How The Ultra Rich Are Trying To Live Forever

the French playwright you Jen ionesco once asked why was I born if it wasn't forever but life if anything is impermanent flowers die stars die and you will die so if you can't defeat death what if you could postpone it or at least postpone the diseases commonly associated with getting old many people especially the ultra wealthy in Silicon Valley are investing money into companies trying to answer exactly those questions richest man in the world Jeff Bezos and billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel have both invested in the space in 2013 Google formed aging research company calico there's also bio age bio Viva the longevity fund age X the Methuselah foundation and many others whenever you meet a fundamental human need there's a market and in this case the market for age-related disease and aging is a trillion dollar market billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to aging research bullet-proof founder Dave Asprey has spent more than a million dollars hacking his own biology I right now I'm expecting to live to about a hundred and eighty I think that's very achievable assuming a truck doesn't hit me people claiming to know what you ought to do to live longer is not anything new historically as is still the case today a lot of it just doesn't work medicine is a fake I'm a fake yeah officer fake this is no good I tell you mother were cheating all the people don't you see from selling dietary supplements to stem cell injections there is already a huge amount of money being made right now in San Francisco for $8,000 you can get a litre of blood from 16 to 25 year olds injected into your body by one estimate the global anti-aging market could surpass 271 billion dollars by 2024 goals vary to from trying to add decades to your life to simply trying to extend the years your body remains healthy so what's real because there really is new science worth being excited about and what's just wishful thinking or straight-up snake oil if you look around for ways to live longer or look younger you will be offered tons of solutions activated charcoal is the general longevity leader in research and extending lives and animals I take about a hundred and fifty supplements a day this could limonade all disease this perhaps is immortality like snake laws and some people especially in places like Silicon Valley are already taking sometimes elaborate steps to fight their own aging bodies it's our job to disrupt things we literally go out and say isn't there a better way to do this so why wouldn't we disrupt medicine because frankly medicine has failed us part of it comes from the technology and the engineering sort of mindset that many of the people who have become wealthy in Silicon Valley have they view human biology as something that can be engineered and so I think that many of us who are biologist by training can look at some of the strategies that money's being thrown at and just say that's not gonna work the science of aging gerontology is not new but fairly recent advances have changed what scientists suspect might eventually be possible today if the question you're asking is what has science proven without a doubt we'll help you live longer the answer will not surprise you if you wanted to ask me with certainty what could I tell you can we do to help you live longer it's the things that we more or less already know about don't eat too much exercise regularly don't smoke but scientists are working on much more radical but promising approaches to attack aging there's been a real breakthrough in longevity research in the past couple decades starting in the 1990s scientists at for example UCSF discovered that you could change single genes in a tiny worm and get increases in lifespan this opened up the possibility that evolution actually controls in a sense aging we're starting to learn a lot about the biological mechanisms of aging and the possibility of going beyond what we already know works to slow the aging process or in some cases even functionally rejuvenate aged animals and hopefully aged people we've got hypotheses now that have been tested in animal models but have not yet been demonstrated to have those effects in people for the most part researchers are focused on increasing your health span the length of time you're not just alive but alive and healthy living longer it might be a consequence but they say it's not the primary goal well you know a lot of people think that scientists working on aging have as a goal to extend human lifespan our to make people immortal in or to stop aging itself I wouldn't say that that's not our goal but our primary focus is improving the quality of life in our later years so we're free of debilitating chronic diseases late in life you know if people live up to a hundred and ten plus years if they had the functionality of a 20 year old that would be better for them probably better for everyone around them so how do you do it while their goals might be similar scientists are approaching this in different ways well there's two schools of thought either is for Paris regulations so if you take a young sell an old sell that have same DNA then there are only differences that regulate it differently and you can reprogram an old self be a young cell and it's becoming more and more routine that's one category of aging reversal but other ones are they're just they're just things that flow around in your blood many of the essential components your body drop with age and if you just bump those up then your body says oh yeah I'm young again and we're not literally engineered you know this is evolution but mice die at two years of bowhead whales die at two hundred years and so clearly it's negotiable one prominent company working in the space is unity biotechnology it's raised more than 300 million dollars from investors like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel unity focuses its research on specific types of cells called senescence cells cellular senescence is the accumulation of cells in our bodies as we age that no longer divide and when cells do this we call them senescent cells now stopping dividing is not bad for you the bad part is that when cells do this and pull this emergency brake they begin spewing out all of these factors these inflammatory factors and factors that destroy your tissue and it's these factors that wind up driving a bunch of aging features and particular diseases and if you could understand what those mechanisms were if you could intervene in those mechanisms you might be able to make it so we all got to live vibrant more healthy lives in 2019 unity published first-of-its-kind data from a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial on humans specifically using anti aging mechanisms the study was about osteoarthritis of the knee patients got a shot of unities drug in their knee which was meant to destroy senescence cells our data in humans was the first then it was a small 48 patients study this year in 2020 will have a hundred eighty patients it'll be the first of its kind my belief is that if those data are positive that we took a feature of Aging and sent it backwards in almost 200 patients that is when things would begin to change unity is developing its treatment the traditional way by going through the rigorous steps to get FDA approval I believe that what all of us in this field ought to be trying to do is to make medicines to benefit as many people as possible the best way to do that is to use the classical development path the disadvantage to that is it takes a long time and it's expensive the advantage is if you get FDA approval you can be confident that there's probably a real benefit there and we know what the risks are venture capital firm the longevity fund which invests specifically in aging related companies also invested in unity people often ask us how big motivating market is we don't have any earthly clue I mean a couple hundred billion is a number for a single age-related indication imagine drugs that combatted all of those another company working on aging is age X in Alameda California it's in a much earlier stage than unity and its main focus is what it calls induced tissue regeneration in the short-term it's working on a topical hydrogel that would facilitate healing and minimize scarring in the long term it hopes to apply the same basic ideas to age-related disease early in life in the very earliest stages of life if you have a heart attack your body just grows the heart back and so we believe if we turn the clock of cells back far enough in time we can unlock this regenerative potential and allow the aged human body to repair itself the basic science is already on the lab bench here and we plan to do this with FDA you know hand in hand we want to work out delivery technologies to get these therapeutics into the body we need to test them in animals and we hope in a few years we'll be able to begin human clinical trials but even if a company operates with scientific rigor there are important ethical and societal questions that need to be considered even if we can one day make people live longer should we if you're living more years but not necessarily more healthier years what does that mean for the cost of healthcare what does that mean for quality of life how do we ensure that those those years gained our years that people actually would like to be alive and are enjoying being alive and fully engaging in their existence when I was in the prime of my working days there were five workers to every retired person when the baby boomers retire there will be three workers to every retired person if we live to a hundred and fifty we will go down to almost parity where there will be one worker for each retired person over 85 is the single largest growing group of Americans and that is going to put a burden on our health system it's gonna put a burden on our Social Security system older people are wealthier than younger people can say they have disproportionate power in the marketplace and all of that skews everything towards the elderly the biggest concern for many is that anti aging interventions are being developed as a tool for the wealthy investment in such research by the ultra rich can be seen as trying to buy the one thing money hasn't yet been able to buy them immortality this utopian dream of living forever and I do believe that the anti-aging proponents are not just interested in adding another 10 or 20 years to their lifespan they're really looking for immortality immortality has been the dream of human beings and it's been a story part of our mythology since the earliest times but it is a narcissistic dream because I have yet to hear a single social good that that will bring but again most companies in this space say they're not actually trying to increase lifespans they say they're trying to increase the number of years people remain healthy is unity trying to help people live forever first we don't know how and even if there were a way that's not the business for it do I think that the reason that we live and operate in your Silicon Valley has something to do with this idea that the Silicon Valley powerful want to live a long time that isn't easy and sort of entertaining idea I've never got an email from one of those people asking actually that's not true I did get one but he's not an investor okay increasing a person's health span is perhaps less ethically consequential than significantly increasing their lifespan but there are still important questions to be asked you can tell based on what socioeconomic resources a person has what education level they have how much money they make in their job whether they have health insurance or not whether that's state-funded health insurance versus private health insurance all of those things are things that also currently affect both our health span and our life span so there are many modifiable factors of human existence right now that are nowhere near as sexy as you know life-extending biomechanics or medical treatments but those should all be on the table if we're truly talking about improving the health span of humanity these ethical concerns aren't necessarily reasons to not pursue anti-aging therapies but they do highlight how important it is to have conversations about ethics while you do so the United States is a country whose poorest men died 15 years before its richest it's 10 years for women the richest Americans lived on average 3 years longer in 2014 than they did in 2001 and the poorest Americans didn't gain any year's life span is about much more than what science knows is possible it doesn't mean these companies shouldn't exist but it does mean inequality around when you die can't be solved with pharmaceuticals alone there are scientists at universities who are every day understanding more and more about how aging works there are companies developing real science based drugs and techniques that may one day prove to successfully help humans combat aging these companies are confident perhaps but also careful and they're not yet selling anything there's a highly regulated pathway one has to go through to make it to market as a drug and longevity companies are not exempt from that but there are loopholes for things like supplements that are considered natural or procedures that involve taking stem cells from your own body and injecting them back into you that allow companies to sell products with out FDA approval products exploiting these loopholes far outnumber companies carefully developing aging related drugs the basic science is so exciting it's inevitable the public will hear about it and it's inevitable that the charlatans will try to offer up you know fake versions of real science to the public a little anecdote which is oh my friend took the stem-cell therapy and he feels great you could probably find a hundred examples where the opposite happened so you can't use anecdotes you have to use clinical trials there's nothing illegal about what people are doing so I think it becomes more of a personal question of is it ethical or not as a scientist to start recommending to people that they take something for which there is little to no data that it will actually benefit them there is definitely a large number of people out there who are rushing to apply what they think they know about the mouse studies in themselves you know they've read the literature to the extent that they are able to understand it and they immediately try to apply whatever the the newest discovery is from from the basic science science is very hard and it takes years to make the insights and the progress to build a medicine to take to people biohacking on the other hand if you think about the ideas that animate it it's that this stuff isn't complicated but it's not hard and what could go wrong what you find is if you examine each of the underlying beliefs is that they they don't hold up as correct so will there be incredible science fiction ask longevity advancements in your lifetime there might be but you'll hear about them they'll be clinically validated and fda-approved and you won't have to track them down on websites trying to sell you stuff we're not going to add decades human life from those drugs it's more likely years if anything we're going to see just virginal impacts on lifespan starting now and the presumption would be that those will increase over time so you won't see a great leap to a brighter future you'll see your reviewer small changes that add up my expectation is that there might be a half-dozen medicines I'm talking three decades from now widely used the target diff and mechanisms that target agents in a series of diseases that are now inescapable these will be features of Aging that you'll read about in books kind of the way a public pay telephone is now is like oh my goodness look it's a phone booth right it's this vestige of the old I believe these insights and these future medicines will drive that sort of future

Channel: CNBC

Views: 1,556,878

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, jeff bezos, elon musk, longevity research, hack biological age

Id: EYXKCfLJXM4

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sergpepper]

I live in Russia, where there is no affordable quality medicine, where products contain harmful substances, the quality of life of ordinary poor people at the poverty level, work does not bear fruit ... how to live in such an environment for more than 45 years? I left all my health at work, which takes all my life force.

[u/CireAvos]

I’d like to see a sequel, ‘How the rest are just trying to get by’.

[u/Swedish_Pirate]

What do we do when they achieve it though? They aren't going to make it affordable to everyone, they're going to create a 2 tier society of those that get to live and those that get to die.

[u/timshel42]

its up to us to make sure that doesnt happen.

*sharpens guillotine blade*

[u/[deleted]]

Bezos should be mind uploaded into a smart toilet. That's fitting for him.

[u/therodt]

The meths are coming

[u/JoeyvKoningsbruggen]

I hope they can.

[u/rchive]

The rich and educated have been seeking immortality forever. This is not some new development. Countess Elizabeth Bathory bathed in virgin blood in the 1800s to try to retain youth. We always later learn that what they tried was crazy and ineffective, and that the real ways to improve life are simple and fairly accessible to everyone, like eating healthy, getting exercise, etc.