachment or absence of a illness, and even absolutely the variety of years of life that’s necessary, however the high quality and the amount of these years within the context of a spread of different components, corresponding to life-style.
The time period used for this in age analysis is “healthspan” – and the target in most modern science on this subject is to extend it. Healthspan means staying wholesome for longer, and protecting the illnesses of previous age at bay. It means protecting your physique younger, intervening within the strategy of rising previous, and contemplating the potential of “rejuvenation”.
That is the place “respectable” science gasps: “the perimeter of the perimeter”, a physician colleague stated to me dismissively once I talked about I used to be researching the subject. But there’s a rising physique of proof that there’s something organic underlying how we age – and a few out-there researchers, funded by Silicon Valley, are attempting to determine find out how to tweak it, in order that our our bodies truly can go backwards in time.
It began within the Nineteen Nineties, when a younger molecular biologist named Cynthia Kenyon and her postgrad pupil Ramon Tabtiang designed a number of landmark experiments with a tiny nematode referred to as C. elegans. Their findings urged that tweaking a gene doubled the lifespans of those creatures.
Kenyon gave a chat at Stanford College not lengthy afterwards. “She regarded like a super-young, very hip professor,” says Irina Conboy, who was there together with her then boyfriend Mike, each PhD college students on the time. “And he or she urged that just by altering the depth of sure molecules, you can also make an previous animal youthful.”
Once I meet Irina and Mike Conboy of their workplace – now married, they’re each professors within the bioengineering division on the College of California, Berkeley – they’re carrying matching tie-dye sweatshirts, and ending one another’s sentences. They’re charming, heat and a bit shambolic. Their tiny white pup is comfortably chewing on his leg on a saggy couch, subsequent to a sheaf of papers.
The couple have one huge query on the subject of ageing: “So why is it that each one the tissues of the physique appear to develop previous collectively?” Mike asks. “It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re on the skin or on the within, whether or not they’re exercised or going alongside for the journey. Every thing appears to go to heck in a handbasket with age.” They questioned if there was some type of sign within the physique that adjustments the molecular construction of muscle groups, and ages all of them concurrently. They got down to discover out what all tissues have in widespread.
Assume again to your biology class at school, and also you would possibly bear in mind these hand-drawn anatomy posters with elaborate illustrations and labels for every a part of the physique: the skeletal system – the physique’s framework of bones, ligaments, cartilage and joints that offers us construction and form; the nervous system – the community that transmits electrical alerts between our mind and the remainder of our physique; and the vascular system – the blood-vessel pipelines that take vitamins and oxygen to our muscle groups. May it’s that some form of ageing alarm was handed by means of the physique through one in every of these programs?
“The best experiment could be, ‘OK, what if we transplanted a younger nervous system into an previous mouse,’” says Mike. “Effectively, we are able to’t technically try this. What if we put a younger vascular system in an previous mouse? We will’t try this, both.”
Irina seems to be at me with a twinkle in her eye whereas Mike continues. “What if we put younger blood into an previous mouse?” he says. This must be greater than a one-off injection – they would wish to switch a big proportion of blood from a younger mouse to an previous one to verify there was an observable impact.
“What if we related the younger and previous mouse collectively? You’ll be able to take an previous mouse and sew it to a younger mouse, and as a substitute of the pores and skin therapeutic edge to fringe of the previous mouse, it heals throughout edge to edge to the younger mouse,” Mike explains, describing a method often called parabiosis. “As that tissue heals, blood vessels re-form there. Now you will have blood slowly trickling from one animal to the opposite and forwards and backwards.”
Between 2003 and 2004, they sutured three classes of mice collectively: younger and previous, younger and younger, and previous and previous. They let the blood stream for 5 weeks, after which gave every mouse an harm in its hind leg muscle. 5 days later, the mice with the younger blood – together with the previous ones – recovered “robustly”, in contrast to the untampered-with oldies, whose muscle groups regenerated “typical of aged animals”.
The crew tried once more elsewhere, with accidents on different physique elements. The liver, identical factor. The mind, identical factor. Because the outcomes started to trickle in over the lifespan of their conjoined rodents, the Conboys had been capable of conclusively say that the tissues of the previous mice regarded extra just like the tissues of a younger mouse – whether or not they had been within the muscle groups or within the liver or within the mind. One thing within the younger blood rejuvenated the previous tissues. In 2005, they revealed their leads to Nature.
The Conboys had found a fountain of youth, however that they had no thought why or the way it labored.
Scientific information is extra of a course of than a single second in time. The trail to right now is suffering from previous, disproven concepts that, maybe, had been truly the stepping stones that received us to the place we are actually. The highway to longevity is not any totally different.
In 1889, in Paris, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a distinguished and celebrated physiologist and member of the Royal Society, stood earlier than an esteemed viewers of friends on the Société de Biologie and gave what grew to become his most well-known presentation. Sensing himself rising previous on the age of 72, Brown-Séquard had began investigating lack of sexual operate, and claimed to have discovered the best remedy: an injection into each of his arms of a mix of blood taken from the gonads, semen and “juice extracted from a testicle” of a canine or a guinea pig.
He was met with shocked silence. There had been analysis suggesting that one thing as but unidentified within the intercourse organs was a salve for the results of age (not less than in males). After his remedy, Brown-Séquard reported improved vitality ranges, muscle rejuvenation, cognitive functioning, and heightened talents and expertise within the bed room. Alas, it proved to be a potent type of placebo impact.
Nonetheless, one in every of Brown-Séquard’s apprentices was Serge “Samuel” Voronoff, additionally a pupil underneath the eugenicist Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate and pioneer of organ transplantation. Voronoff took his mentors’ two novel concepts – placing an organ from one physique into one other, and the mysterious rejuvenating energy of testicles – and examined his personal concept of rejuvenation: he transplanted intercourse glands from the younger into the previous. Particularly, he transplanted fragments of monkey testicles into older males’s scrotums. In 1923, he appeared earlier than scientists on the Worldwide Congress of Surgeons in London, informing them that the process had been so profitable that the Pasteur Institute had constructed him a chimpanzee-breeding compound in west Africa.
Inside 20 years, greater than 45 surgeons around the globe used his method greater than 2,000 instances; 500 males had been operated on in France alone. Voronoff revealed books and papers, and was quoted as saying that life may span greater than 140 years; the press described the outcomes as miraculous and life-changing. In Brazil, the place he was a minor celeb, Voronoff impressed carnival songs. However his celeb light when his strategies had been confirmed to be much less efficient than what seemed to be the enigmatic energetic agent: testosterone, remoted by Ernst Laqueur in 1935.
Each males, discovered and respectable, had pulled on a thread of scientific analysis that appeared logical. But each had been off the mark. On the time, the gold normal of regulatory checks hadn’t but been established to make sure that the remedy they had been proposing was each protected and efficient. At the moment, the equal therapies have been, and younger blood is dancing round it.
In 2016, Jesse Karmazin, a Stanford Medical College graduate, opened Ambrosia Well being’s doorways in a enterprise park close to a redwood forest in Monterey, California, to run an experiment testing the Conboys’ speculation, however in people. There nonetheless wasn’t a lot to go on about why younger blood appeared to reverse ageing – within the decade of analysis since their papers on parabiosis, only some molecular and hormonal candidates had surfaced, however even in these the proof for them was inconclusive, and all of it was in mice.
Karmazin determined to run a human trial of his personal as a non-public firm, and charged an entry charge to anybody over the age of 35 who wished to participate: $8,000 to have biomarkers measured, to obtain a transfusion of 1 litre of younger plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25, and to have their biomarkers measured once more for comparability.
He phoned Irina Conboy to see what she thought; she declined involvement. She didn’t agree with the premise, she tells me – Karmazin’s examine didn’t “match very properly”. There wasn’t sufficient proof that constructive results could be mirrored so broadly. But, even with out her endorsement, the corporate and the trial received greater than 100 press mentions in underneath two years.
Jesselyn Prepare dinner was a tech reporter on the Huffington Submit on the time. “Karmazin was quoted saying issues like, ‘It really works, it reverses ageing’, and ‘I’m probably not within the camp of claiming this can present immortality, however I feel it comes fairly shut,’” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you happen to had been younger, desirous to really feel further succesful, or if you happen to had been previous and making an attempt to, in his personal phrases, reverse your age,” Prepare dinner tells me. “It simply appeared like it doesn’t matter what the issue was, Ambrosia may assist.”
By 2019, Ambrosia Well being had a complete of 5 clinics across the US, and Karmazin was hinting he was seeking to open one other in Manhattan. Different personal clinics, additionally claiming to hold out analysis research, had popped up, providing paying purchasers younger blood transfusions. But younger plasma therapies for the bodily and cognitive results of age had by no means been authorised by the FDA, which launched an announcement in February that yr citing considerations that sufferers had been being “preyed upon” by “unscrupulous actors” touting the therapies as “cures and cures”. Ambrosia Well being went darkish inside hours.
Once I exchanged emails with Karmazin in 2023, he informed me: “The FDA by no means reviewed our information earlier than making their announcement … I don’t know in the event that they had been ever conscious of Ambrosia, actually. It’s totally attainable they had been referring to our rivals, who acted with much less diligence and respect for the foundations.”
“In case you assume that you may merely go and do the process and grow to be youthful – not but,” Irina Conboy says to me once I deliver up the Ambrosia Well being story. “If the purpose is to cease ageing and plateau, or begin to step by step grow to be youthful, I’d simply say that, proper now, we don’t have it. However if you happen to make investments accurately, your time and efforts and sources, we can have it quickly. That’s my feeling about it. Quickly.”
“Quickly” is precisely what some longevity pioneers are banking on.
When I spoke with “rejuvenation athlete” Bryan Johnson in 2023, he was 45 years previous. The biohacker and tech entrepreneur had used his Blueprint algorithm to assist him “reverse” time, by devising a strict protocol of dietary supplements, vitamin, and train that will deliver his “organic” age considerably decrease than his “chronological” age. He had additionally dabbled in younger plasma remedy; his teenage son Talmadge had grow to be what Johnson referred to as his “blood boy” for a short while whereas Johnson’s medical crew assessed whether or not there was any fact to the rumours of blood’s advantages. Johnson in the end discontinued the remedy along with his son, however nonetheless tweets about going to the clinic each few months to choose up a number of litres of albumin – the protein in plasma – like a daily longevity oil change.
On Johnson’s forty sixth birthday, he examined his organic age once more. His goal over the earlier 12 months of the protocol was to see if Blueprint may assist him keep the identical organic age for a complete yr. His pc seemed to be doing its job: his physique was ageing at a charge of 277 days for each 365.
Now, holding again time for one yr might not appear sufficient to stay for ever, however right here’s why it’d: consider it like a rocket leaving the Earth. It wants to succeed in a sure pace to beat the pull of gravity. That is referred to as escape velocity. Now think about that by means of therapies, life-style adjustments and prayers you may cease your self from ageing. The thought is that you’d finally attain the purpose the place every age-related illness, corresponding to dementia or diabetes, and people who we don’t find out about but, can have been cured earlier than your physique ages into them. You’ll escape the pull of mortality. That is referred to as longevity escape velocity. Basically, this isn’t residing for ever; it’s not dying right now.
The escape velocity cusp is nearer than most of us would think about, maintains gerontologist Dr Aubrey de Gray, who coined the time period in 2004 and now runs personal analysis group the LEV Basis. 20 years in the past, he predicted that, as we’re already so long-lived, “even a 30% enhance in wholesome life span will give the primary beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies one other 20 years – an eternity in science – to profit from second-generation therapies that will give one other 30%, and so forth advert infinitum”.
Longevity escape velocity depends on a serious mathematical assumption: that know-how can sustain with the heterogeneity of human decline. The situations that have an effect on you while you’re younger are – medically talking – comparatively easy. However the diseases of previous age might be stated to develop in severity at an exponential charge. Johnson has to remain younger, or an age-related illness that may’t but be handled will kill him. If you’re making an attempt to age in reverse, you’d have to be residing in a time when therapies and applied sciences each enhance on the identical exponential charge. These persons are actually racing in opposition to the clock.
They consider in an thought referred to as Moore’s regulation – a extensively held remark that predicts that each 18 months, pc know-how will get twice pretty much as good. Moore’s regulation is the rationale the cellphone that you’ve in your hand prices across the identical because the final mannequin (not considering inflation), however is twice as highly effective.
Every thing from MRI scans to drug discovery to protein folding is now being considered a computational downside, subsequently the thought goes that fashionable drugs, too, needs to be characterised by an exponential enhance of functionality. If each 18 months it will get twice as highly effective at protecting you alive, what’s going to drugs be like in 20 years’ time? And if you determine how to not age in that point, you start to know why residing to 200 years looks as if one thing that would occur.
Technofundamentalists consider that ever advancing know-how ought to be capable of remedy the ever extra complicated issues we throw at it. So if the physique could be expressed as information and we are able to determine find out how to repair it when it goes improper, why aren’t we already residing for ever? Life – mortality – is difficult.
In his 2024 ebook Why We Die, Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan describes “the attribute vanity that many physicists and pc scientists show towards biologists” that causes the engineers to overlook one thing essential. That one thing might by bodily, nevertheless it’s extra more likely to be one thing unattainable to interrupt down into information. Seamus O’Mahony, the physician and prize-winning creator of The Approach We Die Now, discovered this when he went to a long life convention in 2025. “They’re solely within the biomolecular and the monetisable,” he says. “I heard a terrific deal over the 4 days about AI-designed medicine, glycans, the transcriptome ageing clock, however virtually nothing on the complexity of loss of life programs and the social determinants of loss of life and dying. They appeared unusually uncurious concerning the enemy they’ve declared struggle on. Ageing to them is just a technical downside that may, and can, be fastened.”
The irony is that the mechanistic metaphor that served us so properly is now dramatically impeding additional progress. An excessive amount of religion in information and engineering overlooks the worth of the unknown and the unknowable. So as to defeat ageing and loss of life, we should bend to the technical instruments which are alleged to serve us – from spreadsheets to giant language fashions. We should grow to be extra like home equipment. “This impulse, this motivation, this ethical mandate to wish to enhance your self means we should grow to be like a machine,” says Dr Elke Schwarz, political theorist at Queen Mary College of London.
But “we stay an inconvenient life”, says Schwartz. “We’re bizarre. We’re messy. Our our bodies are mortal. We die. Why can’t we be like merchandise? Why can’t we be just like the issues that pc scientists make that they will enhance and fine-tune?” As a result of we aren’t. But that is the place to begin for a way Silicon Valley intends to “repair” mortality, and their easy options – and what they should obtain them – are on the radar of a few of the strongest individuals on this planet.
In 2025, Donald Trump returned to the Oval Workplace with daring ambitions to remodel the US authorities. Flanking him at his inauguration had been representatives of the biggest tech corporations on this planet, all of whom have thrown their weight and their Silicon Valley wealth behind America’s AI future.
Within the months since January 2025, Trump has granted them entry to funds and infrastructure that can be sure that AI is the driving power behind the US economic system; it’ll additionally propel the technological seek for everlasting life. They consider it’s a ethical crucial to make use of know-how to reinforce the physique and thoughts in direction of immortality.
Regulation is standing of their approach, and regulation is what Trump’s crew is dismantling. Within the early a part of 2025, Elon Musk’s Doge carried out actions that considerably affected analysis on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH), and regulatory oversight of the FDA. The division cancelled leases, diminished the workforce within the FDA’s Workplace of Digital Transformation, and terminated a whole lot of analysis initiatives valued at billions of {dollars}.
Techno-libertarian Peter Thiel, longevity investor and co-founder of PayPal, has assisted with the position of former colleagues and staffers in positions the place they will help dissolve authorities oversight. The appearing director of the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention – till lately RFK Jr’s proper hand man – is Jim O’Neill, a longtime Thiel ally who in 2014 urged reforms to the FDA “in order that it’s approving medicine after their sponsors have demonstrated security – and let individuals begin utilizing them, at their very own danger, however not a lot danger of security”, which could embrace unproven longevity therapies utilizing “younger blood”.
The price of giving a lot to the technofundamentalist dream of AI immortality has been that sources have been allotted away from initiatives that assist people who find themselves getting older right now. The administration proposed cuts of a whole lot of billions of {dollars} to Medicare – the social assist community for healthcare for thousands and thousands of US residents over the age of 65 – and cancelled the White Home Convention on Ageing, a flagship occasion held each 10 years since 1961 to find out the strategic path for coverage to assist older People.
Really, all of this radical technological and governance innovation is not going to assist the remainder of us stay longer, more healthy lives.
It’s simple to roll our eyes at individuals like Xi and Putin who want for immortality, and to dismiss their delusions of grandeur. They consider we’re getting ready to radically prolonged life, and that they, uniquely in historical past, are those who will assist construct the machines that can get us there.
However contemplate this: the technologists who essentially consider within the immortality challenge – whether or not they wish to actually stay for ever, or are constructing AI that they assume will usher within the subsequent enlightenment – are having fun with unparalleled political entry to the leaders of the world, and they’re as soon as once more constructing our future.
For the immortalists of Silicon Valley and the wealthy and the highly effective like Xi and Putin, loss of life is just not thought of an inevitability. Though organ transplantation for everlasting life is science fiction, they do have a head begin within the race to longevity escape velocity, just because they will afford cutting-edge therapies, personalised protocols, and as a lot younger blood as they will morally deal with. They will stay on: as kingmakers, rulers of the world, or bits of pc code that carry their essence all through the cosmos. However as they transform the world of their picture, they promote the parable that human beings are solely as complicated as pc code. These are the concepts which are laying the groundwork for an everlasting for ever. However we do have a alternative about whether or not to simply accept them – or to stay within the right here and now.
