Immortality, Inc.

by Chip Walter

  29 | PLAN A

  After all the conversations, queries, and explorations into the complicated ways death might be arrested; after I had traveled 50,000 miles from here to there and back again, meditating on what The End really meant, Hugh Hixon kept edging into my mind. I decided to go back for a visit and walk among Alcor’s shiny canisters and patients as they mutely awaited resurrection. There, Hixon—the constant gardener—remained, devotedly shuffling among his stainless steel dewars, topping them off, and, now and again, tipping the people who hoped never to die into their frigid cocoons.

  Professor Laurence Pilgeram was still there, in one of the neuro cans. But his family wasn’t happy about that. They are suing Alcor for one million dollars, arguing that Pilgeram didn’t want to be a neuro after all.

  But that wasn’t stopping other Alcor members from using the foundation’s services. When I last checked, neuro member A-1547 had passed through the veil, Norma Peterson. She was living near Alcor in a memory care nursing home. Then one February morning her heart gave out. The FCP team was right there. They performed the Final Protocols and, soon after, her vitrified body was placed in its appointed canister.

  Hixon’s words echoed in my mind. Time is our enemy. I can’t stop it, but I sure as hell can slow it down. And he was doing just that. Counting Norma Peterson, 31 more patients had arrived at Alcor’s Chill Chamber since the day Laurence Pilgeram’s heart stopped in April 2015. Diane Cremeens, Alcor’s patient coordinator, said that in just those four years, people’s views of cryonics were changing. Interest was up, significantly. The calls she received about Alcor’s services were now arriving daily, and the foundation was adding roughly one new member a month. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable.

  But again, Alcor was plan B. Where was plan A?

  * * *

  —

  CALICO WAS WORKING ON THAT. The proof came just before and just after the beginning of 2018, when Art Levinson told me about two remarkable discoveries made at the lab. Each revealed that science might outwit aging after all, and finally turn Gompertz’s rising curve into the long, flat line of unending youth the company was built to create.

  The first discovery came from Shelley Buffenstein’s preposterous mole rats. The findings revealed beyond a shadow of doubt that the critters simply refused to age.23 Even as the years passed, their hearts remained strong, females kept breeding even after 30 years, and their body compositions, bone quality, and metabolism functioned as well as they did when they were pups.

  This was not simply surviving to a ripe old age, like Ikaria’s centenarians. This was as if a 100-year-old was romping around in the body and mind of a teenager. The little animals did die, eventually, of course, but not from aging; maybe a fight, or because of a genetic problem with a faulty organ or gland. But not from growing old. For Levinson, this proved that it was possible for a mammal to defy beta: the intrinsic, unstoppable killer. Now, Calico hoped to pass the same secrets on to Homo sapiens. Figuring that out might take some time, but at least now it looked as if science had at last proven that somehow aging could be stopped.

  Calico’s second discovery unveiled the opposite side of the coin: the creation of youth. This research had to do with the way eggs and sperm talk to one another.

  In any living organism, eggs sit dormant in the female, ready to be fertilized. But during that time, like every other cell in the body, the eggs also age, accumulating small clumps: the evidence of time’s damage. Given that damage, how can an older animal create a brand-new offspring, the epitome of youth?

  Cynthia Kenyon’s group found the answer as they watched C. elegans sperm approach the creatures’ eggs. (Worms have sperm and eggs too.) In real time, they could see the sperm sending a chemical signal that awakened tiny membranes called lysosomes within the egg. These then reached out like long fingers to snatch the damaged clumps and obliterate them. That meant that by the time the sperm arrived for the happy moment, the egg was perfectly rejuvenated, ready to begin fresh and new.

  So far, Kenyon and her fellow researcher K. Adam Bohnert had only seen this happen in worms and, later, frogs. But maybe the mechanism worked in all living creatures, including humans. It made sense that it would. Why, after all, would evolution toss aside a system that worked so well?

  This opened the possibility that a drug for humans could be developed that might trigger similar lysosomes to happily go about shredding damaged cells found throughout aging bodies—rejuvenating hearts, livers, muscle, skin, brain, and bone. Was this possible? “Maybe,” said Kenyon, “maybe, maybe…with a little help from genetic engineering.”

  30 | UNBOUNDING THE FUTURE

  By now, the last of the four forces that drive great endeavors was undeniably in the wind: Success. In May 2018, Japan’s Ministry of Health gave researchers at Osaka University permission to begin injecting 100 million stem cells into three patients with advanced heart failure in 2019.24 If a second trial involving 10 patients succeeds after that, scientists plan to roll the treatment out commercially.

  Another 2018 study at the University of Washington revealed that when monkeys with damaged hearts were injected with stem cells from human hearts, their hearts regained up to two-thirds of their normal capacity. Essentially, the procedure turned their biological clocks backward. If these approaches work, they could slow or repair millions of damaged hearts. Stroke and heart disease continue to decline, but they are still the world’s number one killers.

  Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s millionaires and billionaires continue to transform their high-technology plays into longevity plays, investing money in venture funds like Proteus, and start-ups with names like Halcyon Molecular and Butterfly Sciences. Some analysts reckon the market for regenerative medicine will hit $20 billion by 2025.

  Aubrey de Grey was still funding multiple longevity research projects including one at the University of Arizona and another at Yale. His SENS Research Foundation was doing so well that by early 2018 the foundation had closed five million dollars in donations when it was only asking for $250,000.

  In 2018 Celularity, Inc., the company Bob Hariri and Peter Diamandis founded, landed another $250 million from investors and a board of directors that included life coach guru Tony Robbins; Andrew von Eschenbach, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and John Sculley, ex-CEO of Pepsi and Apple (and the man who had ousted Steve Jobs in 1985). Celularity researchers were developing reconstructive and orthopedic treatments, as well as cures for wounds and burns. More than 12 preclinical trials were in the works. Hariri predicted that placental stem cell therapies would soon go mainstream. If they did, it would mark the first wave of biotech advancement—Kurzweil’s Bridge Two arriving not on schedule but ahead of it.

  One of Celularity’s early investors, and a board member, turned out to be Bill Maris. Maris had surprised almost everyone in Silicon Valley with his departure from Google Ventures in 2016. He went on to create a new venture firm called Section 32, and by 2018, it had raised $350 million. The investments so far were going into life sciences, health care, and high technology. One of the largest investments ($133 million) was in a Silicon Valley start-up called Alector, which focuses on combining antibody technology and new discoveries in human genetics to develop novel therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

  Peter Thiel, an Alcor board member, was busy too, having recently invested in more than 14 health and biotech companies. His fascination with parabiosis, the transfusion of young blood into older people, seemed to be gaining traction. Ambrosia, a start-up in Monterey, California, was selling transfusions of human plasma drawn from young donors to its 600 clients (average age 60) at $8,000 per 1.5 liters. Although the promise was to deliver a ready-made injection of youth, the jury was still out as to how effective that approach was.25

  In addition to Celularity, Peter Diamandis had become involved in two more longevity ventures. One, founded by a team of Harvard researchers, is called Elevian and fo
cuses on the same blood-based therapeutics Peter Thiel found so fascinating. It promises to “target root-cause aging processes” and “develop new medicines to restore regenerative capacity.” One of the diseases now on their radar: sarcopenia. Diamandis’s other venture is called Fountain, another partnership with Tony Robbins that involves a worldwide network of regenerative and longevity medical clinics linked to Celularity that sounded something like Venter’s old HNX idea. As of early 2019, though, there had been no formal announcements.26

  In the midst of these endeavors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, now the world’s richest human, had begun injecting tens of millions of dollars into longevity ventures—including Unity Biotechnology, the company backed by the Mayo Clinic that is working on ways to eliminate senescent cells in the body.

  Even Bill Gates—the man who once remarked, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer”—was jumping on the longevity bandwagon. The cost of treating Alzheimer’s in 2017, he said, was skyrocketing: $259 billion in the United States alone. Unchecked, it could rise to $1.1 trillion by 2050. During the past two years, Gates announced donations of $100 million of his own money for Alzheimer’s and dementia research.27

  My, how things had changed. In 2012, during that October dinner at Larry Page’s house in Palo Alto, it had all sounded so crazy: the idea of stopping the world’s most successful serial killer. But now it was happening. In early 2019 Art Levinson told me that Calico had begun early stage work with its pharmaceutical partner, AbbVie, to develop new drugs to treat cancer and neurodegeneration. He felt the progress was promising. Meanwhile, the company had expanded into new quarters next door, and the number of Calico employees was pushing 200. The need, the will, the money, and the science were all flowing. The death of dying was going mainstream.

  Now what?

  * * *

  —

  CAN DEATH BE CHEATED? Are we there yet? Do we even want to be?

  I knew plenty of people who said they couldn’t imagine living forever. It was wrongheaded, selfish, unnatural. Sometimes they just laughed. I didn’t push it, but I had to wonder: When exactly was anyone ready to die? Really. What would any of us be thinking the day we gazed into the abyss knowing that this was the moment? Unless we were in unbearable pain, I was pretty sure we would all say, “Wait!”

  The desire to avoid death is powerful. The very purpose of our genes is to keep us up and running so we can make more versions of ourselves. It’s in the DNA, literally. Maybe that’s why we spin the endless tales we do, imagining ways to outmatch death, generating explanations for heaven or reincarnation, Elysium or Nirvana. It may even be the reason for Ray Kurzweil’s vision of a time and place where everyone is rejuvenated and their minds expanded, like angels on the Last Day—a nice sci-fi fairy tale to give death the runaround.

  Yet, despite those drives, every one of us is dying, at least so far. It has always been that way—which can only mean that if we somehow eliminate our march to the grave, it is not simply going to bend the great river of human history. It’s going to twist it in ways that will be difficult for us to wrap our currently mortal minds around.

  When historians someday look over their shoulders at the early decades of the 21st century, they will not find that aging had been cured and the grim reaper put to ground. Not yet, because it hasn’t happened. No one has resuscitated an Alcor patient. There are no stories of Celularity giving 90-year-olds an elixir that makes them suddenly look 30. And Calico has yet to hand out a pill that guarantees a healthy life beyond 300.

  Nevertheless, something remarkable has happened. Science is going to cheat death. That line was crossed the day Art Levinson and Google hopped on board Bill Maris’s genie-in-a-bottle idea—and the day Craig Venter, Peter Diamandis, and Bob Hariri launched Human Longevity, Inc. And those ventures emerged—whether or not anyone believes it—because decades earlier Ray Kurzweil began ardently plowing the longevity road, with some serious help from Aubrey de Grey. They were the catalysts that set the grand endeavor into motion and attracted billions of dollars to the immortality business.

  The first breakthroughs are already in front of us, and a series of profound advancements will follow in the next five to ten years. At first the improvements will be small: stem cells for treating arthritis, battered knees, and organ disease. Next, we will see new and increasingly specific treatments for cancer and deteriorating brains, driven mostly by insights into human genomics. After that, further discoveries will arrest, and even reverse, the aging that evolution long ago foisted upon us.

  All of this will happen as artificial intelligence comes increasingly to grips with the stubborn intricacies of human biology, using codes so elaborate that even their makers don’t fully comprehend how they do what they do. Each insight will build as a growing generation of entrepreneurs, doctors, researchers, and computer scientists come to realize that what once looked like snake oil no longer is.

  How will the world look when we are all living hundreds of years? Scenarios like that can go in a lot of directions. Scientists might decide they’ve pulled another Manhattan Project, and find themselves horrified at what their work has wrought. Maybe there will be so many of us that we’ll burn the planet down, making immortality moot. Or perhaps Elon Musk will find ways, after all, to off-load millions of humans from Earth to set up shop on Mars.

  As the wealth gap broadens, will the rich grow richer, and younger, while the less fortunate grow old, unable to pay for their personal rejuvenation? Maybe we will we stop having babies? That could happen. In the world’s so-called developed countries, the longer people live, the fewer children they have. A recent New York Times poll revealed that Americans were having fewer children, mostly because the cost of having them was so high. But if we become a childless species, who would experience their first kiss? Their first swim? Their first Big Idea? And come to think of it, what would the world look like on Thanksgiving with 100 descendants on hand, and every one of them apparently the same age? Could marriages survive 400 years? Would there really be a difference between a mother who was 300 and a daughter who was 270, assuming there was a daughter?

  One doctor I know suggested that in this brave new future, when we reach age 21, we’ll have to make a choice: Either have children and die a normal death, or live extremely long, but childless. Maybe we will remain young, but grow emotionally withered and ossified, rocking in our chairs, endlessly checking our Twitter feeds. Or will we, now blessed with unlimited amounts of time, at last find the work that each of us truly loves? With our clocks stopped, we might discover more time to enjoy our families and closest friends, learn from our mistakes, and get our lives right: fulfilled and happy at last.

  It may even happen that the heavenly future Ray Kurzweil imagines will abide, with the human race not only upgraded like flights of angels but released to live in whatever amplified mind we can imagine.

  It’s a lot to think about, the capsizing of the human condition. And any or all of these possibilities may soon unfold before us like some great and intricate tapestry. It’s hard to say. The only certainty is that the unbounded future, when it comes, will mark a paradigm shift unlike any the world has ever seen: right up there with the arrival of hurtling asteroids, the appearance of extraterrestrials, and the emergence of machines as intelligent as we are.

  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

  EPILOGUE: THE END OF THE END

  I was sitting with Ray Kurzweil one Friday afternoon when I asked him how he felt about the passage of time…and the idea of running out of it. He didn’t like to talk about it much these days, but in 2008 he had made a pilgrimage to Mount Auburn Hospital in Boston to have his chest cracked open, and his mitral heart valve repaired. It was a genetic shortcoming, lifelong, and it needed to be taken care of. A leaky heart valve is never a recipe for immortality.

  The procedure didn’t require new valves from pigs, only some suturing. Doctors fel
t the valve would be just fine for the foreseeable future. So when I brought up the question of mortality, he just grinned that same big kid grin he showed everyone on I’ve Got a Secret. “I worry about that a lot less,” he said, “now that I know I’m not going to die.”

  And why should he think otherwise? The Bridges were advancing. Nanotechnology was evolving, and artificially intelligent algorithms were devotedly undoing the mysteries of Homo sapiens’ demise every day. For Kurzweil, it was only a matter of time, and time’s acceleration.

  After all these years, there could be little doubt that Kurzweil had indeed accomplished the promise he had made during his childhood days in Jackson Heights. He had changed the world—less with his inventions than his ideas. Others may have explored the notion of living forever, but no one had driven the message into the mainstream with the unrepentant fervor of Raymond Kurzweil. And no one hammered away harder at the importance of exponential growth than he—science driven by the irresistible fusion of human and artificial intelligence. More than ever, he, like Levinson and Venter, Hariri and even de Grey, had come to believe that any problem could be solved—even the one that, so far, had killed every living thing on Earth.

  Venter had clearly faced a few rocky years since the creation of Human Longevity, Inc. There was the prostate cancer, then his departure from HLI. In August 2017, his mother, Elizabeth, passed away at age 94. Venter always said that the last mortal barrier each of us faces is the one between our parents and us. Now she was gone, and so was the barrier.

  Not that he was embracing the idea of stepping into the grave. When I put the question of his personal mortality to him during one of our meetings, he mentioned he had recently turned 70 and had to admit some days he was feeling the deterioration of his genes. But that didn’t mean he planned to roll over. In fact, one of the things that really ticked him off that 70th year was a letter from the federal government saying he was required to begin taking his Social Security benefits. When you hit age 70½ that was the law, whether you wanted to collect the checks or not. But, dammit, Social Security checks were for old people, not him. Even worse, this made a statement about the way the world saw age 70—that it was just a matter of time before you hopped into the funeral casket while the dearly beloved nodded and murmured over what a fine person you were. He still planned on living nicely past 100, and racing sailboats and riding his motorcycle at age 87, the way he had in his pre-Vietnam days. In the meantime, prostate or not, HLI or no HLI, a lot of work remained to be done, and he planned to keep at it.