Are You Rich Enough To Live Forever? – TownandCountrymag.com (blog)

The Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village is in the horsey part of western Los Angeles County, just off the 101 freeway past the exit youd take to go down to Malibu. It features all the elements typical of a Four Seasons: tasteful marble floors, guest suites with large bathrooms featuring deep tubs, obscenely soft sheets You get the picture.

I am experiencing none of this. Instead I am in a building adjacent to the Four Seasons, sitting in an airtight egg-shaped box about halfway in size between a regular refrigerator and a refrigerator in one of those guest suites next door, wearing only my underwear and a vermillion swim caplike thingy of uncertain material, surrounded by an organ-massaging whump-whump-whump sound somewhere below the vocal range of Barry White.

Death never made any sense to me. Larry Ellison

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The box Im in is called the Bod Pod, and its designed to tell me the percentage of my mass that is composed of fat. The building is the California Health & Longevity Institute (CHLI), a combination spa, medical clinic, fitness center, and research institution founded in 2006 by David Murdock, a 93-year-old billionaire who made a fortune in real estate and later bought the Dole Foods company, and who has something of an obsession with increasing his time on this earth through the combination of science and lifestyle choices. (He reportedly believes so fervently in the essentiality of consuming fruits and vegetables that he eats banana and orange peels, and thats just the beginning.) Murdock is a sort of god-father to a breed of California-based ultra-high-net-worth individuals who are focused on increasing lifespan and staving off disease.

Gabriela Hasbun

His successors are numerous. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has said that death never made any sense to me, has spent $430 million on anti-aging research; Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Calico, a secretive company thats seeking to extend lifespan through genetic research and drug development. Ex-financier and philanthropist Michael Milken is funneling money toward speeding up the development of drugs and other medical treatments for the chronic diseases associated with aging, and Jeff Bezos has just invested in a company called Unity Biotechnology that is targeting cellular mechanisms at the root of age-related diseases.

Meanwhile, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiels Breakout Labs funds companies trying to extend the useful life of various body parts; Thiel himself has reportedly given millions to a foundation aiming to increase the human life-span.

The single-mindedness of the high-net-worth live-forever crew is not just theoretical. As they await the progress reports of their well-funded research projects, these people have adopted a long and quirky (to say the least) list of habits in their daily lives. My own experience at CHLIwhere the offerings include guided meditation in a thing called a Somadome, a fitness consultation, a nutrition consultation, and various spa-type treatmentsis rather quaint compared with what those engaged in this new space race to immortality are doing.

Take Dave Asprey, a former top executive in a company that operated Googles and Facebooks first computer servers and who later created Bulletproof Coffee. He now spends three minutes five to six days a week in a $50,000 tank of air chilled to 270 degrees Fahrenheit, which he says increases the density of his mitochondria (the power plants in all living cells). Asprey also enjoys doing cardio with various parts of his body strapped into plastic sleeves full of ice water in a machine called a Vasper, he breathes 100 percent oxygen, he sits in an infrared sauna, and he plays ping-pong against a robot. Rapid movement where youre crossing from one side of the body to the other re-patterns your brain, he says.

"We are going to crack this. Its not going to be simple. Theres a bunch of things that will need to be done to achieve lifespans into at least hundreds of years. But well get there." Brian Hanley

Or microbiologist Brian Hanley. In his modest ranch house in Davis, California, 90 minutes northeast of San Francisco, Hanley, who owns the biomedical company Butterfly Sciences, describes to me the way he spent years of research and more than half a million dollars: After receiving approval from an accredited independent board that evaluates clinical trials, he enlisted the assistance of a doctor colleague to (in what is clearly not a practice currently approved by the FDA) shove twin needles into his leg and, with a burst of electricity, install DNA of Hanleys own design that was supposed to encourage his organs to operate better. It proved to be very painful (though less so the second time, after they had modified the protocol), but to Hanley it was totally worth it. I just felt so fantastic, he says with a smile. Hanley's white blood cell counta measure not particularly susceptible to the placebo effectspiked and his "bad" cholesterol plummeted, while his diet was essentially unchanged.

Matt Kaeberlein, a biologist at the University of Washington who is testing the effects on aging dogs of a drug originally developed for human transplant patients, reveals that several -superrich live-forever types have called to ask him to give the drug to them. There are more people than youd guess who are self--experimenting, he says.

Over the past century medical science has made tremendous strides in increasing the lifespan of most humans. Antibiotics and reduced infant and childhood mortality were two arenas in which doctors had dramatic success in the early part of the 20th century. Advances in medical technology in the latter part are a big reason someone must still sing Happy Birthday to Dick Cheney every year. Weve been adding about two years to the average life expectancy every decade for the last hundred years. And if youre wealthy and educated and have access to decent healthcare, youre likely to live longer than someone without any one of those things, and much longer than the billion or so people who have none of them.

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Still, while humans have been living longer on average, the longest any individual has livedthe apparent maximum life-spanhas remained essentially unchanged. And to todays titans of cutting-edge industry, whose visions of the future are the very things on which they have built their fortunes, not being around for said future is simply unacceptable.

What people like Asprey and Hanley are after is an increase in the healthy lifespan far beyond anything we know about so far. Im going to live to 180-plus, Asprey tells me. Hanley is equally confident. We are going to crack this, he says. Its not going to be simple. Theres a bunch of things that will need to be done to achieve lifespans into at least hundreds of years. But well get there. The real question might be what the word we means. Hanleys treatment cost him well over $500,000. Aspreys regimen costs him more than $1 million.

Human Longevity Inc. is a La Jolla startup co-founded in 2015 by J. Craig Venter, who spent $100 million becoming, in 2000, the first person to sequence a human genome with private funding. At the companys clinic, Health Nucleus, you can get: your own genome sequenced; a full-body MRI to look for cancer; microbiomial and metabalomic profiles; a neurological exam; a bone-density scan; a body fat measurement more accurate than the Bod Pods; and a 4-D picture of the inside of your heart. It costs $25,000. It goes without saying that no health insurance covers it.

C. Flannigan

Still, such expenses pale in comparison with the moonshot-level funding that guys like Brin and Page are lavishing on labs like Calico. Such facilities also come with billion--dollar ethical questions. With simple healthcare still out of reach for much of the world, some people, including Bill and Melinda Gates, take issue with the longevity movement.

It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer, Bill Gates told a Reddit audience in 2015.

Egocentric, perhaps, but it certainly displays a signature attitude of Silicon Valley. On my way to Palo Alto for an interview for this story, I had lunch at the Battery, a private club in downtown San Francisco, with Ty Ahmad-Taylor, who has worked at, launched, and sold various tech startups and is today CEO of the entertainment technology company THX Ltd.

I wondered aloud why anti-aging research is happening in such concentration around the city and why so much of it is funded with tech money. I think theres a fundamental optimism here that doesnt exist in other places, Ahmad-Taylor said. When he was looking for investors for a social sports site he founded, he recalled, I got turned down 43 times before selling Samsung on the project. Silicon Valley is full of the kind of people who think that being rejected 43 times is not a reflection of their likelihood of success. Thats precisely the attitude required to believe that death can be forestalled, or even foiled.

It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer Bill Gates

The first hole was poked in the idea that aging equals an inevitable deterioration in 1983, when a mutant strain of a 1-millimeter-long worm called C. elegans was discovered to have a much greater lifespan than nonmutant strains. Then, in the early 90s, a young University of California San Francisco researcher named Cynthia Kenyon identified a specific mutation that doubled the lifespan in C. elegans; it turned out to be the first of more than 100 gene variants now known to affect longevity. Kenyon now works at Calico.

For the first time, people realized that there is a subset of genes that can regulate lifespan, says Eric Verdin, M.D., CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in Marin County. That really changed everything. If you identify genes and pathways that control aging, this means that specific proteins can regulate it, and that means drug targets. People started to think, Maybe we can delay aging.

The Buck Institute occupies a modern building designed by I.M. Pei on a hilltop an hour north of San Francisco. Here, 180 scientists work to develop therapies to slow aging. One of them is Judith Campisi, a cancer researcher who, years back, began studying senescent cellscells that have stopped dividing. Initially senescence wasnt thought of as bad but rather as the alternative to cells becoming cancerous. When I started studying senescence it was as an anti-cancer mechanism, Campisi tells me.

But she started to think the people in her field had it all wrongthat senescent cells were dangerous because they were oozing yucky stuff that caused inflammation in the body. (One of the hallmarks of aging is that the body carries around more inflammation, which is a major factor in, if not the cause of, age-related diseases, including cancer and heart and liver disease.) Senescent cells, Campisi and colleagues found, were essentially polluting their neighbors, causing times ravages.

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Bruno Levy/Challenges-Rea/Redux

Last year Campisi helped found Unity Biotechnology, a lifespan-enhancing biotech firm in San Francisco that had received $20 million in financing even before Jeff Bezos jumped in. (As of October the tally was up to $116 million.) She also continues to work at the Buck Institute. As a storm that has pummeled the Bay Area breaks up outside, I look through her microscope at a culture of fibroblast cells from a human lung. They are of more or less uniform size and snuggled tightly together; two of them appear to be on the verge of dividing, as happy cells do.

Then I view senescent cells from the same tissue that have been artificially aged using ionizing radiation. These cells are grossly distorted, huge and spread out, and they secrete inflammatory factors, with much bigger nuclei.

Were trying to devise ways now to tame that secretory characteristic of the cell, Campisi explains. The other next step is to make them go away. (Apparently Kenyon had also been trying all sorts of methods of killing senescent cells before she joined Calico, according to Venter, who had been thinking of hiring Kenyon at the time for his company, Human Longevity Inc. The life extension world, being much smaller than the tech universe, is even more competitive than its primary benefactor, it turns out.)

The problem is that the idea Campisi started with 30 years agothat senescent cells are protective in some wayremains, in a sense, true. In very special circumstances theyre good, she says. So we have to be very intelligent about how to apply drugs designed to kill senescent cells.

Campisi is well aware of the scientific challenges of anti-aging research. But there are other challenges as well. Theres a misperception among people in other fields that research in this field isnt as rigorous, says the University of Washingtons Kaeberlein, the biologist who gets calls from live-forever types hoping hell inject them with his experimental drug, rapamycin, which in 2009 was discovered to increase the lifespan of mice. Kaeberlein calls it the most effective and reproducible drug for extending lifespan in mice at this time.

I think theres a fundamental optimism here that doesnt exist in other places. Silicon Valley is full of the kind of people who think that being rejected 43 times is not a reflection of their likelihood of success. Ty Ahmad-Taylor

Across the country, in New York, a former Israeli Defense Forces medical officer named Nir Barzilai, who is now director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is trying to raise $70 million from the National Institutes of Health and private funders to test the effectiveness in slowing disease formation of another existing drug, metformin, which is currently given to diabetics. Barzilai and a few other heavy hitters in aging research had to, as he puts it, cajole the FDA into letting him run the experiment, because the agency that approves medical treatments hasnt considered aging a treatable condition (an indication, in its jargon).

So Barzilai came up with a workaround. We are working with the FDA to have an indication that is similar to agingto delay the onset of certain diseases associated with aging, he tells me. The idea is that if aging is a major risk factor for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers, preventing those diseases can be seen as a proxy for slowing aging.

This is going to be a breakthrough, he says. We have shown we can target aging in a variety of animal models. Thats not the question. The question is why pharmaceutical companies are not coming in and developing drugs to increase our lifespan. And the answer is because the FDA just hasnt had aging as an indication.

While many of the privately owned longevity labs are engaged in the search for anti-aging drugs, Venter is taking a different approach: using genomics to identify genes associated with heart disease, cancer, and other afflictions associated with aging. On the second floor of an undistinguished building in a sea of them in northern San Diego, past two security guards and a fingerprint scanner that restricts access to the lab even for employees of Human Longevity Inc., 33 DNA sequencing machines (each of which costs $1 million and is named after a Star Wars character) run 24/7, going through 55 to 60 terabytes of data per week. This work is part of a large-scale effort to gather as many human genome sequences as possible from subjects, who also provide clinical and phenotype samples.

Were trying to, through the genome, predict causes of premature death, says Venter, the companys chair. We spoke in his expansive office on the buildings top floor as his miniature poodle, Darwin, sat under his desk. We can predict your risk for many types of cancer from mutated genes in your genome.

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Reuters/Alamy

On the first floor of Human Longevitys headquarters is Health Nucleus, the companys consumer-oriented affiliate. It employs the most advanced diagnostic equipment and uses detailed biological samples to provide a comprehensive examination of an individuals health status. We look at the person as a whole and measure everything in the genome, and everything we can in the clinic, Venter explains.

Around 500 people have had the $25,000 service performed so far, and Venter says serious health issues undetectable by any other means have been found in about 40 percent of them. Two and a half percent had early-stage cancer. One 55-year-old customer learned he had a 5-centimeter tumor under his breastbone. If it hadnt been discovered until he started experiencing symptoms, he might have been dead within two years. Now he has as good a chance as anyone of making it to 95. Its a shock at first, but then you realize you just saved your life, Venter tells me.

Still, not everything Health Nucleus can detect presents as clear a course of action as removing a tumor. As with everything in science, from astronomy to microbiology, theres a difference between being able to detect something and being able to do something about it. Theres also the question of false positives generating risky, expensive interventions that turn out to be unnecessary. With some of the things we do now, Venter admits, the scientific community is at the 1 percent level of interpretation. Were trying to get better. In the future, for $1,000 well be able to tell you whether youre at increased risk for cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimers.

Health Nucleuss services, along with treatments like those at the California Health & Longevity Institute (never mind the kind of expensive equipment Dave Asprey personally surrounds himself with), are currently available only to the very rich. These are all huge accomplishments in terms of science, says Laura Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. But she allows that they present their own set of societal problems. If these medical interventions remain this expensive, we will see social class differences that pale in comparison to disparities today.

Since I began my research into longevity, my blueberry consumption has surged and Ive developed a high-intensity interval training habit. And when I walked out of my meeting with Venter I was seized with anxiety that lurking in my cells is a time bomb planted by my love-hate relationship with tobacco, which I still struggle with in my forties.

Everyone who quits says he has a moment when he realizes he is really, finally done with smoking, and my interview with Venter was mine. My great-grandfather died of oral cancer at 43though he did smoke fat black cigars from the moment he woke up in the morning to the moment he went to bed at night. Does that count as a family history? As I Ubered back to the Amtrak station for the trip home to my wife and two daughters, I thought that maybe I need to drop $25,000 at Health Nucleus.

I talked it over with my wife when I got home, and we decided I should wait for the price to come down. It turns out Im not quite in the live-forever tax bracket. But in the spirit of Silicon Valley, I try to remain optimistic. After all, I may be only one insanely successful startup away from immortality.

This story appears in the May 2017 issue of Town & Country.

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Are You Rich Enough To Live Forever? - TownandCountrymag.com (blog)