Silicon Valley startups aim for immortality, technology bigwigs go forward, and Musk sings solo opposites

Focus:

• 1Anti-aging research is a promising area for investment, with a global market size of more than $271 billion in 2024.
• 2 Including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, Google co-founder and other Silicon Valley technology bigwigs have invested heavily in the field of anti-aging.
• Ultraman, the father of 3ChatGPT, invested $180 million in research into anti-aging and quietly took metformin himself.
• 4 Musk has spoken out against excessive life extensions, saying old ideas create "social suffocation" and impede progress.

Tencent Technology News June 11 news, Israeli historian Yuval Harari wrote in "A Brief History of the Future" that when the threat of human beings with huge new abilities, famine, plague and war is finally eliminated, the next goal is likely to be immortality, happiness, and incarnation. Since ancient times, mankind has longed for the fountain of youth. Today, our obsession with health is beginning to spread to the eternal pursuit of life. Backed by billions of dollars in funding, Silicon Valley anti-aging startups are looking to slow down human aging and death.

According to CB Insights, a market data research platform, investors poured more than $850 million into aging and anti-aging startups in 2018. The global anti-aging market is expected to exceed $271 billion by 2024. Anti-aging research looks like a promising area for investment because it hasn't attracted much money in the past, at least relative to the scale of the problem. According to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, nearly one-fifth of U.S. gross domestic product (about $4.3 trillion) is spent on health care, most of which is spent treating older adults. Longevity researchers generally agree that if a drug can slow aging, it may help delay a range of serious diseases, including cancer and heart disease.

At present, the anti-aging industry in the United States is mainly divided into two groups: healthspanners, which are scientists who study longevity, and immortalists, which are dominated by Silicon Valley bigwigs. Healthists advocate that human beings should slow down the aging process through a healthy lifestyle to achieve a longer, higher-quality survival. They believe that humans do not live forever and do not want them to be immortal. Instead, healthists seek to identify and stop the causes of terminal illness. In their perfect world, all humans would live healthy and full lives and then die quickly and painlessly.

Immortals, on the other hand, believe that it is possible—or even likely—for humans to use science and technology to prevent death. Like algorithms and advanced artificial intelligence, Immortals believe they can program the human body to create a future where evolution is controlled by humans rather than nature.

From a biological point of view, the longer we live, the less welcome we become on Earth. Technically, we only have one job – to pass on our own genes. After that, we just take up space. So, when we reach the age of 30, the aging process accelerates, and every day brings us one step closer to death.

Truly understanding the details of the aging process is much more complicated. First, despite a lot of research, doctors and scientists are still uncertain whether longevity is primarily determined by our genes, or by our lifestyle and environment. What we do know is that aging – the process of worsening with age – is ultimately something that none of us can avoid. Over time, our cells become senile and stop repairing themselves. The body's inability to heal leads to inflammation, which contributes to the emergence of chronic diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer's, and arthritis. The unanimous view tells us that each of these diseases is independent and should be treated individually. However, many scientists agree that aging is the main cause of many chronic diseases. If this is the case, by isolating senescent cells, we may be able to "cure" aging.

Silicon Valley bigwigs are obsessed with immortality

In recent years, the bigwigs of Silicon Valley have invested heavily in the study of "immortality", trying to uncover the mystery of life extension and make themselves young forever. Over the past decade, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel have all invested heavily in life-extending and anti-aging research.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel both invested in San Francisco-based Unity Biotechnology. The company focuses on senescent cells, and a major part of the research effort is not focused on aging itself, but on designing drugs and treatments that allow a person to stay healthy and functioning their organs for as long as possible, away from aging-related diseases. Before going public in 2018, Unity Biotechnology had raised more than $300 million. But at Friday's close, the company's market capitalization was just $49.5 million, well below its peak of $972 million in 2018.

MIT Technology Review reported in September 2021 that Bezos invested an undisclosed amount of money in anti-aging startup Altos Labs, which was founded earlier that year. According to its website, the San Francisco-based biotech company focuses on "programming cell regeneration," a theoretical approach to reversing disease, injury and disability.

Thiel is probably one of Silicon Valley's best-known proponents of anti-aging research. An Thiel-funded start-up called Ambrosia revived a 2050s practice called xenosymbiosis, which experimented with incision and suturing of the mice's circulatory system. The studies didn't reach specific conclusions, but the Monterrey, Calif.-based company began similar human trials — infusing the blood of people younger than 25 into participants 35 and older — claiming to have rejuvenating effects. "It's one of the very strange things that people did this research in the '50s and then gave it up completely," Thiel said in a 2015 interview. "I think there are a lot of these things that are strangely unexplored." But in 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against xenosymbiosis. Ambrosia is no longer able to conduct similar surgical experiments.

That hasn't stopped other tech billionaires from pursuing similar end goals. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are co-founders of the Science Breakthrough Award. According to its website, the prize awards $3 million annually to scientists who "have made transformative advances in understanding living systems and extending human lifespan." "I'm most interested in questions about people," Zuckerberg said in 2015. "What can make us immortal? How to cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work, and how do we enable humans to learn a million times more things? ”

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has donated at least $370 million to anti-aging research, according to The New Yorker. Another example is Calico. The company, a subsidiary of Google founded in 2013, has $1.5 billion in funding to study the causes of aging and how to combat it. "Silicon Valley people think those problems can be solved, given enough time and enough action." Kevin Perrott, president of the Global Healthspan Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based health research organization, said, "It's clear that the rewards of this type of research will be enormous. If you can bring that research to market, you have what the whole world needs. ”

Here is a list of well-known Silicon Valley anti-aging startups:

Calico, Alphabet's anti-aging subsidiary, has $2.5 billion in funding. Since its inception in 2013, the company has kept a fairly low profile.

Juvenescence has $165 million in funding to develop "anti-aging" drugs that remove cells in the body that stop dividing and can cause damage to other cells.

Unity Biotechnology is developing drugs that target senescent cells. Backed by Bezos, Thiel and Longevity Fund, the company went public in 2018 and at one point had a market capitalization of $972 million.

• Rejuvenation startup Life Biosciences has raised more than $75 million to research into combating age-related decline.

Samumed, a company that uses stem cells to regenerate hair, skin, bones and joints, has raised $650 million and valued it at $12 billion. The company has raised $33.9 million from venture capital firms Anderson Horowitz Fund, Khosla Ventures and Felicis Ventures, among others, to treat aging.

Elysium Health has raised $71 million to develop direct-to-consumer health products based on aging research.

NewLimit, humans age because their organs decline as they age. If genetic cells are reprogrammed, this decline can be reversed, and people can be immortalized. The company's co-founders include Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong.

Ultraman, the father of ChatGPT, invested heavily in it

Can the breakthrough of anti-aging increase human life expectancy by 10 years of healthy life? Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is paying to find out. When a startup called Retro Biosciences got out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had received $180 million in funding for a daring task: to increase the average human lifespan by 10 years. Just a year ago, the company set up its headquarters in an original warehouse space near San Francisco, bolting containers to concrete floors to quickly free up lab space for scientists drawn to the company.

MIT Technology Review recently revealed that the funding was provided by Altman, a 37-year-old entrepreneur and investor and CEO of OpenAI. Ultraman has shown a keen interest in extending his life, and although he is still young, he has begun to "anti-aging" by taking the diabetes drug metformin. In addition, Ultraman's personal anti-aging program includes "working on a healthy diet, exercise, and adequate sleep." Taking metformin is also popular in Silicon Valley circles, and in theory it may be able to keep people healthy for longer.

Ultraman spends almost all of his time working at the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, whose chatbot has rocked the tech world in recent years with its human-like capabilities. But Ultraman's money is different. He says he has hollowed out his bank account to fund two other very different but equally ambitious goals: unlimited energy and extended lifespan.

He said in a 2021 interview that one of those investments was fusion energy startup Helion Energy, to which he has poured more than $375 million. The other was Retro, which in the same year Ultraman poured $180 million into the company. "That's a lot indeed. I basically put all my net liquid assets into these two companies," Altman said.

Altman has long been a staple in Silicon Valley, previously running Y Combinator, a startup incubator in San Francisco, but little is known about him. With the release of ChatGPT, a software that can write poems and answer questions, Ultraman also began to gain popularity. According to Fortune, the breakthrough in artificial intelligence has made the 7-year-old company a "member of the club of tech superpowers." Microsoft's pledge to invest $10 billion and with 1.5 million Twitter followers is cementing his reputation as a heavyweight, and his creations seem certain to change society in far-reaching ways.

About eight years ago, Ultraman became interested in so-called "young blood" research. In these studies, scientists stitched together young and old mice so that they shared a blood system (the xenosymbiosis study mentioned earlier). Surprisingly: the old mice seemed to be partially rejuvenated.

A terrible experiment, but in a way, very simple. Ultraman was the head of Y Combinator at the time, and he had his staff study the progress of anti-aging scientists. "It felt like this was an outcome I didn't expect," he said. "So, something is happening ... Maybe there's a secret here that's easier to discover than we think. ”

In 2018, Y Combinator launched a special course for biotech companies, inviting those with "radical anti-aging programs" to apply, but shortly after, Ultraman left Y Combinator to focus on his growing role in OpenAI. Then, in 2020, researchers in California showed that they could achieve an effect similar to that of young blood by replacing the plasma of aged mice with saline and albumin. This suggests that the real problem lies with the old blood system. By simply diluting it (and the toxins in it), the drug may be one step closer to curing aging.

Every technology also has risks. In the case of artificial intelligence, it is chatbots that spread lies and misinformation. For rejuvenation, if it does exist, an oft-cited risk is public resentment, especially if it will be offered to wealthy people like Altman in the first place. In 2016, after one of Ultraman's mentors, Thiel, expressed interest in receiving blood transfusions from young people, he was ridiculed by the media as a vampire looking for young victims. A year later, the HBO spoof show "Silicon Valley" launched an episode called "Blood Boy." In the film, a fictional tech CEO attends a meeting whose veins are connected to those of a handsome young man who is introduced as his "blood transfusion assistant."

Altman believes that most biotech companies are used to moving too slowly and often "running badly." What is needed, he argues, is "OpenAI efforts" in terms of longevity. "The main purpose of Retro is to be a really good biostartup because that's a rare thing," Altman said. "It combines great science and the resources of big companies with an entrepreneurial spirit to get things done." This is the current project. ”

Musk openly objected

Unlike other Silicon Valley tech moguls who want to live forever, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been speaking out against excessive lifespan. In Musk's view, old ideas can cause "social suffocation" and hinder progress.

Musk said in an exclusive interview with the media last year that although he believes that the decline in the birth rate is "the greatest threat to the future of human civilization", longevity is not so important to him. "I don't think we should try to make humans live very long. This will lead to social suffocation because the truth is, most people are not going to change their minds," Musk said. "If there is no death, we will be bound by old ideas and society will not progress."

For democracy to work, Musk believes that the ideal age for political leaders should be within 10 to 20 years of the average age of the population they rule. On his own human issues, Musk said that while it's important to stay healthy, he's not afraid of death because it would "be a relief." Musk also said that the founders of the United States set a minimum age for employment. But they didn't give a maximum age because they didn't expect people to live that long. He said. "Because for democracy to work, leaders must reach out to the majority reasonably. If you're too young or too old, you can't say you'll be valued. ”

Musk's view is one of a difference, at least among Silicon Valley billionaires. If humanity can't overcome death, what if it could delay death, or postpone the diseases associated with aging? Many of Silicon Valley's biggest names have a track record of investing in longevity research. But so far, these investments have not been truly successful.

The road to anti-aging is still tortuous

According to billionaire investor Jim Mellon, longevity is the biggest investment opportunity ever. He asserted: "I want longevity to work for me and my portfolio. According to Mellon, there are three areas where breakthroughs will be made in the coming years. The antidiabetic drug metformin appears to help people live longer; The macrolide antibiotic Rapamycin is receiving increasing attention. At the same time, stem cell therapy and gene therapy have proven effective, but at a higher cost.

By supporting anti-aging companies, well-known entrepreneurs and investors hope to profit from the next big thing. But as The New Yorker points out: "Solving aging seems to be only a few decades old, and we haven't seen the game-changing innovation in the industry as envisioned." "While some studies have yielded results in laboratory animals, little progress has been made in clinical trials. The fact that the FDA does not classify aging as a disease complicates the path to bringing anti-aging drugs to market even more complicated. At the same time, the lack of regulation makes the effects of dietary supplements on longevity unproven, leading to hype and confusion.

To make matters worse, GlaxoSmithKline's $720 million deal to buy anti-aging startup Sirtris fell through in 2008, and two years later GlaxoSmithKline halted anti-aging research on the grounds that the results were unsatisfactory and could have side effects. As one paper concluded, health-derived companies "are risky and most likely to fail." Still, the temptation of immortality is too powerful to dampen entrepreneurs, scientists and billionaires in their ambitions to find the proverbial fountain of immortality. (Mowgli)