They want to be 50 to 90, and to do that they are willing to spend millions of dollars every week on experimental treatments.
A while ago, American tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to transfuse his teenage son’s youthful plasma into his own aging body. Today, he spends $2 million a year on a research team dedicated to understanding how we might live longer. And he is not the only one in Silicon Valley to have embarked on this quest for eternal life.
The race to counter aging gained real momentum in 2017 with the launch of Ambrosia, a startup by Jesse Karmazin that offered plasma transfusions to prevent aging. Hundreds of customers, mostly in their 60s, paid $8,000 to participate in what was essentially still a trial.
Research work continues. Michael and Irina Conboy, professors in the department of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered that mixing the blood of old mice with that of young mice resulted in a “younger” blood profile. This discovery could revolutionize research into age-related diseases. However, the couple insist that this will not necessarily make older people “young”.
The quest for immortality is not limited to plasma transfusions. Billionaires are also looking for other solutions. Last year, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the third richest person in the world, invested in Altos Labs, a start-up working on “programming cellular regeneration.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has invested millions in the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to make “90 the new age of 50 by 2030.”
However, it is essential to point out the ethical concerns raised by these advances, especially given the growing power of billionaires in this area. Some fear that certain groups of people will be excluded from this new reality, based on the decisions made by those who hold the keys to these technologies. Today, although mortality is still inevitable, it is clear that humanity’s obsession with immortality is only intensifying, fueled by technological advances and the desire to transcend our biological limitations.
