The Eternal Problem Silicon Valley Can't Solve

The death by a thousand cuts applies to aging. So I am working to kill aging with a thousand cuts.

During the dotcom boom, Dave Asprey made $6 million in one swoop. At the age of 26, in the rush of power and possibility that came with that sudden windfall of cash, he felt like nothing was beyond his reach, not even death. I decided that I was just not going to die, he tells me, with a smile. That would be my next challenge.

And, so, Asprey joined the age-old fight to conquer death.

Over the last 15 years, Asprey has been tinkering with technologies in the hopes of slowing the aging process in his own body. He describes this as bio-hacking, using the hacker mentality to turbocharge his own biochemistry. And to hear Asprey tell it, that's working: With a couple of scientific hacks, hes lost hundreds of pounds, increased his IQ, and improved the quality of his sleep. All these things, he says, are also prolonging his life-span. Hes now sharing these techniques with others through Bulletproof Executive, the company he founded that creates coffee and other products to spike bodily performance, and as the chairman of the board of the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a group that meets monthly to discuss the latest developments in the study of longevity.

The building that houses the SVHI, located just down the street from Googles campus, is a microcosm of a growing Silicon Valley trend. There, Asprey and others are trying to stop individual bodies from aging--starting with their own--and investment is pouring into a growing number of companies whose stated goal is to increase human longevity and, in some cases, even cure death. Asprey freely admits that these are grandiose, quixotic endeavors. But in a place where geeks have changed the world with previously unthinkable breakthroughs in science, nothing seems impossible. When youre young and youve just created something amazing that makes you a ton of a money, you do egotistical things, Asprey says. And Im not saying thats a bad thing: I want to swing for the fences. What is all of this cool technology were creating compared to getting an extra hundred years of life?

He's far from the only one dreaming of a home run. Last year Google launched Calico Labs, a medical company whose goal is to tackle aging and illness. While so far Calico is remaining fairly secretive about its projects (my requests for an interview were politely declined), experts believe its objective is to go beyond solving individual diseases the way most medical researchers have done until now. Instead, it will work on technologies that extend life through previously untapped means, like gene therapies and cryogenics. Earlier this year, Calico hired Cynthia Kenyon, an acclaimed geneticist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has been experimenting with tweaking genes in animals to slow aging. By disabling a gene called daf-2, she has doubled the life-span of roundworms, fruit flies, and mice. In her new role as VP of aging research at Calico, she will ostensibly be attempting to re-create these results in humans.

This year, another company, Human Longevity, joined the anti-aging quest. Founded by J. Craig Venter, another millionaire entrepreneur, its central goal involves understanding DNA. Felix Frueh, the chief scientific officer of Human Longevity, explains that in some ways, the goals of Human Longevity are in line with what medicine has been trying to do all along: cure illness, improve life quality, and extend the human life-span. The difference is that his company applies big-data tools to process vast quantities of information we now have about the human body. The organization will sequence 2 million human genomes in five years, gathering unparalleled insights into the causes of disease. Rather than tackling problems incrementally, he says it is possible to work on a bigger scale, yielding more dramatic results. One of them could be cheating death.

When I spoke to other members of the medical community--doctors and surgeons--they were largely skeptical about the anti-aging movement. Dr. Mark Shrime, a surgeon who serves as a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, says that radical life extension and curing death hardly ever comes up in hospitals or medical classes. He tells me that theories of longevity have been circulating for decades without any tangible results but outcomes seen in lab animals are rarely replicated on human bodies. The question is, are these things feasible in high-level organisms, like primates, he says. Shrime points out that there is already an immortal jellyfish. The steps to making humans immortal would be astronomical, he says.

Dr. Raghu Athre at Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital in Texas says that in working with patients, it becomes immediately apparent that human bodies are complicated and often react in ways that we could never expect. Patients are not the same as test tubes and lab rats, he says. There are so many variables that are out of our control. Athre argues that tech entrepreneurs are used to creating things they can control and work with data that makes sense; doctors, on the other hand, realize that human beings often defy logic. While neck cancer is associated with smoking, there are also 29-year-old non-smokers who get neck cancer and die within six months, he says.

This is not to say that doctors believe life extension will never happen. We will probably get to a point where we know enough about aging to increase life-spans," Shrime says, "but if we are seeing breakthroughs in worms and jellyfish, this is still miles and miles away from anything tangible we can offer to patients.

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The Eternal Problem Silicon Valley Can't Solve