Rather than the National Institutes of Health designating public funds to further research towards development of an anti-aging pill, a key group of billionaire oligarchs now lead private enterprise ventures to discover ways to halt, slow or even reverse aging.
The anti-aging business has become a rich man’s pastime. Silicon Valley billionaires dot the anti-aging landscape: Methuselah Foundation’s Peter Thiel, Google’s/Alphabet’s Larry Page, Oracles’s Larry Ellison, Juvenesce’s Jim Mellon, to name a few. These billionaires who provide the capital have everything anyone would want in life except immortality.
A recent issue of The New Yorker described “the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: ‘We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span’.” [“Silicon Valley’s Quest To Live Forever” The New Yorker, April 3, 2017]
That is the impetus driving the quest for biological immortality by billionaires who now believe they can conquer aging. This may be the greatest technological mountain man has ever attempted to climb.
Actually, wealthy Americans are living longer already. While a “long life” is on a list of fifty things money can’t buy [Inc.com], a modern truth is that people in the U.S. with higher incomes are living up to 20+ years longer (variance 66 to 87 years). Obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and diabetes, emanating from poor diets and nutrition, account for 74% of the variation. [CNN May 9, 2017; JAMA May 8, 2017] But the kind of longevity Silicone Valley technocrats are talking about is more like 120+ years.
But don’t bet on biotechnology. A report on “The Business of Anti-Aging Science” states: “Of the 4000 private and 600…