How Some Serious Scientists (and Some Very Big Money) Are Solving the Problem, Right Now

We aren’t talking about fads or diets or snake oil. My most recent book, published by National Geographic, tells the story of how some of America’s most revered scientists are determined to turn back the clock.

This is the prologue for my Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions and the Quest to Live Forever. Can serious science solve one of life’s great mysteries? The story begins here …

Never Say Die …

The idea that people like you and me might manage to live outrageously long lives first struck me several years ago, when Ralph Merkle and I were having lunch and he mentioned he planned to be frozen when he died. I looked across the table, put my fork down. and folded my hands. “Really,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Merkle, cheerily.

Merkle was a witty and affable polymath who was not only one of the world’s experts in nanotechnology, but also the co-inventor of the key encryption technology used for credit card transactions over the internet. His plan was that he would be slipped into one of several stainless steel canisters at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, so that, sometime in the future, he could be brought back to life.

Alcor is one of three places in the world that specialize in freezing the faithfully departed. The process requires a series of complex medical procedures that result in its denizens being slowly cooled to a temperature of minus 310°F. That, said Merkle, was where he, and the rest of Alcor’s clients, would remain — until science divined how to bring them all, entirely whole, back to the future.

“You know how in lab experiments you have the ‘experimental’ animal and the ‘control’ animal?” Merkle asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“The control is left alone, and the experimental animal is the subject of the test, right?” I nodded.

“Well,” said Merkle, “in this case I’m obviously the experimental animal. Maybe I’ll be reanimated. Maybe not. But I already know what happens to the controls.” Long and pregnant pause.

“They all die.”

I EVENTUALLY VISITED ALCOR, and I confess it made me wonder. Maybe science could find a way to pull off some sort of end run on death. But I also sensed a problem, and it had to do with the Big Wait. The rejuvenation of Alcor’s occupants required that their animation be suspended. Their hearts had to stop before they could be slipped into their chilly thermoses. That was the law. Even if they could be safely frozen, reviving them would still require, at some unknown point, not only resuscitating their damaged bodies but also rewinding their biological clocks. Otherwise, they would return no better off than they had been when they first departed. And  what good was that?

This, it seemed to me, made Alcor’s approach what you might call plan B, but not plan A. Plan A was to avoid death in the first place, solve what killed you before you passed through the veil. Who wanted the Big Wait? Put another way, Alcor didn’t really solve the fundamental problem of curing the one thing that got us all (assuming something else didn’t get us first): aging.

Where was the solution to that?

So I began digging deeper. I can get to the bottom of this as well as anyone, I thought. Wasn’t I a science author and documentary filmmaker, a National Geographic grantee who had also been a CNN bureau chief? All I had to do was formulate the right questions, hunt down the best people to ask, and then come up with a scintillating way to unfold the story.

Simple.

Except it wasn’t.

I pillaged the internet and rifled through armloads of books. I explored the fields of geriatrics and gerontology (there is a difference) and reviewed research being done at the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute on Aging. I investigated Earth’s so-called Blue Zones, the places where people live unusually long. Blearily, I scoured actuarial tables and found that Americans, even though nearly 70 percent were overweight, had, during the past 120 years, somehow been doing an otherwise exemplary job of extending their life spans. As of 2015 the average American lived 78.7 years; in 1900 the number was 48. And yet, although we might be living longer, it didn’t seem we were necessarily living better; the last years of life were often costly, long on suffering, and short on quality.

Despite this news, the mainstream media said still longer lives lie ahead. Books, magazines, and the internet were swimming in hype about diets, fitness regimens, and cosmetic procedures that could make one live longer, look better, stay stronger. Between 2013 and 2015, Time, National Geographic, Scientific American, and the Atlantic published cover stories proclaiming that living well past 100 years was just around the bend.

About the same time, I came across a Pew Research Center study entitled Living to 120 and Beyond. I tracked down the authors and found that baby boomers were especially fond of the idea of longer lives. Boomers made up the generation of humans bookended between the ages of 50 and 68. I was familiar with those people. I was a boomer myself. It turned out they were busy spending billions of dollars annually not only to extend their lives but to extend the quality of their extended lives. Name the drug, diet, supplement, exercise, or scientific breakthrough that might broaden the distance between boomers and the grim reaper, and they were buying it by the boatload. Not that they were the only ones. Everyone, even millennials, it seemed, loved the idea of remaining indefinitely youthful.

DESPITE OUR FASCINATION WITH YOUTH, the very idea that we can live forever strikes the brain as fundamentally silly, even wrong. When I would bring the subject up with friends or relatives, there was always a knowing rolling of the eyes: “Oh, pulleeeze, when I get old, just shoot me!” Or sometimes, “I’ve told my kids that when I can’t remember their names, it’s time for the Lethal Cocktail.”

“Right,” I would answer. “But what if you didn’t have to grow old? What if science somehow found a way to roll back the clock and restore you to your best physical and mental self?” Well, that was a different story.

But then, didn’t other trouble await if everyone lived hundreds of years? Surely we would all be facing some Soylent Green, dystopian world, stacked in urban silos living hollow- eyed, cheek by jowl. If that happened, wasn’t it also inevitable that we soon would burn the planet to a cinder? And by the way, isn’t this living super-long stuff for the rich only? A bunch of selfish, well-heeled, white, male, baby boomers who are looking down the barrel of their own mortality and not caring much for the view? Besides, who wanted to live in a future they might not understand — one bereft of family and friends who had failed to make everlasting muster? Death is a blessing! It gives life meaning! One New York Times opinion writer even called the drive for an extended life fundamentally “inhuman.”

Others, however, saw the end of aging as a great blessing. Let’s be honest, they said, getting old isn’t the warm and fuzzy fairy tale we make it out to be. It grinds people down. Bit by bit we are robbed of our strength and spirit. We grow up, dream, work, slow down, and then watch the cells in our bodies clatter and fall apart like a battered car. Who enjoyed watching the people they loved grow weak and weary until one day they blipped out? And who wanted to be that person, someday?

Wouldn’t a youthful life — five, even 10 times longer — be an upgrade? Wouldn’t we grow wiser, build on our mistakes and knowledge, and become better friends, parents, workers — just better people? And wouldn’t that collective wisdom enable us to learn from the wars and mayhem we seem to constantly repeat? How much more would Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, or Marie Curie have changed the world with a few additional centuries under their belts?

But more than anything, I wondered who among us — if we were truly handed the opportunity for a longer, healthier life — would say, “No, thanks. Today, I’m done. Take me now.”

In the end, you could argue that the debates were all useless anyhow — because when I looked up from all my research, so far as I could tell 100 percent of the human race was still headed to the grave. Not one of my investigations and ruminations had revealed even a single major scientific breakthrough that might fundamentally change the long and mortal landscape of aging and death. Maybe, I thought, science didn’t have a clue after all, and we were all doomed to spend the final stages of our existence blathering around the assisted living facility checking our name tags to recall who we were, and not a thing to be done about it.

Then came news. The announcement on September 18, 2013, of a corporation called Calico, funded largely by Google. “We’re tackling aging,” was the way the company put it, “one of life’s great mysteries.” Google? Now that was worth looking into. And just as intriguing was the news that Arthur D. Levinson had been asked to lead the company. Most people wouldn’t have known Levinson if they tripped over him, but he was a force in Silicon Valley. He was the chairman of Apple, and just a year earlier had chaired Genentech, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied early start-ups. When news of Calico hit the wires, the media snapped to. “Google vs. Death” — that was how Time Magazine put it.

There is always a watershed moment that precedes any truly fundamental change in the human story. Calico’s founding, I felt, might mark that moment. The very idea that a company with pockets as deep as Google’s, and a leader with Levinson’s pedigree, had chosen to undertake something that for so long seemed crazy, made it instantly not. This wasn’t snake oil or mumbo jumbo; it wasn’t even a few million federal or foundation dollars being thrown at a handful of scientists hoping against hope for some staggering breakthrough. This was hundreds of millions of dollars stoking the engines of a team capable of tackling really big, complex biological problems.

Then, just a few months after news of Calico emerged, another company rose up determined to take on aging: Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI). With a first-round investment of $70 million in March 2014, this venture didn’t have Google in its financial pocket, but it was seeded by an impressive list of Silicon Valley investors. And at the helm it had J. Craig Venter, a scientist who, in the late 1990s, had found a quicker and better way to sequence the human genome, an approach that goosed the federal government’s slower effort (and ruffled no end of feathers in the process). Today, the completion of the Human Genome Project remains one of the most important scientific advancements in human history. With Human Longevity, Inc., Venter said he wanted to focus his genomic expertise on extending a “high-performance” human life span.

Central to HLI’s creation was one of the company’s co-founders, a surgeon, researcher, and serial entrepreneur named Robert Hariri. Over the previous 15 years, Hariri had quietly become among the world’s leading experts in cellular therapeutics, and the first to realize that stem cells supplied by the human placenta might deliver an entirely new way to safely extend life.

The sudden emergence of these two companies made me wonder. Why them? Why now? And that brought me to Raymond Kurzweil. Kurzweil isn’t a microbiologist or expert in genomics or even a biologist: He is an engineer, inventor, and futurist, one of the world’s best known. I had interviewed him several times over the years, and watched his prognostications about the exponential advance of artificial intelligence and human longevity bend mainstream culture to his often outrageous ways of thinking. Could his views and books and unrelenting talks have anything to do with Silicon Valley’s emerging belief that technology could alter death as profoundly as it was already transforming brick-and-mortar stores, cars, and phones? As it turned out, the answer was yes.

THERE IS NOTHING RUN-OF-THE-MILL about these scientists. They are all troublemakers at heart. As I looked more deeply into them, I found each had his own plan for taking on death and dying. But together they all shared one common view: The conventional approaches most researchers and practitioners of the medical arts were applying to disease were, at the very least, misguided. Why squander billions of dollars trying to bring cancer to heel — or diabetes, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s — when the real answer was to go for the truly big game: aging itself. Solve that problem, and all the rest would disappear.

Now as you ponder this, the same questions might be crossing your mind that crossed mine. Were these men crazy, or actually on to something? Was this hubris or genius, altruism or ego? Were they the Galileos, Newtons, and Einsteins of their time, or just a handful of deluded baby boomers whose wallets happened to be as outsize as their own talents? Why should these scientists succeed, when over the past 3.8 billion years, every living thing on Earth had died!

The world has witnessed big plays before, but what was bigger than death? Billions of dollars were now on the line, and movers and shakers were at the table. But would it really lead to anything? Could Venter truly revolutionize the practice of modern medicine? Could Hariri’s stem cells rejuvenate the body? Was Kurzweil right that the exponential advance of computing would be our salvation? And could Levinson’s team someday truly shift the biological paradigms of life and death? Given the rapid advances in genomics, genetics, and molecular biology, big data, nanotechnology, and machine learning, who could say? Maybe death could be cheated. Not with a lot of hand wringing and mythical quests, not with religious and philosophical meditations — and certainly not with ellipticals, StairMasters, tinctures, or alchemic jars of snake oil. But with real and serious science.

Every great endeavor requires four forces to make it a reality. First, there has to be a need: a desire, a market. The second is the will and drive to fulfill the need. The third, resources: tools, money, expertise. And finally, people talented enough to succeed and achieve the dream. The human race — baby boomers, especially — had already provided plenty of need. But was all the rest in place too?

That was the ringing and elemental question. Because this was big. Nothing could possibly change the world more profoundly than the end of The End. Accomplishing that would represent the greatest scientific achievement in all of humankind.

But where to begin the quest? I couldn’t think of a better place to start than the one place where absolutely no one wants to die…

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Chip Walter is a National Geographic Explorer, science author, former CNN Bureau Chief and documentary filmmaker. You can learn more about Immortality, Inc. at local bookstores everywhere or online at Amazon and other online stores. (Find the Audio Book here.) You can also watch his interview at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington DC here. Visit Chip’s website at www.vagabond-adventure.com to explore more about his travels and about other books, like Last Ape Standing. If you’d like to buy a signed copy of any of Chip’s books, he has a small number available here.