Joon Yun

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The Immortality Industrial Complex will not make you live eternally, but there still will likely be benefits to the research. We might get more bang or the buck if we were focused on incremental improvements rather than moonshots, sure, but the Silicon Valley megabucks privately funding the search for a “permanent cure” wouldn’t be available at all if it were not for the promise of people with stock options getting to live forever. 

From Adam Piore’s “The Immortality Hype” at Nautilus:

The quest to extend longevity makes perfect sense in Silicon Valley, explains Lindy Fishburne, a longtime lieutenant of Thiel’s, in her stately office in San Francisco’s Presidio, a former military base that sits on a pictorial tip of the San Francisco Bay. “It’s the engineering culture which says we’ll build our way out of it, we’ll code our way out of it, there has to be a solution. I also think it’s coupled with a very unique optimism that is pervasive in Silicon Valley.”

The big goal of the Silicon Valley titans is not to extend longevity by beating back cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or any of the other diseases that most of us succumb to. Rather it’s to use molecular biology to decode the very mechanics behind the process that is the biggest single risk factor in all of these diseases—the process of aging itself—and to attempt to halt it in its tracks. In recent years, researchers have made undeniable strides in decoding the cellular processes that go awry as we age.

The mainstream press has amplified the research into the second coming of Ponce de Leon. “Can Google Solve Death?” read a Time magazine cover in 2013. Veteran aging scientists bristle at the invocation of the “I” word (immortality). Even the most leading-edge studies in molecular biology today, they point out, including those done by the top scientists recruited to work for Google’s Calico, do not promise aging—let alone death—can be solved or cured.

The hype “has a bad effect because it makes the field look like we’re focusing on something that is not achievable,” says Felipe Sierra, the director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, of the NIH. It also obscures the significant research that is being done to identify the mechanisms of aging. “The positive side is that people are starting to understand that our goal is to improve health for everybody and not the particular patient that has one disease. It’s a more holistic approach.”

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No one with stock options would want to die, so Silicon Valley technologists are earnestly pursuing radical life-extension methods–even immortality. I mock, but I also wish them well and hope there are eventual results. However, anyone professing that successful head transplantations and hundreds-year lifespans are on the horizon is sort of overpromising. Theoretically not impossible but nowhere near ready. From Charlotte Lytton’s Daily Beast piece about the fountain of youth’s new splash:

If a successful, life-extending surgery does arise—and prove successful—its implications would be revolutionary. After announcing his intentions to carry out the procedure several months ago, [head-transplant enthusiast Sergio] Canavero was inundated with volunteers offering themselves up for the project—a testament to how prevalent the notion of extending one’s life really is.

Canavero’s ideology is one keenly shared by Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, Joon Yun, founder of the Palo Alto Longevity Prize. A $1 million reward for those who can successfully “hack the code of life and cure aging,” Yun is hoping to find scientists able to extend the lives of mice by 50 percent, which he believes will be demonstrative in efforts to push the human life span beyond its current U.S. average of 78.7 years.

While Yun’s efforts might resemble a Death Becomes Her-esque bid to uncover an elixir of eternal youth, he is not the first wealthy businessman to make a serious financial donation to the prevention of aging. Peter Thiel, one of PayPal’s co-founders, has donated millions to researchers leading the charge, while Larry Ellison, who co-founded computer hardware company Oracle, has given some $430 million to the cause. “Death has never made any sense to me,” says Ellison.

The government used to fund two-thirds of medical research, with private backers accounting for the other 33 percent of studies, but that ratio has now been flipped, with the major cash injections supplied by entrepreneurs with life-prolonging pet projects far surpassing money pumped in by the state. Some of the ideas being explored by Thiel-backed researchers include technology that can cool human organs at a high speed, allowing them to be preserved long term, and using stem cells to grow bone replacements for broken ones. One more involves analyzing molecular and cell damage throughout our lifetimes in a bid to better understand how we might rejuvenate deteriorating bodies.•

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