How the rich and powerful plan to live forever

Imagine you’re the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world. You have everything you could want at your disposal: power, influence, money. But the problem is, your time at the top is fleeting. I’m not talking about the prospect of a coup or a revolution, or even a democratic election: I’m talking about the thing even more certain in life than taxes. I’m talking about death.

In early September, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about strategies to stay young. “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Putin said via an interpreter to Xi.

“There’s a chance,” he continued, “of also living to 150 [years old].” But is this even possible, and what would it mean for the world if the people with power were able to live forever?

Over the centuries, we have used ever more sophisticated technology to heal ourselves into unprecedented longevity. In the 20th century, it was innovations in public health and medicine that effected this transformation, allowing today’s children to live longer, healthier lives than at any time in history. Yet that’s still not enough for some.

I got curious about the growing cadre of billionaire investors coming from Silicon Valley who wanted to live forever. What world were they imagining?

I’ve been a technology reporter for 25 years, chronicling the rise of the web from its early days. I have reported on how it has transformed our social world, and I’ve railed against overzealous developers pushing disruptive innovations that inevitably come into conflict with society at large.

Billionaire investors

I got curious about the growing cadre of billionaire investors coming from Silicon Valley who wanted to live forever. What world were they imagining and building, and how would the rest of us fit into it?

I’ve met people who have tried radical life-extending experiments and biohackers who swear the numbers will keep them forever young, and seen inside Silicon Valley labs where technologists are planning a longevity revolution. I uncovered the motivations, ethical conundrums and doctrines that drive the belief that we are on the brink of eternal life, and that these immortalists are the people who will give it to us.

The term used for this in age research is “healthspan”, and the objective in most contemporary science in this field is to increase it. Healthspan means staying healthy for longer and keeping the diseases of old age at bay. It means keeping your body young, intervening in the process of growing old, and considering the possibility of “rejuvenation”.

This is where “respectable” science gasps: “the fringe of the fringe”, a doctor colleague said to me dismissively when I mentioned I was researching the topic. Yet there is a growing body of evidence that there is something biological underlying how we age – and some out-there researchers, funded by Silicon Valley, are trying to figure out how to tweak it, so that our bodies actually can go backwards in time.

Landmark experiments

It started in the 1990s, when a young molecular biologist named Cynthia Kenyon and her postgraduate student Ramon Tabtiang designed several landmark experiments with a tiny nematode called C. elegans. Their findings suggested that tweaking a gene doubled the lifespans of these creatures.

Kenyon gave a talk at Stanford University not long afterwards. “She looked like a super-young, very hip professor,” says Irina Conboy, who was there with her then boyfriend Mike, both PhD students at the time. “And she suggested that simply by changing the intensity of certain molecules, you can make an old animal younger.”

When I meet Irina and Mike Conboy in their office – now married, they are both professors in the bioengineering department at the University of California, Berkeley – they are wearing matching tie-dye sweatshirts and finishing each other’s sentences.

They are charming, warm and a bit shambolic. Their tiny white pup is comfortably chewing on his leg on a saggy sofa, next to a sheaf of papers.

The couple have one big question when it comes to ageing: “So why is it that all the tissues of the body seem to grow old together?” Mike asks. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re on the outside or on the inside, whether they’re exercised or going along for the ride.

Everything seems to go to heck in a handbasket with age.” They wondered if there was some kind of signal in the body that changes the molecular structure of muscles and ages them all simultaneously. They set out to find out what all tissues have in common.

It’s easy to roll our eyes at people like Xi and Putin who wish for immortality, and to dismiss their delusions of grandeur. They believe we are on the brink of radically extended life, and that they, uniquely in history, are the ones who will help build the machines that will get us there.

But consider this: the technologists who fundamentally believe in the immortality project – whether they want to literally live forever, or are building AI that they think will usher in the next enlightenment – are enjoying unparalleled political access to the leaders of the world, and they are once again building our future.

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