John Harris writes:

Welcome to the era of immortalists: scientists, dreamers and – crucially – billionaires, who want us to think of age as a curable disease, and our final end as something that could be indefinitely postponed. According to one estimate, the revenues of the global anti-ageing industry will increase from about $200bn today to $420bn by 2030. One sure sign of its rosy prospects is the involvement of high-profile people in the US who have made vast fortunes from the internet. If many of them can avoid taxes, why not death?

“Death is sort of an affront to American life,” wrote Zadie Smith in 2003. “It’s so anti-aspirational.” In tech circles, this kind of distaste for mortality often blurs into the culture of “biohacking” (fasting, closely tracking your vital signs, gobbling supplements and “smart drugs”) which is one manifestation of transhumanism: to quote the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, “a belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current limitations, especially by the use of science and technology”.

The sums invested in anti-ageing research by such tech players as the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the Trump-supporting venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, show what happens when such ideas meet big money. The same goes, somewhat predictably, for the activities of the Amazon founder and aspiring astronaut, Jeff Bezos, who has previously funded an anti-ageing setup called Unity Biotechnology, and, via his personal investment vehicle Bezos Expeditions, is now reportedly a donor to a newly founded California venture called Altos Labs. The latter company is apparently going to set up “institutes” in the US, the UK and Japan, and is recruiting scientists with the offer of big salaries. One insider says its initial aim is to “understand rejuvenation”; its focus is the kind of “biological reprogramming technology” focused on the manipulation of cells. [Continue reading…]