Blue sky ideas: the disruptive promise of tech titans’ immortality quest

From Gilgamesh onwards, quests for the fountain of youth have not ended well. That has not deterred Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel, who once described death as “a problem that can be solved”.

The quest to extend longevity radically is the first blue sky idea Lex is examining in our annual focus on early-stage innovation.

Jeff Bezos is reported to be among the other tycoons backing the endeavour. Altos Labs, incorporated in the UK and US, is pursuing biological reprogramming technology. It will build on pioneering research of Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka, who will be an unpaid adviser. He discovered that adding four specific proteins can make mature cells revert to something approaching an embryonic state. They can then be transformed into any type of cell needed to treat diseases.

Such an approach might be able to restorevision damaged by glaucoma, a leading cause of age-related blindness. That is the implication of recent experiments on mice by a team from the Harvard Medical School. In September, researchers largely based in Germany reprogrammed heart cells in the same animals. They were able to regenerate cardiac tissue after a heart attack.

Calico, an Alphabet-backed anti-ageing company founded in 2013, is also working on reprogramming, publishing a paper on the topic in 2021. It conducts more than 20 early-stage programmes addressing disease states in collaboration with US-based AbbVie. In June 2021, the partners agreed to invest another $1bn in the pursuit of new insights into the biology of ageing and targets for age-related diseases.

There are numerous challenges to overcome before such treatments can be tested on humans. The main risk is that reprogramming will awaken cancer-causing genes. But advocates for this and other approaches, such as clearing senescent “zombie” cells and reducing inflammation, insist it has great potential.

There are people alive today who will live for 1,000 years, according to one biomedical gerontologist. That, if taken seriously, conjures a dystopian future. If the technology is expensive, only the rich would have access to it; if not, it would further strain environmental resources.

A less contentious and more realistic goal would be delaying the onset of age-associated disorders. Treatments that target multiple disease pathways could lighten the economic burden of an ageing population.

Tech titans chasing after immortality are ridiculed for their hubris. But anti-ageing research could have wide benefits if it is able to reduce years of ill health at the end of every life.

This is the first of five articles on blue sky thinking published by Lex today. Look out for the others in Lex online.