Immortality, Inc.

by Chip Walter

  This was all easier said than done, of course. Back in the early, euphoric days of the Human Genome Project, scientists had become so excited about the huge advance it represented that everyone forgot that sequencing the genome was not the same as comprehending it. Right now, science understood 2 percent of all those laddered spirals. Of the 33,000 specific genes that did the work of creating a human being, 32,340 were then unknown: pregnant with information, but a black hole bigger than the Messier 87 galaxy (and that was the biggest one in the known universe). You could imagine it was something like an old-world map from the age of discovery where some frustrated cartographer had scratched out a few outlines of continental coasts and then, inside of large white spaces beyond, scribbled the words “Here be dragons.”

  But if Human Longevity, Inc., could fill in the blanks, then the bald spots on the great genomic map would disappear, and every bit of that information would be available for license to anyone who wanted it. And if HLI also chose to develop any new drugs or treatments of its own, then there was that possibility too. Alliances could always be arranged. But first things first: Gather hundreds of thousands of human genomes, and then ransack the mountains of data to decipher what it all meant. That was the ticket.

  * * *

  —

  TO ACCOMPLISH IMPRESSIVE FEATS such as this, HLI needed two kinds of information: high-resolution sequencing of people’s individual genomes, as well as deep dives into each patient’s personal and medical history. Collectively, this is known as phenotypic data.

  Phenotypic data synced a patient’s genome with the real world of his or her health and background. Was the person 20 years old or 60? Were they Olympic specimens, or did they have heart problems and arthritis? How tall were they? What did they eat? Were they obese or slim? Where did they come from and what was the health of their parents and siblings like? Did they have any diseases? Did their parents? Combining genomic and phenotypic information created what was known as an “integrated genome,” because it revealed both sides of the same human coin, and helped to match what you experienced in life with the details of your DNA.

  HLI’s massive, integrated genome enterprise was Sabatini’s Face Project all over again, writ large. That project had taken eight mind-searing months of unremitting machine learning. We broke the Cloud! And now Venter wanted to do the same thing, top to bottom, with hundreds of thousands of human genomes.

  This idea went way back with Venter. One day, when we were talking in his HLI office, he told me in his inimitable way that it wasn’t as though creating the company had been “some kind of brain fart.” As far back as 18 years earlier, he had told the science journalist James Shreeve, “We’re going to be on the forefront of everything. We’re going to need to build the fastest computer in the world, with data production orders of magnitude bigger than anything else. We’re thinking on a different scale. Just doing the human genome and stopping there is way short of what can be accomplished.”

  In the Venterian mind, health, aging, disease, and the genome were all variations on the same theme. Each revealed the other. It was just that it had taken a decade and a half for the world’s computing software to catch up. The need and the will had been there, but not certain resources—the technology and money. At last these had emerged too, so now it was time to succeed. And in his mind, the genome was the key: the wellspring of all human insight.

  And so HLI’s machines had begun cranking out the trillions and trillions of bits of data that had for so long been hiding up evolution’s long and hoary sleeves. And, at last, they were unmasking more than a few of its stubborn secrets.

  22 | EVERYONE HAS SEEN THE ADS

  Everyone has seen the ads. Pharmaceuticals with names like Plavix, Lexapro, and Humira that seemed to be the cure for every possible ailment—rheumatoid arthritis, erectile dysfunction, high blood pressure, Crohn’s disease, hepatitis, depression—the ads brimming with smiling, happy people romping with their dogs, hugging their children, embracing their spouses as the sun sets and the joys of a healthy life reveal themselves in all their glory.

  Yet, no matter how sublime the images, no matter how thick they were with remedies, it was also impossible to miss the alarming ways each drug might maim or destroy a part of your brain or anatomy with some side effect: serious liver problems, suicidal thoughts, high blood pressure, blindness, cancer, autoimmune diseases, loss of muscle control, incontinence, even death itself. The lists seem to go on longer than the remedies! Why all of these disclaimers describing the many ways your cure could also be the end of you? The answer was simple: It was because so much of the pharmaceutical industry is a high-stakes, genetic crapshoot.

  That became all too clear one summer day in 2016 when Ken Bloom, HLI’s president, was holding forth with a small group that included then Vice President Joe Biden and a cluster of Big Pharma executives. Biden soon began berating the group for gouging patients and insurers with the outrageous prices they charged for their drugs.

  Now, the minions of the pharmaceutical industry were hardly pure as the new driven snow when it came to charges like this. But those in the room nevertheless felt compelled to speak up. One of the heads of Merck looked at Biden and said, more or less, “Hell, we’d love to reduce the cost of drugs. Inside our labs we have the ability to synthesize just about any compound you can think up, but that’s not the problem. The problem is we don’t understand the chemistry.” If Merck could sit down and tell the federal government which specific molecules might actually solve cancer or Alzheimer’s or name-your-ailment, the company would happily run to synthesize busloads of cheap and perfect drugs. But who knew the answer to that? Nobody.

  Nobody walked into a lab with a perfect solution, because no one truly understood how the human body worked—which was another way of saying nobody knew how the human genome worked. The best they could hope for right now was promising research that would lead to a series of FDA trials that would become, after years and many millions of dollars, either functional enough to pass muster or flamed-out disasters.

  It was as if drug companies were playing a vast game of seven-card Texas hold ’em, just hoping their researchers could pull the cards for a royal flush or full house out of the deck. They had 52 cards, which meant winning was possible, but by no means a slam dunk. Most every pharmaceutical company gave developing an effective drug their best shot. Sometimes you won, and sometimes you lost. Whatever the case, it always cost boatloads of money—and frankly, it was usually messy, which meant no drug out there could truly tailor itself to each and every human being.

  That was the rub, and that was why the FDA required all of those disclaimers. Because if some poor soul used a drug that damaged rather than helped him, and didn’t know about it, all sorts of biological and legal hell would break loose, and that would not be a good thing for anyone. The point was: Costs for drugs, and for those lengthy examples of their side effects, were not going to disappear until medicine got a far better handle on what the human genome was trying to tell everyone!

  Bloom had other examples of how insights into the human genome could kill you or save your life, depending. Take the infamous H1N1 flu epidemic of 2009. H1N1 killed 203,000 people worldwide—one of the worst pandemics in recent history. The first known outbreak was in Veracruz, Mexico. In analyzing the epidemic’s genomic data, HLI’s chief data scientist Amalio Telenti found that for every 40,000 children, one died of the disease. That wasn’t a lot (unless you were the child who died), but the statistics had a “genomic” ring, as if something in the genes made some children more susceptible to the virus than others.

  When Telenti looked at the records of the children that died, he noticed about 60 percent had preexisting lung illnesses like asthma or cystic fibrosis. It was easy enough to see how those diseases could make the flu deadly for them—but what about the other 40 percent? Before they got the flu, they appeared to be perfectly healthy. Then the next thing you knew they were gone, wiped out by the virus.

 
; It turned out that the thing killing those children was in their genes. They simply didn’t have the specific DNA that enabled them to fight off the H1N1 virus. But who would have known it? Normally the virus wouldn’t kill most people, because no one got it in the first place. And if none of those children had come across that particular strain of flu, they would have been just fine.

  The point for HLI was that the best way to drop medical costs, improve health, and ensure that a killer disease didn’t get you was to understand what secrets your genome held. But again, that would only be possible when huge amounts of the genetic and phenotypic information could be assembled.

  Now, at the end of 2016, almost three years after HLI’s founding, Venter had upped the stakes and officially set one million integrated human genomes as the company’s goal. Why a million? When Bloom would embark upon his meetings with pharmaceutical companies or insurance conglomerates or federal agencies, he had a nice analogy he liked to use to explain the idea.

  Imagine you plan a trip from the United States to Japan. You know some basic Japanese and have a little book with some helpful phrases. That’s great, if you only need to get from the airport to your hotel, or maybe buy some sushi at the local katsupōten. But if anyone starts asking you where you’re from, or what you do for a living or your thoughts on Japanese politics, pretty soon you’re lost.

  But it could be worse: What if someone decided to engage you in insights about Zen Buddhism or Sartre’s views on existentialism or even an ounce of biology? That would require a very deep vocabulary, as well as subtle grammar and syntax—which meant, to use the vernacular, you were screwed.

  The same held true for the genome. Without lots and lots of genomes synced with integrated phenotypic information, good luck comprehending what the strangely linked nucleotides are trying to tell you. You need, in effect, to improve your vocabulary, upgrade your Japanese dictionary. So the Data were important. And HLI had been making progress in those first three years after its founding growing the dictionary: It had gone from zero integrated genomes to 40,000, which was about 37,000 more than anyone else in the world had at the time. Along the way, it had managed to peel back a few layers of the genomic onion. For example, everyone knew they inherited 50 percent of their genes from their mother, and the other half from their father, right? Well, no. HLI’s initial findings indicated that most humans introduced at least 50,000 entirely fresh and unknown rungs into their personal DNA, about 8,500 of which had never been seen in any other individual thus far sequenced.

  Bloom called this the Wheel of Fortune, because the new genes were utterly new and random mutations. True, they constituted only a small percentage of your total DNA—nevertheless, the shift could introduce entirely new proteins. Maybe they would throw a wrench in your genes, or maybe they would make you smarter or stronger. There was no way of knowing. That was how the evolutionary lottery worked; that was why species evolved slowly, and why each of us is as different as a newly fallen snowflake.

  HLI’s findings revealed other surprises too. The company had continued work at the Venter Institute, analyzing the genes of thousands of centenarians. For decades, gerontologists and quacks and everyone in between had been looking to the Exceptionally Long-Lived for insight into their extended existence. Everyone has read, at one time or another, the story in their local newspaper about “Pearl,” the 110-year-old who was still as spry as a sapling. When asked the inevitable question about her secret to such a long life, she would say with a wizened grin, “Cigarettes, chocolate, and a shot of whiskey every day. And all the sex you can get!” Some funny bon mots like that. Well, scientists, too, wanted to know why the world’s 316,000 centenarians were still drawing breath.

  In 2011, author Dan Buettner had come across an extraordinary story when updating his book The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer. “Blue Zones” are areas of the world where Buettner noticed that people seem to live an unusually long time. One was the Greek island of Ikaria, located in the Aegean Sea not far off the coast of Turkey.

  According to Greek myth, Ikaria was the place where Icarus had plummeted to the sea when he flew too close to the sun, thus the name of the island. According to the legend, Icarus’s father Daedalus was considered the greatest inventor and scientist of his day, and so he was summoned by King Minos of Crete to create a labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man. After Daedalus dutifully built the labyrinth, Minos trapped him and his son inside to protect its secret. But Daedalus, being the clever inventor that he was, fashioned magnificent wings made of feathers and wax for him and his son, and together they made their escape from death and the labyrinth.

  Daedalus cautioned his son not to fly too close to the sun, because its heat would melt his newly constructed wings. But during the flight, Icarus was so overcome with the joy and pride of flying that he disobeyed his father and flew too high. His wings melted and he plunged helplessly into the Aegean.

  More recently, Ikaria has become famous for something else. As Buettner found, many Ikarians are unusually long-lived, routinely reaching ages beyond 80, 90, or 100, strong and healthy until the end with their morbidity seriously compressed. I visited the island to see for myself. At local cemeteries, I found tiny plots festooned with flowers and pictures of those who had passed, but not before they had lived long lives: ΒΑΕΙΛΙΚΗ ΛΕΡΙΑΛΗ 1920 to 2014; ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΑ ΚΑΡΝΑΒΑ, died April 21, 2015, age 99; ΕΛΕΝΗ ΚΟΥΡΑΚΗ, 1910 to 2008.

  One of Buettner’s more fascinating discoveries was a dark-haired, bowling ball of a man named Stamatis Moraitis. Stamatis had emigrated from Ikaria to the United States after World War II. He moved to Port Jefferson, New York, where he married, built a painting business, and raised a nice family with three kids. All was well until he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in his early 60s. His prognosis was six to nine months.

  Doctors recommended that Moraitis undergo aggressive cancer treatment, but he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could pass his final days among its peaceful hills. So off he went, planning to enjoy time with his parents (who were still alive and healthy) and live out his last days in their little whitewashed cottage on the north side of the island.

  But after several weeks of lying in bed waiting to die, nothing happened. In fact, Moraitis started to feel better. He began sipping a little local wine and spending time with his friends. Soon he began to plant a few vegetables in the garden. Still he didn’t die. Instead he grew stronger, built a vineyard, and made 400 gallons of wine a year. He expanded the house so his kids could visit, and lived 35 more years, utterly cancer free. No drugs. No treatments. Just the sun, clean air, and good vibrations of Ikaria.15

  The media loved this story, and so did readers of Buettner’s Blue Zones books. Clearly, this place delivered some sort of elixir that fortified the bones and blood, and laid disease to waste. At least that seemed to be the headline.

  But the idea of a longevity elixir was not Buettner’s takeaway. Moraitis’s story was a fine yarn that helped reveal the joys of Blue Zone living, but he knew there weren’t any magic potions. Mostly the reasons Ikarians lived so long (especially those who were born in the early 1900s) had to do with their lifestyle: walking for miles up and down the island’s high hills, eating fresh, organic food from their own gardens, imbibing healthy herbal teas, living by the sea with very little stress, and spending lots of quality time with their family and good friends. No one worried about time, or the stress that came with it. Of course, the occasional glass of local wine might not have hurt either.

  The truth was, nearly anyone would do pretty well this way. Except then, they would actually have to live in a relatively stress-free Blue Zone. And that would be difficult, because most people do not settle down in small Greek islands where anxiety is low and the food is local and fresh. Buettner knew better than most that Ikarians didn’t actively try to live exceptionally long lives; it was simply a natural side effect of how they
went about their business. Still, there had to be some way to bottle all of this vitality, didn’t there? Sure enough, after the publication of Buettner’s book, people from all over started coming to places like Thea’s Inn in Ikaria to get their proper doses of longevity.

  Buettner had met Thea Parikos during one of his research trips to the island. Later, I met her too, because her appearances in Blue Zones books had made her a celebrity of sorts. Thea loved people coming to visit her little inn. But did they have to be so obsessed with long life? Travelers would show up at her place in the tiny village of Nas (population 90), and after spending some time eating the food and breathing the bracing Aegean air, head back to America or Sweden or Germany or England, figuring they would soon emerge as healthy as the gods themselves. Of course, it didn’t work that way. Life was good if you lived there, but leave and all the benefits disappeared. Kind of like Shangri-la.

  The desire for quick longevity fixes was understandable. Why not hope that people like Pearl and Stamatis possessed some sort of ambrosia that made living and dying more bearable? This was precisely why Venter and Human Longevity, Inc., had wondered if some people had specialized genes the rest of the human race had been deprived of: little bundled proteins that acted as microscopic Fountains of Youth. And if they did have them, wouldn’t it be nice to find them, and learn to swap them into the rest of us so that everyone could live long and prosper?