The Longevity Gold Rush: Adding Years, Selling Dreams

(image:genspark.ai)

Remember that once-fresh meme from long ago – "live fast, die young"? It has been put out to pasture. Welcome to the longevity-industrial complex – equal parts earnest lab science, boutique wellness, and venture capital's most durable faith-based product: the future ROI of human time.

Many decades ago, I accompanied a friend to her appointment at a company south of Los Angeles. It was called Alcor and she had been hired to take photographs of what was happening behind the locked doors of the company's building in a drab industrial area of the city.

Their business was to cryogenically freeze human heads within minutes of death, with the permission of their, um, previously very-much-alive owners. There were some issues here, as you can imagine, besides the obvious creep factor.

Why just the heads, you may ask? The healthy residents of the heads urgently did not want to expire for any reason (sickness, accident or old age), and because there was no mechanism to keep them alive forever, they figured that they could be frozen and re-animated when technology caught up some time in the future. Bodies were too complicated (organ damage during freezing and the like) but the heads seemed a reasonable aspiration. If the technology was that advanced, they could be grafted onto any old body (preferably a pretty one, recently deceased). Many legal agreements were apparently signed between the company and their still-breathing customers. A long waiting list was rumoured.

It was a little grisly in there. Dead animals in various states of dismemberment (they were the test subjects for the embalming and freezing technologies). A couple of supercooled, futuristic-looking barrel-shaped metal affairs which might or might not have contained heads (I seem to remember that they wouldn't tell us). And some very earnest scientist types and a few operating tables with alarming-looking equipment.

I remember thinking at the time about how weird a person would have to be to want to wake up 100 years from now, when everyone you know is dead; what would be the point? In any event, the life-extension industry was not a thing back then. It was the playground of cranks, amateur enthusiasts, dreamers and mad scientists.

Not anymore.

At the beginning of the 21th century there were a handful of companies operating in the life-extension space, and some academic work going on in microbiology. There was no investment from the venture capital community. By 2015 there was about $500m in venture investment and fewer than 50 companies dabbling here and there.

In 2024, $8 billion was invested in the sector and many hundreds of companies are developing and peddling their wares. It is expected to continue at a double-digit annual compound growth rate. It is not called life-extension anymore. It is called healthy ageing, but that's just marketing-speak.

One of the problems that had beset this young industry is that there is no single 'villain' of the ageing process. It's not good enough to stamp out heart disease if you are going to die of cancer, right? More recently biologists and their fellow travellers have come up with a more useful unified framework: "hallmarks of aging". This framework identifies nine interconnected biological processes that progressively lose function over time, leading to impaired physiological integrity and increased vulnerability to death.

Trying to understand these nine processes is well above my paygrade, but here they are, for those readers who studied these things – genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient-sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication.

No one villain then, but more like a gang of assassins, and the unified framework sets up a fertile set of targets for the considerable amount of money being poured into this sector. The two major approaches currently being pursued are preventing non-functioning ('senescent') cells from gumming up the works and poisoning the waters (so to speak), and reprogramming the genes to reverse or stop 'genetic clocks'.

So who is playing in the field? Companies like Altos Labs, Juvenescence, Retro Biosciences, Unity, and Calico have hogged the limelight and attracted the most capital. These companies were often founded with seed capital from the ranks of the tech-bros club – Sam Altman and others. Nobody, it seems, is more eager for life-extension than those dripping with wealth, influence and ego.

The research is going well, according to all accounts. At least for mice in the labs, although history is littered with animal experiments that did not translate that well to humans. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of trials underway.

Still, there are very clever scientists for whom life-extension treatments are considered to be an inevitability, sooner or later. One extreme example – Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist based in Silicon Valley, and a widely published original gangster and somewhat of an icon in the life extension movement – was asked about immortality. His answer: "There is a 50% chance we will reach longevity escape velocity within 20 years." This seems to be pushing it a little far – healthy ageing is a fine goal, but immortality seems, I dunno, a little unwise? Things could get a little crowded, right?

There are also a slew of ethical questions. It is certainly true that some of these technologies will allow some of us to live longer and healthier lives, but then who gets access to them? They are not going to be free, and will be unlikely to be handed out to you by governments with your ID card and passport. The words elitism and exclusion pop up a lot in this debate.

Do I want to live forever? No. Do I want to live longer and healthier? Well, yes, but how much longer needs a little more definition. Ten extra years seems attractive. But given the seemingly endless and increasing nastiness going on in the world around us, I would be hesitant to ask for more.

Finally, am I sceptical of the whole enterprise? Let's just end here – we will spend money to outsmart biology, we will tell ourselves clever stories while doing it, and occasionally stumble across genuine breakthroughs. Until those breakthroughs reliably add decades of healthy life, the sensible posture is sceptical optimism: cheer for better science, roll your eyes at 1,000-year life plans on a two-year burn rate, and save your scepticism for treatments that sound cheaper than the trials needed to prove them.

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, Daily Friend and Currency News. His new book "It's Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership" is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now