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There are some big-name tech billionaires, mostly middle-aged, pouring funds into start-ups that aim to hack death and solve the natural ageing process.

It seems ludicrous but, if you look at the science, it’s not so far-fetched.

In 2019, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, Diljeet Gill, found evidence in his lab that aged skin could be made more youthful (25 years younger, to be exact) by “reprogramming” the old cells into stem cells.

Shortly after, Gill and his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics, were hired by Altos Labs – that extravagant biological reprogramming technology start-up that Jeff Bezos is said to be involved in.

Altos Labs has a dream team, including other Nobel laureates, and is flush with Silicon Valley cash to the tune of $3 billion.

Despite what has been previously reported, the idea is not so much about making immortality a thing and more about staving off the inevitable ageing process, reported The Guardian.

Prof Janet Lord, director of the Institute for Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham, puts it nicely:

“This is not about developing the first 1 000-year-old human; it’s about ensuring old age is enjoyed and not endured. Who wants to extend lifespan if all that means is another 30 years of ill health? This is about increasing healthspan, not lifespan.”

Also pouring big money into anti-ageing research is Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and big data analyst Palantir.

His go-to is the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit that aims to make “90 the new 50 by 2030”.

Thiel added to that inflated statement with the claim that it could be possible to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”

He is certainly among the more zany investors out there, also advocating for all those US firms offering young blood transfusions for a pretty penny, despite the US Food and Drug Administration warning that there is “no proven clinical benefit”.

The idea came from a set of rather Franken-esque experiments where they found that the muscles, brains, and organs of old mice could be partially rejuvenated when the blood of a young animal was shared with them.

At least there are some out there who find the phrases “solving ageing” and “solving death” a bit much, like Prof Dame Linda Partridge at University College London’s Institute of Healthy Ageing:

“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.”

Unity Biotechnology seems to be working closer to Partridge’s line of thinking, with therapies that flush out the damaged, zombie-like cells from our body called senescent cells that cause inflammation and accelerate the ageing process.

Unity’s co-founder, Ned David, believes the drugs could “vaporise a third of human diseases in the developed world”.

There are many other biotech ventures and investors also experimenting and funding as the clock ticks, and a lot of them appear to be quite viable at this stage.

But as Partridge says, we still “need to see some clinical success stories”.

In the meantime, all of us non-billionaires out there still have Botox, Bio-remodelling treatments, anti-ageing supplements, and other relatively effective hacks to help us look fresher for longer.

[source:guardian]