by Chip Walter
He was pretty sure they would conclude he had lost every one of his marbles.
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AUBREY DE GREY was a piece of work. In the early 2000s, he seemed to have dropped out of the sky like some John the Baptist, reap-the-whirlwind desert prophet, rattling his staff and railing against traditional medical science. His gaunt face was hidden behind an immense, messianic beard, and a brown ponytail of wavy hair ran thickly down the middle of his back. His look and style was a 21st-century fusion of Rasputin and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—part brooding, part beatific, a man who understood secrets others could only hope to fathom.
And he had wit. When he gave talks, de Grey would open with questions like: “Hands up! Anyone in the audience in favor of malaria? Good! Because there is this characteristic that malaria shares with aging: It kills you!” He had a puckish way with words too, his elongated British elocutions punctuated by little verbal bombs like “It’s just bullshit!” or “That’s bollocks!” and “Bloody well stupid!”
But no one should be under the impression these lectures were simply out-and-out rants. De Grey was a scientist, in two separate fields. His first degree at University of Cambridge in computer science had landed him work with Sinclair Research Ltd., an artificial intelligence software company. His second scientific venture began when he ran into Adelaide Carpenter at a friend’s birthday party in Cambridge. Carpenter was a well-respected fruit fly geneticist on sabbatical from the University of California at San Diego. She was 19 years older than de Grey, but they got married anyway. During their long conversations over breakfast and dinner de Grey began to interrogate his new wife about her investigations into the biology of genetics.
“Was anyone working on aging?” he would ask.
“No,” she would reply.
“Why not?”
“Because it was wicked hard to study and nobody is going to tackle it. They wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Well, that was just too delicious a problem. So de Grey forsook his former job and took up gerontology while handling software development and bioinformatics at the Cambridge genetics lab where Adelaide and her students worked. Over the next several years he would harangue Adelaide for information, pore over textbooks and journals, pester biologists with every kind of question, and show up at conferences to interrogate anyone he could find.
Despite becoming a gerontologist, de Grey didn’t care much for others in the field. For decades, since the days when gerontology had first emerged in the 1950s, scientists tended to view the aged as some disconnected group of peanut-gallery aliens known as “old people.” De Grey likened gerontologists to geologists who thoughtfully reviewed the Richter scale readouts of disastrous earthquakes but did nothing about stopping the destruction itself. Well, bollocks! He didn’t want to simply witness the process of aging. He wanted to halt it!
Nevertheless, de Grey began writing papers in respected journals like BioEssays and the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine and Experimental Gerontology. He visited conferences and roundtables in Cambridge and Los Angeles and Chicago, and joined scientific societies like the American Aging Association and British Society for Research on Ageing. After all, one had to observe all the appropriate proprieties if one hoped to have an academic hearing.
In 2000, after de Grey completed his Ph.D. and the “eureka” moment had struck, he encapsulated his thinking in his first book, Ending Aging, with co-author Michael Rae. When it was published in 2007, he was suddenly everywhere because he was just what mainstream media loved: frank to a fault, articulate, credentialed, and exotic. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “If even one of [de Grey’s] proposals works, it could mean years of extended healthy living.” In 2010, Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Weiner was so captured by de Grey’s persona that he wrote a whole book, entitled Long for This World about the man and his revolutionary quests. De Grey’s TED Talks hit numbers that clocked in at the millions. He was even interviewed on 60 Minutes, sitting under the lights opposite Morley Safer, expostulating on the possibility of immortality, stroking his great beard and explaining how he had worked out his prescriptions for everlasting life—or as he liked to put it, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, or SENS.
Part of what caught on about de Grey was his straightforward analysis of aging. He was really the first person to come right out and say that it wasn’t heart disease or cancer or Alzheimer’s that were making us old; it was the opposite. Aging was what broke down hearts, bones, and organs; it accelerated cancer and crippled brains. The diseases that plagued most of us were just aging’s side effects. Aging was the mother of all diseases. And if that was the case, why were scientists twiddling their academic thumbs solving diseases one by one, when it would be far smarter to get to the root of the problem—or, more accurately, the seven problems he had laid out that morning in Manhattan Beach? Did we not see that every day 100,000 people were dying from age-related diseases? Two-thirds of the human race. At his talks, he would throw his hands up and rail. We are talking about millions of lives here!
In 2007, this was a radically different view of aging. Even as Ray Kurzweil was honing his ideas on age prevention with Terry Grossman, even while Art Levinson continued to grow Genentech into a bigger, more successful biotechnology juggernaut than it already was, and even as Craig Venter was figuring out how to create the first artificial form of life, almost no one viewed aging the way de Grey did—as a lethal disability with a mortality rate of 100 percent. Kurzweil himself called de Grey the most energetic and insightful advocate for eliminating aging out there.
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AROUND THIS TIME, de Grey became linked, by an unlikely route, with Craig Venter. The editor of MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin, asked Venter if he would sit on a small scientific committee whose job would be to review papers that refuted Aubrey de Grey’s claims that aging could be cured. They were calling it the SENS Challenge. Technology Review was a magazine read regularly by the geekerati, so the request carried real weight in the scientific world.
Venter had heard of de Grey but wasn’t necessarily a fan. He felt the man mostly fulminated, rather than accomplishing any actual science. Nevertheless, the MIT articles that had led to the challenge bothered him. Pontin’s pieces in the magazine clearly showed he didn’t care for de Grey’s views, and to Venter, this felt like the magazine might be railroading the man, or at least trying to marginalize him. Venter didn’t care for that. He knew a thing or two about being railroaded and marginalized.
The challenge had its origins in an earlier article Pontin had commissioned about de Grey in 2004, when he dispatched Sherwin Nuland to Cambridge to put de Grey under the microscope. Nuland, Pontin figured, was the perfect man for the job. He was a physician and professor of surgery at Yale’s School of Medicine, and an expert on medical history and bioethics. His best-selling book, How We Die, had won the National Book Award in 1994. If anyone was capable of disarming de Grey’s outlandish views on mortality, Pontin felt it would be Nuland.
Soon Nuland found himself jetting across the Atlantic and spending hours at de Grey’s favorite drinking hole, the Eagle, a 350-year-old pub where Francis Crick and James Watson themselves had spent their youthful, pre–Nobel laureate days downing a pint or two as they plumbed the mysteries of deoxyribonucleic acid. De Grey personally preferred drinking Abbot Ale, which he saw as a kind of elixir—the wellspring of his boundless energy and intellectual creativity. That’s how he put it.
A thoughtful debate ensued. Nuland wasn’t so much interested in the bearded man’s remedies for aging as he was concerned with the notion of a planet filled to brimming with humans who never died, never had children, and eventually became all the same age. As he saw it, those would be the inevitable results of a world where radical life extension was common.
De Grey said he understood those concerns, and he could see why people came up with the elaborate rationalizations they did to explain death’s inevitability: Knowin
g I’ll die in the future gives meaning to the present. There is a heaven and eternal life after death. I’ll live on in my children or my achievements. I’ll come back reincarnated as a better man or woman (but hopefully not a toad or bottle fly). These thoughts helped people make peace with death, rather than obsessing over the miserable inevitability of The End. What bugged him was the way in which all the objections to long life were raised. If science one day came up with a cure for cancer, he said, the world would sing its praises to the rafters. But suggest that we should eliminate aging? That was heresy!
In de Grey’s view, staying alive—even indefinitely—was a straightforward extension of the “duty-of-care” concept that went all the way back to common law. This simply meant we should care for others if it was possible to help them avoid harm. If someone lived longer because of a new drug, were you going to take away their diabetes medicine or beta-blockers? Why didn’t the same hold true for aging?
That was a good point, but in Nuland’s view, not good enough. He said so officially several months later when he wrote his New Yorker–style story for Technology Review. His assessment was eloquent, and in some ways complimentary, but ultimately dismissive, even chilling.
Personal desires, Nuland said, needed to be balanced with the needs of the rest of humanity—and these were best served by dying when our individual time came. In the end, Nuland concluded that de Grey was dangerous, maybe delusional. It wasn’t that he was some insane dictator or rogue menace, humanity’s Green Goblin or Lex Luthor. It was more complicated than that. He was a benevolent soul, well meaning and agreeable, who would absolutely immolate the species, all with nothing but our very best interests at heart.
When Nuland’s article appeared, something astounding happened: It became one of Technology Review’s most popular pieces ever. But the irony was, readers weren’t nearly as taken with Nuland’s insights as they were fascinated by de Grey’s ideas for life everlasting. Pontin hadn’t seen that coming.
That was when the SENS Challenge emerged and Craig Venter got involved. Venter had been plenty busy in the years following the completion of the Human Genome Project. By 2008, Time had counted him among the 100 most influential people in the world, twice. In June 2005, Venter founded Synthetic Genomics Inc., and then immediately took his newest yacht, Sorcerer II, on a globe-encircling expedition to explore the fundamental processes of marine microbes. He felt there were secrets to be revealed in the millions of ancient and invisible creatures that had evolved over billions of years in the world’s oceans. Later, in 2010, he and his team would create the very first synthetic life-form at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), another of his scientific ventures. Up to that day, every form of life that had ever existed on Earth had been honed in the crucibles of natural selection—but Venter’s team created an entirely new form of life they would call Mycoplasma laboratorium. It was a remarkable feat, and made headlines worldwide.
But again, that would come later. For now, Venter willingly joined the five referees for the SENS Challenge, which included other heavy hitters like Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot and Roomba, and Nathan Myhrvold, formerly one of Bill Gates’s top advisers. Together, Technology Review and de Grey’s own Methuselah Foundation agreed to launch a $20,000 prize that would reward any scientist working in the field of biology who could prove that de Grey’s thinking was so wrong it was “unworthy of learned” debate.
In the end, Venter and the other judges decided the challengers had not made their cases, and de Grey won. Or at least he didn’t lose. Venter, though he was pretty certain de Grey was not the knight errant of everlasting life, felt that supporting de Grey’s point of view at least ensured that those who thought outside the box could get a shot at being heard and debated. That’s what science needed. Maybe de Grey’s prescriptions for longevity escape velocity or engineered negligible senescence made sense; maybe they didn’t. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to do the experiment!
Soon enough, there would be plenty of those to follow.
14 | DON’T F*CK UP
When Art Levinson began considering the remarkable proposition that Larry Page had made to him that October night in 2012, he knew his knowledge of aging and how it worked was just short of zero. Not that he was entirely clueless. He had, after all, picked up a thing or two during those decades at Genentech. He knew that he, and all that company’s teams of researchers going back to the 1970s, had been playing in the very same molecular sandbox that made life possible, and death inevitable, even if they hadn’t been specifically involved in curing aging. But he also knew that the undertaking was going to be the beast of all beasts.
That’s why he couldn’t fathom how people could make these wild prognostications about eliminating death when so little was really known about how to do it. Later—though Levinson would never say so outright—these views had to include the thinking of Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey—and, in December 2015, Harvard genetics professor George Church, who announced at an international summit in Washington, D.C., that he was confident he could reverse aging inside of five or six years.
Now George Church was not some second-rate, white lab coat bumpkin. He was co-founder of Harvard’s vaunted Wyss Institute, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a key player (along with several others) in the development of the gene-editing system Crispr (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). When Church spoke, people listened. Still, this was quite a prediction.
What excited—and frightened—biologists and policymakers about Crispr was its ability to cheaply and easily edit genes; just go into a string of DNA and change them with hardly more difficulty than scissors snipping a bit of ribbon. Gene editing had been around since Boyer and Cohen invented recombinant DNA technology, but Crispr was easier and more accurate, which also made it cheap—and therefore, potentially, dangerous.
But the way Church saw it, Crispr’s powerful gene-editing capabilities would soon mean a quick death for dying. Levinson wasn’t so sure, and he certainly wasn’t willing to make any predictions. In fact, part of him still wondered if the very idea of this company he was getting involved in might not become a monumental waste of time: a big fat lamp without a genie. After all, hadn’t the human race been trying to outfox the grim reaper from time in memoriam? Levinson didn’t mind if something was difficult, as long as it was possible. Possible could be handled. Complexity was to be expected, even sought out and enjoyed. But just running yourself down some rabbit hole?
But that was only part of the challenge Levinson faced. He had to worry about the business side of things too, the resources: the new company’s organization, strategy, total required investment. No one had ever tackled anything like this before. Should the operation be a Big Pharma play à la Genentech, or something utterly different? What manner of human beings should he hire? Biochemists, geneticists, gerontologists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, aging experts, a couple of witch doctors, and a few zombie therapists?
For the better part of three months, Levinson read, researched, and ruminated on these questions in between deliberations with Page and Maris and a few select others. Finally he felt he had all of his ducks in a row. So on January 23, 2013, he and Maris headed to the Googleplex to lay the whole crazy idea out.
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GOOGLE’S BOARDROOM WASN’T very fancy, but it was generous enough to seat its 11 directors. Levinson knew most of them from his days on Google’s board: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders; and John Doerr, one of Google’s original board members, chair of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), and the man who had loved Maris’s genie-in-a-bottle idea so much. Eric Schmidt, former CEO and now executive chairman of Google, was there too. Between 2006 and 2009, Schmidt and Levinson had both been on the boards of Google and Apple simultaneously, something that placed each in a very exclusive club. The point was, all attendees were pretty comfortable in the room that January day. Google’s board respected,
even liked Levinson. Hadn’t Schmidt himself said when Levinson left the board in 2009 that Art would always have a special place at Google? Well, here he was.
Together, as they sat at the table, the group discussed ideas for creating the company soon to be known as Calico. Laura Melahn, who headed GV’s marketing team, had come up with the name, and Levinson liked it—a kind of acronym for the California Life Company, but also a nod to a cat and its nine lives.
The meeting’s presentation was simple: no more than seven slides or so, including ideas that Maris had discussed with Doerr several months earlier. Of course, a crucial part of the conversation was confirming that Levinson would run the new company, because all assembled agreed that he had to be part of the deal.
Among the ideas added to the deck were two concepts that Levinson felt were crucial. First was the idea that Calico should be split down the middle, like the two hemispheres of a brain. This helped him solve his “insanity” problem: the one that sometimes got him wondering if the whole idea of curing aging was even feasible. One side of the company would tackle multiple forms of cancer, as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s. These were immense problems among the so-called “diseases of aging.” Reducing or, better yet, eliminating them would, all by itself, change the world. But eradicating them wasn’t the same as annihilating aging itself. For Levinson, that was an entirely different animal.
Levinson had to admit that this first hemisphere was more in his personal comfort zone, and more in the Genentech model: Find a disease and then find a drug that could eliminate or reduce its damage. Maybe you couldn’t guarantee people would live 500 good years, but you could make some serious, if incremental, progress that would improve the overall quality of human life.
