The Greatest Life Extension Technology of All Time
Billionaires are super focused on longevity tech. Just not the kind most likely to benefit you.
The richest, most powerful men on Earth have long sought to extend their time on it. Legend has Alexander the Great coming across the healing “Water of Life” in the 4th century B.C. Spanish Conquistador, Juan Ponce de León, who was funded by King Ferdinand II on his expedition of the new world in the 1500s became linked to an apocryphal search for the Fountain of Youth among Florida’s waters. Following in the tradition of a reclusive, nineteenth century Eastern European oligarch who’d famously employed a similar method for “radical life extension,” twenty-first century billionaire Peter Thiel saw regular transfusions of young blood as the key to staving off mortality in 2016. According to Life Extension Magazine, Aubrey de Grey, a pioneering, British scientist dedicated to the “elimination of aging” believes that “within 30 years, it may be possible to rejuvenate a 50-year-old individual to such a youthful condition as to allow him or her to live to the age of 130.”
As Gen X and elder Millennial billionaires, centi-millionaires, biohackers, and optimizers have entered middle age, life extension and anti-aging have become pressing concerns. Once a philosophy relegated to the fringes, “transhumanist” values of leaving behind the mere human lifecycle are now a major focus for tech disruption. In March 2023, MIT Technology Review reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had invested $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a company “trying to delay death,” by adding “10 years to healthy human lifespan.” Not to be outdone, the government of the 37-year old Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia plans to put $1 billion a year towards discovering anti-aging treatments. And Altos Labs, whose investors include the likes of Yuri Milner, and possibly Jeff Bezos, has bet $3 billion on cellular rejuvenation. What do you get the men who have literally everything? More life. As it has been for millennia.
Death anxiety is particularly on trend in the US right now, of course, where the arrival of COVID-19 unplugged American life expectancy from life support, and it has been tumbling down ever since.
“Across the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations,” NPR reports. “A big part of the difference between life and death in the U.S. and its peer countries is people dying or being killed before age 50.”
That’s almost old enough to be rejuvenated to 130!
“The average American now has the same healthy life expectancy (years lived in good health) as someone in Blackpool, the town with England’s lowest life expectancy,” writes Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch. “I think that bears repeating. *The average American* has the same chance of a long and healthy life as someone born in the most deprived part of England. Despite being a richer society on average, the poorest in the US are even poorer than the poorest English.”
As the chart indicates, only a handful of the US super-rich manage to match English life expectancies. Or to put it another way — an American would need to be considerably richer than the Queen of England to get to live as long as the Queen of England did.
“Even Americans with healthy behaviors,” write the authors of “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” a landmark 2013 study from researchers convened by the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institutes of Health, “For example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries.” The researchers call this the “U.S. health disadvantage.”
Into this arena has stepped Bryan Johnson. “The most measured man in human history” and arguably the most famous self-experimenter for radical anti-aging, Johnson has been daring greatly to reverse his body’s biological age markers. Against a backdrop of nearly unprecedented decline in life expectancy for the average American, Johnson is striving valiantly to buy himself more time. As Businessweek explains:
Johnson, 45, is an ultrawealthy software entrepreneur who has more than 30 doctors and health experts monitoring his every bodily function. The team, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, has committed to help reverse the aging process in every one of Johnson’s organs. Zolman and Johnson obsessively read the scientific literature on aging and longevity and use Johnson as a guinea pig for the most promising treatments, tracking the results every way they know how. Getting the program up and running required an investment of several million dollars, including the costs of a medical suite at Johnson’s home in Venice, California. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.
Johnson, Zolman and the team are more than a year into their experiments, which they collectively call Project Blueprint. This includes strict guidelines for Johnson’s diet (1,977 vegan calories a day), exercise (an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week) and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light). In the interest of fine-tuning this program, Johnson constantly monitors his vital signs. Each month, he also endures dozens of medical procedures, some quite extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies. “I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no one is pushing the envelope as much as Bryan,” says Jeff Toll, an internist on the team.
According to Zolman, the results achieved so far have been “small, reasonable;” not yet “remarkable.” But he and Johnson are only just beginning. There are hundreds more procedures for them to explore, including numerous experimental gene therapies.
What goes unmentioned in the discussions of life extension innovation, of course, is that we already did manage to achieve something remarkable before. The society-wide advances in life expectancy we take for granted now would have been unimaginable to our predecessors only a handful of generations ago. But perhaps equally as inconceivable to us today is the technology that was used to accomplish this.
For thousands of years, half of all humans didn’t live past the end of puberty.
Then something strange happened. Mortality went down. Way down. People suddenly began living much, much longer. The average newborn girl in 1841 Britain would not have been expected to see her 43rd birthday, but by 2011 British life expectancy had nearly doubled. In fact, despite the gross differences in average life expectancy from country to country, since 1900 life expectancy has more than doubled globally.
What happened?? Vaccines? Antibiotics? Hospitals? What scientific discoveries and marvels of modern medicine could have led to such a dramatic increase in human life expectancy in such a short period of time?
In The Role of Public Health Improvements In Health Advances: The 20th Century United States Grant Miller and David Cutler show how a single intervention seems to have had as great an impact as almost all the others combined on extending the human life span: the widespread implementation of water sanitation systems.
The greatest life extension technology of all time has not been a biomedical breakthrough. It’s clean, public water.
“In 1900, 37% of deaths were caused by infectious diseases,” explains Eric Gilliam, Fellow at the Good Science Project. “By 1955, the number was down to less than 5%. Today, it’s down to around 2%. This trouncing of the infectious disease problem made society’s most dangerous medical problem almost obsolete within half a century.”
Cutler and Miller identify all of the major American cities with clear records of when water chlorination and filtration technologies became widely available. As Gilliam writes:
For these 13 cities, the authors made a graph for each showing the mortality rate of typhoid fever and when the city-provided chlorination or filtration systems began reaching the majority of individuals. (as a note: these technologies are substitutes to some extent)
All 13 graphs, more or less, generally look like the following, with major drops in mortality immediately following the implementation of a clean water system.
Some of the reductions seem to begin immediately before the vertical lines, which is to be expected, because the authors drew the line to coincide not with the first year a clean-water system was implemented but, instead, the year in which it finally reached the majority of citizens.
The authors then go on to use much more robust statistical methods to estimate that clean water and filtration systems explained half of the overall reduction in mortality in the early 1900s, 75% of the decline in infant mortality, and 67% of the decline in child mortality. [Emphasis added]
The greatest life extension technology of all time has been mass pathogen mitigation.
Yet even as fewer people were dying young of waterborne diseases, they were now living longer to die of more systemic, chronic illnesses in middle age and beyond. “In the same period when infectious diseases fell from 37% of total deaths to less than 5%,” writes Gilliam, “other diseases became our new ‘major problems’. Deaths due to heart disease, cancer, and strokes grew from 7% of total deaths to 60% of total deaths.”
These kinds of conditions are multi-factorial, but a particular, recurring factor has kept persisting. As far back as 1918, people born during the flu pandemic had a noted increase in the risk of heart disease in adulthood. A century, and a brand new global pandemic later, we’ve once again discovered that even a “mild” case of what most people think of as merely a respiratory infection can increase their chance of heart failure by 72%, heart attack by 63%, and stroke by 52%.
Over and over research keeps linking the most devastating diseases of our time to viral infections sometimes a decade or more in the past. The list of post-viral illnesses includes:
- Parkinson’s — An October 2021 study in JAMA Neurology found 70% higher risk of developing Parkinson’s following flu infection
- Diabetes —A January 2021 study in Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, found virus-induced activation of the immune system increases risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
- Multiple Sclerosis — In January 2022, researchers at Stanford Medicine showed how the Epstein-Barr virus leads the immune system to attack the body’s own nerve cells, triggering Multiple Sclerosis.
- Alzheimer’s — A January 2023 study in Neuron identified 45 viral exposures significantly associated with increased risk of neurodegenerative disease, with the largest association between viral encephalitis and Alzheimer’s disease.
- Autoimmune disease — In April 2023, two retrospective studies in Nature Reviews Rheumatology found considerable increase of new-onset autoimmune and inflammatory diseases after COVID-19 infection.
- Cancer — There’s a whole peer-reviewed publication devoted to this: Infectious Agents and Cancer. We’ve known viruses cause cancer for a long time.
Recent research out of the University of Helsinki, published in April 2023, has revealed “unprecedented prevalences of viral DNAs in human organs.” Long after the acute infection is over, many viruses remain lodged in your body permanently. Virus DNA can be found in the heart, lungs, blood, brain, and elsewhere, till the day you die, as tissue samples from 31 recently deceased Finnish individuals confirm.
How this pervasive viral persistence may compound over time and correlate to long-term, chronic, degenerative diseases — the kind we associate with “aging,” mind you — is something we do not yet fully understand. We are only just beginning to bother to look. But that it has “a significant impact on our health,” the researchers note, there is no doubt.
The greatest life extension technology of all time has been public health infrastructure.
Given what we already know about the prolifically destructive long-term effects of viruses, is it possible that mitigating viral infections and preventing their persistence could do for life extension in the 21st century something as radical as we haven’t seen in a hundred years?
How long could the average person expect to live a healthy life if a “wellness intelligence network that removes pathogens from the air” wasn’t just for a perk for a billionaire’s mansion? What if every building and indoor space we work, study, and travel through was subject to air quality standards and had to meet health-based ventilation targets from ASHRAE/CDC/NIOSH. If air sanitation measures became adopted globally. Sound ridiculous? Every city has water treatment facilities and we think that’s normal now. It wasn’t always this way.
What if we invested in developing next generation vaccines, such as sterilizing nasal sprays that are much more effective at stopping the #3 cause of death in the US (you know what it is). Or how about a vaccine against the Epstein-Barr virus, whose prevalence is 5 times higher in breast cancer tissue than in benign controls. A vaccine that prevents EBV infection could certainly be a contender for adding 10 more years to the healthy, human lifespan. With it, my half sister, who’d had mono, which is caused by EBV, when she was younger could have easily lived a decade longer, at least, considering that when she died of breast cancer she was only 56. 90% of the world’s population has been infected with the Epstein-Barr virus according to Frontiers in Oncology.
“A widespread view among longevity researchers,” according to MIT Technology Review, “Is that if aging could be delayed with a drug, it could help postpone a host of serious diseases, including cancer and heart disease.”
But what if we’ve had it all backwards? What if reducing the prevalence of viruses, which can lead to cancer and heart disease, could help delay aging in the first place? What if reducing viral transmission could be a major avenue of prevention for some of the most intractable health problems we face now that we get to live well past puberty? And what if the solution we need for that isn’t “radical anti-aging schemes” or extreme biohacking or magical midlife rejuvenation technology. What if… I know this is gonna sound crazy after the past few years but hear me out….what if reducing viral transmission is something public health could do?
The types and ages of deaths in the US, writes, Burn-Murdoch, “suggest the US’s life expectancy problem is as much (if not more) a social problem than a health problem in terms of the way we should think about it.”
Yet in the face of these problems that are fundamentally collective, we are now confronted with perhaps the most deliberate dismantling of public health since its inception. And into the gaping void of degradation have stepped billionaire-funded longevity startups and anti-aging technofetishists horny for the genitals of adolescents. Wait. What? I mean, for individualistic solutions. The quest for personal life extension in the face of weakened population health systems is a zero-sum, Darwinian struggle — not against a predator or an enemy, but against a society capable of improving life expectancy for all. Even as fountain of youth fantasies consume the most wealthy and powerful, as they ever have, the most radical life extension technology of the future, like the time before, may yet turn out to be boring, boring, boring, societal infrastructure.
