Forever, for a price

Imagine a world in which you are 90 years old and nowhere near middle-aged. An app on your phone has hacked your DNA code, so you know exactly when to go to the doctor to receive gene therapy to prevent all the diseases you don’t yet have. Every evening you sync your brain-mapping device with the Cloud, so even if you had a fatal accident you would still be able to cheat death—every detail of your life would simply be downloaded to one of the perfect silicon versions you had made of yourself, ensuring you last until at least your 1,000th birthday.

This may sound like science fiction but it could be your fate, provided you can afford it. If current research develops into medicine, in the future the super-rich won’t simply be able to buy the best things in life, they will be able to buy life itself by transforming themselves into a bioengineered super-race, capable of living, if not forever, then for vastly longer than the current life expectancy.

The science of turning back the clock has never been more advanced. In Boston, a drug capable of reversing half a lifetime of ageing in mice is about to be tested on humans in a medical trial monitored by NASA. NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) is a compound found naturally in broccoli that boosts levels of NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), a protein involved in energy production that depletes as we get older. Professor David Sinclair, who headed the initial research at Australia’s University of New South Wales, doses himself with 500mg daily and claims that he has already become more youthful. According to blood tests analysing the state of the 48-year-old’s cells, prior to taking the pills Sinclair was in the same physical shape as a 57-year-old, but now he is “31.4”.

Last February, at Newcastle University, Professor Mark Birch-Machin identified, for the first time, the mitochondrial complex that depletes over time, causing skin to age. Mitochondria are the battery packs that power our cells. So, if we want to slow down ageing, we need to keep them topped up. In the future, Birch-Machin believes, we will not only be taking pills and applying cosmetics, but also have implants in our skin. “Implants will tell us the state of it—how well our batteries are doing, how many free radicals, and will inform us how we are doing with our lifestyle,” he says.

The day after the results of Birch-Machin’s study were published in The New York Times, his department was contacted by nine companies hoping to turn his research into revolutionary pharmaceuticals. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, won a Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, the protective tips on our chromosomes that break down as we get older, leaving us prone to age-related diseases. Blackburn discovered an enzyme called telomerase that can stop the shortening of telomeres by adding DNA, like a plastic tip fixing the end of a fraying shoelace. Today, rich Californians use telomeres therapy to prolong the life of their pets.

Last year, in Monterey, California, the startup Ambrosia—founded by Dr Jesse Karmazin, a Washington, DC-based physician—began trialling the effect of blood transfusions, pumping blood from teenagers into older patients, following studies that found that blood plasma from young mice can rejuvenate old mice, improving their memory, cognition and physical activity.

Dr Richard Siow, who heads the age research department at King’s College London, says we may soon reach a significant point in anti-ageing research because of the massive amount of money allocated by governments and charities worldwide in the hope of making a breakthrough. Indeed, according to a survey by Transparency Market Research, by 2019 the anti-ageing market will be worth £151 billion worldwide.

It is in Silicon Valley, however, that the really radical advances seem likely to be made. Freshly minted internet tycoons appear willing to pay any price to prolong their lives and a critical mass of geeks is working furiously towards understanding our biology at an unprecedented rate. Take Dmitry Itskov, the Russian billionaire founder of the life-extension non-profit 2045 Initiative, who is paying scientists to map the human brain so our minds can be decanted into a computer and either downloaded to a robot body or synced with a hologram. Or Joon Yun, a physician and hedge fund manager who insisted at an anti-ageing symposium of the California elite in March that ageing is simply a programming error encoded in our DNA. “If something is encoded, you can crack the code,” he told an audience which, according to The New Yorker, included Google cofounder Sergey Brin and American actress Goldie Hawn.

And then there is PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who has a net worth of £2.1 billion and has reportedly invested in startup Unity Biotechnology, which aims to develop drugs that “make many debilitating consequences of ageing as uncommon as polio”. Thiel has also offered funding to individual researchers, such as Aubrey de Grey, the Chelsea-born and California-based gerontologist who ploughed the £11 million he inherited from his artist mother, Cordelia, into founding the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation, which promotes the use of rejuvenation biotechnology in anti-ageing research.

Of course, the best-known element of the ‘immortality industry’ is cryogenic freezing. At the Alcor cryonics facility in Arizona, 149 corpses have already been preserved in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 196°C since it was founded in 1972. Worldwide, thousands of people have signed up for cryogenics services. The service doesn’t come cheap (full-body freezing costs £1,65,000, while having your head cut off and frozen is around £60,000) but it has some impressive-sounding clients, including de Grey and Dr Anders Sandberg, research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute.

“It is a gamble but it is still much better than being dead,” says Sandberg. He envisages a world in which the brain is paramount, so when his is revived it could be transformed into a sort of computer programme containing all of his memories of life on earth.

Of course, if such experiments do come to fruition, they could have far-reaching implications for our society. Already, a rapidly ageing population is placing enormous stress on health care and pension systems worldwide. De Grey sees the problem of overpopulation being cured by a dwindling birth rate. But he says little about the impact this would have on the young.

Then there is the question of whether we will one day be living in a world defined by gaping differences in life expectancy—where the ‘haves’ live for 10 times longer than the ‘have nots’. “Mortality has been the great equaliser from beggars to kings to emperors,” says Dr Jack Kreindler, medical director at the Centre for Health & Human Performance in London. “If people embark on really sophisticated, targeted therapies to repair damage to their cells.... I think we are definitely entering into ‘them’ and ‘us’ territory.”

Nevertheless, the quest to overcome mortality continues apace. Last year, at a TEDx symposium Kreindler convened at the Science Museum, London, Daisy Robinton, a post-doctoral scientist at Harvard University, put forward the theory that ageing should be considered “a disease in itself”. She described the excitement in the medical community at the discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, a protein that seems to allow us to target and delete genetic mutations in our DNA. “Gene editing provides an opportunity to not only cure genetic disease but also to prevent diseases from ever coming into being,” Robinton claimed. If gene editing on this scale is possible, Kreindler says we have to ask: can your cells become immortal?

Kreindler is clearly in awe of what the latest medical advances might mean for the future of the human race, but he says, “I don’t believe this should be only for the very rich. If you are going to do things, don’t just do it for the billionaires, do it for the billions.”