But finding a cure for aging was an expensive business. He had an outreach team to pay for, a full-time staff of scientists. By Aubrey’s own reckoning, SENS had about another year left of that inheritance money. And so, when I met him, he was focused almost exclusively on increasing external sources of funding, which was why he’d just been hard-selling the prospect of eternity to a roomful of wealthy Bay Area real estate investors across the street, and, in a less direct fashion, why he was talking to me now.
Aubrey was, as it happened, quite gifted in the necessary arts of persuasion; early in our conversation, he caught a whiff of my own skepticism and proceeded ruthlessly, if not entirely effectively, to interrogate and undermine its underlying assumptions.
He first set about arguing me out of any ambivalence about the desirability of eradicating human mortality. People’s standard reasons for rejecting the principle of radical life extension—that it would somehow rob us of our humanity, that life was given meaning by its finitude, that living indefinitely would actually be hellish—were “embarrassingly infantile and idiotic” rationalizations. Death, he said, was our captor, our tormentor; and we dealt with this situation through a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. This was beneath contempt.
The brute fact of the matter, he said, was that aging was a human disaster on an unimaginably vast scale. It was a fucking massacre out there, a methodical and comprehensive annihilation of every single person, and he was one of a tiny handful of people taking it seriously for the humanitarian catastrophe that it was.
Such was the rhetoric. Calculated, impassioned, performative.
He said: “For every day that I bring forward the defeat of aging, I’m saving a hundred thousand fucking lives!” He brought his fist down hard on the distressed wood of the tabletop.
He said: “That’s thirty September 11ths every week! That is thirty World Trade Centers I’m preventing.”
The science of regenerative medicine was complicated, but Aubrey had at his disposal an array of simplifications for the lay interlocutor. Among his favored rhetorical gambits was to ask you to think of your body as a classic car, as a complex system of interlocking mechanisms that, through regular maintenance, could be kept more or less indefinitely in a roadworthy state.
“Human bodies are basically just machines,” as he put it in a 2010 TEDx talk. The idea, as such, was that we “go in and regularly repair the damage so that we can postpone the time at which the damage is so extensive.”
“It’s all about restoring the molecular and cellular structure of the body to the state it was earlier in adulthood,” he told me now. “What that amounts to, overwhelmingly, is just repairing the various types of damage the body does to itself from the time we’re born, as a side effect of basic operation.”
He then explained his two-part conception of SENS’s project. “SENS 1.0,” in which the organization was now largely engaged, involved various therapies he claimed would be possible to develop within the next two to three decades, given sufficient funding. These therapies, he said, would likely give people now in middle age—people such as himself—an additional thirty years of healthy life. Most of his fellow gerontologists thought this overly optimistic, though some had been persuaded of the value of his claims. “SENS 2.0” was where things crossed over into sci-fi territory—the longevity escape velocity theory, essentially.
“After those initial thirty years,” he said, “the same people are going to come back looking for further rejuvenation. And the therapies, by that point, will have advanced significantly, because thirty years is a very long time in terms of any scientific endeavor. And so it is virtually one hundred percent certain that we will be able to rejuvenate those people even more effectively the second time than the first time. And so what that leads to is the idea that we’ll be able to stay one step ahead of the problem indefinitely, to the point where we can treat people in such a way as they’ll stay biologically in their twenties or thirties forever. Which translates very straightforwardly, at a conservative prediction, into four-digit life spans.”
“Did you say four-digit?” I said, shunting my voice recorder across the table toward the extravagant edifice of his beard. “As in a thousand years?”
“Yes,” he said. “Although that’s, as I say, a conservative prediction. This is completely obvious, of course; it follows absolutely logically. The field of gerontology has started to come around to the idea that I’m right about regenerative treatments being the best way to postpone the effects of old age. But they don’t want to risk their funding through any association with the notion of radical life extension, because it’s perceived as total science fiction—even though, as I say, it’s entirely logical. They find it absolutely necessary to distance themselves from this part of my vision.”
“Just to clarify,” I said. “I’m in my mid-thirties. What are my chances, would you say, of living to a thousand?”
“I would say perhaps a little better than fifty-fifty,” he said, and drained the last of his beer. “It’s very much dependent on the level of funding.”
Aubrey excused himself to return to the bar, and as I sat alone at the table sipping my coffee, I attempted to assimilate the implications of what he had just told me. There was something familiarly unsettling about the movement of his logic, about the apparently rational means by which he reached what I could not help seeing as an entirely irrational conclusion. But my ignorance of the fields of genetics and gerontology precluded any adequate defense of my skepticism, and so it was not only out of mere politeness that I felt disinclined to inform Aubrey that what he was saying sounded, to my admittedly limited understanding, completely mad.
Aubrey returned, pint in hand. I told him, more or less flat out, that I was not convinced of the likelihood of him or anyone else coming up with a cure for death.
“Well, why not, eh?” he said. He narrowed his eyes over the rim of his pint, presenting me with the full magnitude of his gaze.
The problem with me, he said, was that I was far too willing to accept received authority, the opinions of so-called “experts,” without examining the vested interests of those “experts,” their need to say what they were saying—about his work, about the feasibility of radical life extension—even if it didn’t necessarily accord with what they themselves believed. They dared not be seen holding controversial positions, he said, for fear of jeopardizing the flow of grant money toward their own work.
It was his belief that other gerontologists took note of what was said about him in the media, and made a conscious decision not to go near his work—to specifically avoid even reading it—because as scientists, they knew very well that they would, as he put it, “be unable to read something that is logically and cogently true without recognizing its truth.”
The problem was not, in other words, that his fellow scientists found his claims ridiculous and false. It was far worse than that: they were afraid of being convinced of the truth of those claims and thereby coming to seem ridiculous themselves. And so what was preventing the mass of his fellow gerontologists from being persuaded by his work was, if I understood him correctly, precisely the irresistible force of its persuasiveness.
Such was the impenetrable circular system of Aubrey’s self-belief.
Silicon Valley, with its “higher proportion of visionaries,” was another matter entirely. The general cultural climate here in the Bay Area, the balmy atmosphere of technological possibility, was such that Aubrey’s ideas had found a constituency, a place within a social context of radical optimism. (This latter formulation, incidentally, was one with which he took serious issue. “ ‘Radical optimism’?” he said, reciting my phrase with theatrical derision. “ ‘Radical optimism’? That sounds to me like you’re saying overoptimism. And that is demonstrably not the case.”)
When SENS relocated across the Atlantic, it set up its new headquarters just down the street from the Google campus in Mountain View—a proximity that presumably was more than mere chance. Life
extension, a long-term preoccupation for Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had gradually become part of the company’s “moonshot” culture. Google Ventures, the company’s in-house corporate venture fund, was set up in 2009 under the leadership of a former tech entrepreneur named Bill Maris. Maris, who had said that he believed it possible to extend the life spans of people now living to five hundred years, and that he personally hoped to live long enough not to die at all, had invested heavily in biotechnology. (His friend Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012 in order, as Bloomberg Markets magazine put it, “to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology.”)
When, in 2014, Google set up a new biotechnology firm called Calico—a research and development firm established with the goal of combating aging and age-related illness—Aubrey was exultant. Writing with characteristic grandiosity in Time magazine, he paraphrased Winston Churchill: “Google’s announcement about their new venture to extend human life, Calico, is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” He saw Page and Brin’s decision to set up the company as a personal vindication, as well as an extremely encouraging sign that the war on aging was coming to be perceived as winnable. (Although, as he put it to me, if he were in Page and Brin’s position, he’d “obviously have given the money to Aubrey de Grey.”)
I left the bar. Out on Taylor Street, I glanced back through the window. Aubrey was still at the table, his laptop open now in front of him, his fingers moving at a rapid flutter across its keyboard. Against the noonday gloom of the bar, his face was lit by the soft glare of the screen, unreally white, and he had in that moment the strange luminescence of a medieval saint: the fanatical thinness, the holy fury in the eyes. I stood there looking at him for perhaps a minute, wondering what it might be like to believe in something as fiercely as Aubrey seemed to believe—to be so driven, so destined, so ordained. He didn’t look up. He had, I supposed, already forgotten me.
—
In a 2011 New Yorker profile, Peter Thiel spoke about his investment in life extension research, his funding of projects like Aubrey’s. Asked about the likelihood of such projects drastically exacerbating already dire economic inequality, given that the people most likely to benefit from them were the very rich, he said this: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.” As with all advantages accrued by the wealthy, exemption from death would eventually trickle down, in some form or other, to the rest of us.
One of Thiel’s more controversial philanthropic ventures was something called the Thiel Foundation Fellowship, through which he awarded gifted under-twenties $100,000 on the condition that they drop out of college for two years to focus on entrepreneurial activity. In 2011, one of these fellowships was awarded to an especially brilliant MIT student named Laura Deming. Deming, originally from New Zealand, had moved to the U.S. at age twelve in order to work as a volunteer for the MIT biogerontologist Cynthia Kenyon, who became a long-term mentor. (Kenyon was then known for her 1986 discovery of a controlled mutation that increased the life span of the C. elegans nematode worm by a factor of six; by tweaking a single gene in the worm’s DNA, Kenyon had enabled an organism with a natural life span of 20 days to live for 120 days, maintaining the level of vitality it ordinarily had at 5 days. In 2014, she became vice president of aging research at Calico.) At fourteen, Deming had enrolled as a biology undergraduate at MIT, and she was seventeen when she received the fellowship from Thiel, awarded to assist her in setting up the first venture capital fund directly focused on increasing human life spans.
The Longevity Fund, the VC firm which had resulted from that fellowship, was in its third year when I met Laura at her offices on the top floor of a lavishly nondescript building in Mission Bay. I was struck, initially, by the various ways in which she failed to conform to the stereotypes most people, myself included, would have in mind in imagining a venture capitalist focused on life extension. She was not, for instance, a middle-aged white American male who had amassed an immense fortune in technology and wanted to ensure an indefinite life span with which to enjoy the fruits of capitalism; she was, rather, a young woman of Asian descent who, despite enrolling in MIT at fourteen, did not conform to any geek stereotype I’d ever encountered. Laura’s pleasantly businesslike and mildly self-deprecating manner was not quite successful in offsetting an imposing intellectual affect, which was all the more striking given the inescapable fact that the person sitting across a boardroom table from me was younger than many of the tersely hungover English literature undergraduates I’d taught over the years.
And so a strong cognitive dissonance arose from the three-way juxtaposition of Laura’s extreme youth, her position in the business world, and the nature of her work; but it began to make sense within the context of the fact that she had been monomaniacally preoccupied with death for the past thirteen years.
“I have never not felt like extending the life spans of human beings is the correct thing to do,” she said, measuring her words carefully. “When I was eight years old, my grandma came to visit us, and I remember wanting to play with her, and seeing that she wasn’t capable of running around. And I remember realizing that there was something about her body that was, like, broken. And I thought, well, obviously somebody must be working on a cure for this disease that my grandma has. Then I realized that in fact nobody was working on any cure, because what was wrong with my grandma was not viewed as an illness. It wasn’t even viewed as being wrong.”
Not long after that, she came to understand that the way in which her grandmother’s body was broken was merely an advance symptom of an absolute and final breakage, which would cause her to stop existing entirely. This unsettling insight into her grandmother’s fate was quickly followed by the deeper recognition that this was, in fact, a universal phenomenon—the universal phenomenon—and that precisely the same fate therefore lay in store for her parents, and her friends, for everyone she knew and did not know, and for herself.
“I cried,” she said, “for like three days straight.”
Laura become obsessed with the idea of dedicating her life to addressing this unacceptable situation; by the age of eleven her ambitions were fixed on, as she put it, “starting a for-profit entity in the aging biology space.”
She was wary of the term “life extension”; she used it a couple of times in our conversation, but then corrected herself, saying that she preferred to speak of “reversing the aging process,” or “making people feel better while they’re older.” The problem with the term “life extension,” she said, was that it evoked “insane people who have no scientific background convincing themselves that they will never die.”
I got the sense from Laura that, for all the care she took in distinguishing her work from the more fantastic forms of techno-immortalism, she was shrewdly downplaying the extent of her own fixation on eradicating death.
A peculiar reality of modern medicine, she said, was the vast number of pharmaceutical companies pursuing treatments for cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer’s—conditions that overwhelmingly resulted from aging—while virtually no companies were pursuing the underlying condition itself, which was the cellular degeneration of the human organism over time.
“I do believe,” she said, “that death from aging is the biggest problem facing humanity. But I don’t really talk about these things when I’m talking to people about investment, or about the VC fund. It has all the appeal of talking about a cult. People don’t see the radical extension of life span as an investible model. It seems crazy if you haven’t been steeped in the science, if you don’t have a full understanding of the possibilities.”
In terms of immediate investment prospects, Laura was especially excited by drugs that were already on the market. Diabetes treatments in particular, she said, tended to demonstrate an untapped potential for increasing the life span of organisms.
“There�
��s this strange alignment,” she said, “between insulin, blood sugar levels, and life span, and we haven’t yet figured out why.”
One drug Laura was especially excited by was a treatment for type 2 diabetes called metformin, which prevented the release of excess sugar into the bloodstream, and slowed the rate of cell turnover. It had been proven in tests, she said, to significantly expand the life spans of mice. Not long after we spoke, I read a news report on how the United States Food and Drug Administration had approved a five-to-seven-year clinical trial of metformin in humans, to be conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, called Targeting Aging with Metformin (or TAME). I did a Google News search for the drug, and found an article in The Telegraph, which featured an interview with Laura—a “science wunderkind” who was “spearheading research into ‘magic’ anti-aging drugs.” The headline, above a photograph of Laura performing tests in her laboratory, was a classic of the just-asking-a-question-here school of newspaper headline writing: “Could This Pill Be the Key to Eternal Youth?”
—
About a week after his third birthday, my son began to take an interest in the question of death. He began to take an interest, specifically, in the deaths of his mother and me. On hearing mention of my wife’s grandmother, he had become immediately curious about who she was, and where she was. Not being religious, and not wanting to bullshit him, we felt we had little choice but to tell him that she was no longer around because she had died before he’d been born. He was already, at that point, familiar with the concept of death, but only really in the abstract and technical sense, as a thing that could happen, that might happen. We had introduced him to the concept, in fact, primarily as a means of discouraging him from running out in front of cars. If you got hit by a car, we told him, that would be it, the end of everything. He’d be gone.
To Be a Machine Page 20
