Key points:
- Through their anti-aging investments, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other billionaires have propelled research against the buildup of dysfunctional cells that contribute to aging — senescent cells.
- Elon Musk believes life extension-focused research is a waste of money.
Aging research breakthroughs over the past few years have spurred billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg to use their fortunes to help figure out how to extend human lifespans. Their investments are driving the rapid development of technologies related to removing dysfunctional cells that contribute to aging — senescent cells — and cellular rejuvenation. However, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is not buying this hype.
Musk believes that extending human lifespan will perpetuate a kind of cultural stagnation since the majority of people’s mindsets are frozen in time and do not change with age. He thinks that if people do not just die, our society will be stuck with old ideas, which will stifle its advancement.
Musk is not alone in drawing caution for the idea of helping people live longer. For example, Christopher Wareham, a bioethicist and Utrecht University professor, says that these scientific advances may “exacerbate all the kinds of existing inequalities,” which society is already hampered with. Along those lines, due to the cost-prohibitive nature of these age-slowing treatments, billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg would have even more time to further accumulate wealth while the majority of the population would be left unable to afford the treatment. In other words, the longer wealthy people are around, the more their wealth continues to proliferate. Moreover, the wealthier these people become, the more political influence they will acquire.
Billionaires Bezos and Zuckerberg Abundantly Contribute to Anti-Aging Research
In 2021, Bezos reportedly invested in the California-based aging research biotech startup Altos Labs. This biotech company focuses on cellular rejuvenation with the activation of four genes called Yamanaka factors that have been found to revert aged cells to a more youthful state. Altos Labs’ mission is to restore cellular health and resilience and reverse age-related diseases with this technology.
If that is not enough, Bezos has also invested in the San Francisco-based biotech company Unity Biotechnology that researches how to rid the body of senescent cells. With the elimination of these cells, the company aims to slow, halt, or reverse age-related diseases.
On the topic of billionaires, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have both co-founded the Breakthrough Prize, which awards a $3 million prize to aging scientists annually who make “transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life,” according to its website.
Furthermore, according to the New Yorker, a co-founder of Oracle, a company that specializes in online data storage clouds, Larry Ellison, has donated $370 million to anti-aging research. Moreover, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have launched an aging research biotech startup called Calico that seeks to slow or reverse age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.
Recent Breakthroughs in Cell Rejuvenation and Senescent Cell Cleanup Have Prompted Ambition
While anti-aging research endeavors started slowly, with discoveries that were possibly few and far between, aging scientists have had a series of recent breakthroughs. In this regard, they have been able to pinpoint environmental and biological contributors to aging like DNA damage and senescent cell accumulation. By doing so, they have come up with techniques to reverse some of these signs of aging and rejuvenate cells.
As an example, in April 2022, researchers figured out how to partially reprogram human skin cells to a more youthful state, even recovering some of their functions that had been lost with age. In this way, the cells were rejuvenated, providing hope for applying this technology to revive aged cells in living humans. However, human trials are still necessary to confirm that this technology works without causing cancer.
Another example is that researchers are coming up with new and more effective ways to rid the body of senescent cells, which drive aging. Studies in animal models like mice have shown that using new compounds like quercetin, fisetin, and dasatinib helps remove these cells to slow down aging and possibly reverse aging.
As such, Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, believes humans may be able to undergo possible age-slowing senescent cell removal treatments by the end of this year.
“We are done with hope and promise,” Barzilai told the Financial Times. “We are at the point between having promise and realizing it.”
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