As researchers work to make death optional, investors see a chance for huge returns. But has the human body already reached its limits?
Peter Diamandis is five feet four and has pipestem legs, but his torso widens into broad shoulders, powerful biceps, and a craggy, Homeric head. The composite effect is of a genie emerging from a lamp. Our wish is his command, and our wish, surely, must be for more time to make wishes: for limitless life. In December, Diamandis stood before two hundred doctors and scientists and vowed that in the coming decade our wish would begin to come true: “It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem—and we’re going to be able to fix that!”
Diamandis was at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, north of San Francisco, to address the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics. He wore his customary outfit: black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. Having one look and one message—Life just gets more abundant!—spares him decision fatigue. An ebullient spirit whose confidence is tempered, at times, by his reverence for data, he acknowledged that the task was immense. “We have forty trillion cells in our body, and every cell is running one to two billion chemical reactions per second,” he said. “It’s not possible for any human to understand this. We are linear thinkers in an exponential world.” Yet with robots soon able to run a million experiments a day, and with A.I. poised to parse our cellular code, how long could immortality take?
He observed that his clients at Fountain Life, a longevity clinic he established, were already on their way to freedom from disease. They’d have early access to emergent tech, such as a blood filter that can “filter out metastatic cancer” and a transmitter that uses high-frequency waves to diagnose strokes and zap depression: “Remission in a week with ten-minutes-per-day therapy!”
Diamandis, who is sixty-four, has a bachelor’s in molecular genetics and a master’s in aerospace engineering from M.I.T., as well as a medical degree from Harvard. But he’s not a practicing doctor, engineer, or scientist. He’s an emissary from the realms of possibility. After growing up on Long Island in a family of Greek immigrants, he began making his dent in the universe by founding some two dozen businesses, many of which involved voyaging to space. As a young entrepreneur, he formulated Peter’s Laws, which included “If you can’t win, change the rules” and “When forced to compromise, ask for more.”
He promotes the inevitability of longevity through a multitude of channels. There’s the clinic, which he started with two doctors and the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. There’s a newsletter, two podcasts, and books on the future and how to stick around for it. There are partnerships in venture funds devoted to A.I. and biotech; an annual conference, Abundance360, which showcases advances in nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces; and a semi-annual Platinum Trip, where, for seventy thousand dollars apiece, people get to meet eminent longevity scientists, invest in their experimental therapies, and secure those therapies for personal use.
Diamandis’s network, known to its constituents as the Peterverse, is largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes. America’s richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead; Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, and Sam Altman have all funded anti-aging research. Joel Huizenga, the C.E.O. of Egaceutical, a startup whose “water-based drink” aims to reverse cellular age, told me, “We don’t work in mice. We work in billionaires.”
Near the back of the Buck sat the biological theorist Aubrey de Grey, stroking a beard the size of a beagle. In 2004, de Grey coined the phrase “longevity escape velocity” to describe the moment when science stops us from getting older, so that, with further advances, we can begin growing younger. At the time, de Grey was viewed as a brilliant crackpot. He is now seen as a sort of Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift lacked only a practical understanding of how it might work.
The rise in de Grey’s reputation corresponds to Diamandis’s long struggle to encourage longevity research by establishing a prize—his favorite promotional device. In 1996, Diamandis launched the XPrize, a ten-million-dollar award for advances in commercial spaceflight. Eight years later, a team funded by the Microsoft founder Paul Allen sent a manned rocket aloft and won. XPrize went on to establish lucrative awards in domains as diverse as carbon capture, deep-ocean exploration, and literacy software for children.
In 2007, de Grey suggested a longevity prize. Diamandis loved the idea: ever since med school, when he learned that Greenland sharks can live for five centuries, he’d wondered, Why not us? But impediments loomed. There was no agreed-upon framework for interventions; aging isn’t even classified as a disease by the F.D.A. And there was no obvious way to measure competing therapies, short of running a protracted competition to see how long it took participants to die. Perhaps most important, none of the more than fifty billionaires whom Diamandis approached to fund the prize seemed to believe you could turn back time.
The field gradually caught up to him, though. Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarker-based “clocks” that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.
So, at the Buck Institute, Diamandis declared that he’d finally been able to establish a prize in longevity. The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients’ muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars. David Sinclair, a prominent geneticist whose lab recently reversed the effective age of cells in lab animals, told me that the prize had galvanized the field: “It’s helped change the focus from mouse studies to ‘Let’s do something in humans!’ It’s our Wright-brothers moment.”
Many of the clinicians I talked to seemed skeptical about hitting such a difficult target. At the Roundtable, the C.E.O. of the Buck, Dr. Eric Verdin, cited a recent paper in Nature Aging which concluded that we’re already bumping against our biological ceiling. He warned about overpromising: “I do worry for the credibility of our field!”
Diamandis was undeterrable. (Peter’s Law No. 22: “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”) From the stage, he exhorted his colleagues to rise to his level of certainty. “Mind-set is very important,” he said. “Optimists live fifteen per cent longer than pessimists.”
Humans are the only animals known to be discontented with natural selection. Sure, it created us, but we have a few notes. For instance: diabetes was beneficial for our ancestors, because eating fat and sugar shifted them into insulin resistance, helping them withstand cold and famines. Nowadays, chugging a Big Gulp is less evolutionarily shrewd. A feature has become a bug.
For millennia, we’ve sought a fix for debility and death. Medea, of Greek myth, rejuvenated her lover’s father by replacing his blood with plant extracts and foam from a sacrificed werewolf—or, another source has it, by boiling him in a golden cauldron. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, may well have died from mercury in an immortality potion concocted by his alchemists.
Today’s biohackers sometimes look to antiquity for inspiration. This usually involves hormesis—a mild ordeal, such as exercise, fasting, or cold plunges, that can shock cellular pathways into better health. The CAROL, a resistance bike that promises the benefits of a full workout in minutes, spurs users to pedal all out for twenty-second intervals by imagining they are being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. “Neanderthal man didn’t jog,” the bike announces. It’s unclear how CAROL knows that, or why emulating Neanderthals would improve our longevity, as those who escaped the tigers typically died in their thirties.
Most biohackers look to the future. The best known of them is Bryan Johnson, who founded the payments platform Braintree. Once rich and chubby and depressed, Johnson is now, at forty-seven, rich and ripped and determined to live forever. He spends a quarter of a million dollars a year in that pursuit. His regimen has included restricting calories to 1,977 a day, undergoing high-frequency stimulation of his abdomen to simulate the effect of twenty thousand sit-ups, and stimulating his penis with shock waves for some doubtless excellent reason.
Johnson leads a movement called Don’t Die, whose adherents hope that they, too, can reprogram their bodies and minds. Open-sourcing himself, he publishes his biomarkers online, everything from body-mass index to a total duration of nighttime erections (three hours and thirty-six minutes at one recent climacteric). His habit of requiring employees to sign confidentiality agreements and then gliding among them nearly nude has drawn some negative comment, as have his penile metrics. But Johnson told me that it’s a great way to grab people’s attention. “If you tell somebody to go to bed on time, they’re, like, ‘Whatever,’ ” he said. “If you tell them that not getting good sleep is going to ruin their boners—that if they don’t have nighttime erections, they’re seventy per cent more likely to die prematurely—it really is efficacious. No one wants to lose their nighttime erections. That’s a masculine thing.”
Diamandis chooses his words carefully when he talks about Johnson. “Bryan has done more to popularize longevity than any single person,” he told me. “I kind of wish he hadn’t gone down the erection pathway.” Where Johnson seeks to embody biological optimization, Diamandis seeks to articulate the case for its feasibility. His goal is to mobilize a consortium of entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors to help us double our life span and grow rich while we do it.
For Diamandis, the first step to creating the future we want is to speak of it as if it’s already here. He doesn’t watch the news, which he calls “the amygdala-stimulating dystopian from the clickbait media”; he gathers data from conferences, scientific papers, and pitch decks. He checks his colleagues’ claims, but he’s a generous grader. When the noted artificial-intelligence researcher Dario Amodei speculated that A.I. could double the human life span “in five to ten years,” Diamandis immediately began touting the quote—the caveated forecast of someone expert in A.I. but not in medicine—as confirmation that enhanced longevity was close at hand. His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next. Joe Polish, a marketing guru who has worked with Diamandis, said, “Peter has learned that a compelling offer is ten times more powerful than a convincing argument. Now people just want to be part of his world and go wherever he’s taking them.”
Thanks to such advances as antibiotics and better sanitation, our life spans have roughly doubled since 1900. Back then, the leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Now we die of the maladies of old age—heart disease, cancer, strokes, Alzheimer’s. The downside is that we go lingeringly, in ways that we and our children regret. The average American dies at seventy-seven, after twelve years of bad health; if you are old enough to buy a senior-citizen ticket, you are likely to have a chronic disease, or perhaps two.
While the most zealous biohackers seek eternal life, many of the clinicians who oversee their care hope instead to increase their “health span”—the years lived without illness. Traditional life-style therapies, such as Dr. Dean Ornish’s popular approach (“Eat well, move more, stress less, love more”), increase health span. But attempts to target a specific aging dynamic with a specific molecule have mostly just increased scientific vexation. Dr. Jordan Shlain, who runs five longevity clinics, told me, “Everything you do to improve your health span can improve your life span. Everything you do to improve your life span is fucking bullshit.”
It once seemed that improving life span was nearly inevitable. Back in the nineties, a single gene mutation was found to double the longevity of the C. elegans worm, and the geroscientists Simon Melov and Gordon Lithgow made predictions on a bar napkin: Lithgow believed that in five years mammalian life spans would double, Melov that they would more than double. Recalling the moment, Melov sighed and said, “The five- to ten-year horizon for huge breakthroughs has never gotten any closer.”
Animal proxies turn out to be not all that proximate. Lab mice share eighty-five per cent of our DNA, and they live only about two years—a useful period when you hope to quickly determine whether a given peptide might be the long-sought elixir. But mice don’t have heart attacks or get Alzheimer’s, and their muscles waste suddenly, rather than gradually, as ours do. More than eighty per cent of animal-tested therapeutics fail in people.
Our bodies, technically speaking, are just really fucking complicated. The Buck’s Eric Verdin told me, “Peter Diamandis says we’re thinking linearly in an exponential world, and we’ll be able to solve all these problems. But the biological problems to solve also get exponentially harder as you go deeper.” Even the indicators are baffling. Hearing loss has been linked to dementia, as has failing to floss. An impaired sense of smell is more strongly predictive of all-cause mortality than heart disease. And the mysteries do multiply the deeper you go. People who have four organs that are “youthful” for their age are much less likely to experience kidney disease or arthritis, yet those with seven youthful organs—which must be even better, right?—have a greatly heightened risk of diabetes and Parkinson’s.
In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection: every time a cell divides, a few thousand mistakes can be introduced into its DNA. We’re also fighting the entropic forces—time, gravity, and oxygen—that ravage pretty much everything. The authors of a seminal paper in Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such signs of impaired self-regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular senescence (when burned-out cells start oozing toxic sludge), and stem-cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks “are strongly related,” they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently.
Every few years, a new approach promises to turn the switch. These have included taking supplements, such as NAD+, that help preserve genomic integrity; maintaining our telomeres, the protective caps on DNA strands which shrink as we age; perfusing our veins with “young blood”; and taking rapamycin, a drug derived from a bacterium discovered on Easter Island.
Yet interventions that arrest one hallmark of aging often accelerate others. Rapamycin is popular with biohackers because it inhibits the senescent cells that cause inflammation—a condition so associated with aging that it’s often called “inflammaging.” But having too few senescent cells is dangerous, because senescence helps block tumors. Almost nothing the body does is always bad or always good: we walk a narrow footbridge between atrophy (cells failing to replicate properly) and cancer (cells replicating all too well). Caloric restriction, a “natural” alternative to rapamycin, shares some of its benefits—but it can also shrink muscle mass, lower your libido, and suppress neuronal function. Plus, you’re hungry all the time.
The body seems to require a Goldilocks solution for pretty much everything. And yet, to realize significant gains in longevity, we’ll need to significantly disrupt our natural functions. “If it can’t kill you, it probably doesn’t work,” Matt Scholz, the C.E.O. of Oisín, a biotech startup that’s tackling age-related frailty, told me. “That’s maybe not the best way to put it, but you’re perturbing a complex system, so you need to be really doing something.”
Diamandis rises each morning at five-thirty and assesses his overnight biometrics, gathered by an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then, as he meditates, he employs three red-light-therapy devices: one for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria. Along with a Ka’Chava shake, he consumes the first of five daily pill packs: this includes a GLP-1 agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement. After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedalling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at a hundred and fifty grams, one gram for each pound he weighs.
In February, he visited a Fountain Life clinic in Orlando to undergo his quarterly testing. He shuttled between a private room where a video loop of Diamandis himself spoke reassuringly about any worrisome test results—“Wouldn’t you rather find out at the beginning, when you can do something about it?”—and smaller chambers where technicians took blood and saliva and had him blow into a silver bag to test for intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Aides kept offering him electrolyte-infused fizzy water; the clinic describes itself as “like a country club for precision diagnostics.” Annual membership is $21,500, plus about $5,000 for supplements and additional tests. This isn’t bad, as such plans go: the Superhuman package at Extension Health costs ten times as much, and superhumanity is not guaranteed. Aiming at early detection, Fountain Life runs an annual battery of tests your G.P. doesn’t do, such as an A.I.-driven scan for soft arterial plaque. Dr. Bill Kapp, the clinic’s C.E.O., told me, “Seventy per cent of people who die of cancer die of a form that’s not routinely tested for.” Testing is followed by treatments, and then by quarterly follow-up testing. Kapp added, “Just with what we know today, you should be able to get to ninety-five healthy.”
The clinic has five branches and twenty-six hundred patients. Most of them hope merely to be able to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in their seventies. For those with loftier dreams, there’s Epic, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar program that includes an exercise coach and a nutritionist, stem-cell “re-education,” and treatments such as therapeutic plasma exchange, in which plasma is filtered from your blood and replaced with albumin and antibodies from healthy donors. Diamandis has undergone five T.P.E. treatments, each costing ten thousand dollars. Dr. Helen Messier, Fountain Life’s chief medical officer, told me, “I like to say about these men, ‘They spent their health getting their wealth, and now they have to spend their wealth getting their health back.’ ”
As Diamandis was shuttled through a scanner that measures bone density, he imagined a world in which every home became a biodata-mining operation. “My V.C. fund is investing in implantables and insidables, which will be dribbling data to your A.I. at all times,” he said. “We’re going to have sensors in our toilets, sensors listening to your voice, the sound of your cough, recording how you’re walking. This is the future: passive, nonintrusive, constant management, where your A.I. will say, ‘Uh-oh—we better test for this.’ Your A.I. is going to be the best physician in the world.”
He seemed eager for that day to arrive. Having to spend three hours being poked and prodded and prevented from making phone calls rankled; Diamandis is an incorrigible multitasker. Steven Kotler, his co-author on three books, described the experience of driving with him: “You’re moving at seventy-five miles per hour, and he’s texting and also talking on his phone, closing some deal. It’s fucking terrifying.” When Diamandis visits his mother, Tula, she chides him to “go sit in the sun for ten minutes.”
After his blood draws, Diamandis rejuvenated with a “power cocktail” I.V. and chatted with his younger sister, Marcelle Diamandis-Stamatiou, a functional-medicine doctor who consults on his care. A technician came in with a questionnaire: “Stress level on a scale of one to ten?”
“I’d say six or seven.”
“What is your H.R.V.?” Marcelle interjected, referring to heart-rate variability, or the minute differences in heartbeat rhythm. A low score can indicate stress.
Diamandis checked his phone. “Last night it was a twenty.”
“A good number is fifty or sixty,” Marcelle said. She turned to the technician: “He’s a ten for stress.”
“I’m an 8.5,” Diamandis said, scrolling.
“Pete, listen to me,” Marcelle implored. “You’re chasing all this, chasing these markers of senescent cells. What you need to chase is stress. Breathing, and being present, and family, that’s what reduces stress…
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