IMMORTAL BELOVED

To live into our hundreds is the stuff of sci-fi or egomaniacal fantasy, but thanks to companies better known for IT than wellbeing, immortality could be merely an algorithm away, writes

Thanks to companies better known for IT than wellbeing, immortality could be merely an algorithm away.

Picture the scene: a bunker, deep within California’s Silicon Valley. A collection of the world’s leading science, health and technology experts are gathered in a top-secret hub; a futuristic laboratory dedicated to blurring the boundaries between humans and robots. Bodies are frozen and memories downloaded to be stored on computers. Even the language they use to talk about growing older has had a reboot: instead of “antiageing” and “elixirs of youth”, it’s now all “human upgrades”, “hacking the ageing code” and “disrupting death”. Here, reaching 100 is considered humdrum and the aim is longevity on a hitherto unimagined scale. In short, it’s about discovering the secrets of living forever.

So far, this picture is something that only exists within the depths of my imagination; a conflation of references from James Bond to the Laboratoires Garnier. But it’s not entirely without justification. Because having mastered the microchip and curated the digital age, the tech world’s next big obsession, right now, seems to be the business of longevity.

As always in Silicon Valley, Google is never far from the action. In 2013, the tech giant unveiled a highly secretive research company called Calico (it stands for the California Life Company) focused on “health, wellbeing and longevity” ( Time magazine ran with the coverline “Can Google Solve Death?”). But for all the excitement around the company’s mission to “disrupt death”, precious little is known about what it’s really doing. The team at Calico, I was told, “isn’t giving interviews at the moment”, and its website tells you almost nothing.

British scientist Aubrey de Grey, sometimes referred to as the “rock star” of the longevity world, divides his time between Britain and California, developing his theory that with a big enough budget we may be able to reach a point where we could choose the age at which we would like to exist for the rest of our natural lives within the next 25 years. (His navel-grazing beard lends him a sort of “mad professor” air, and the irony is lost on no-one that the man who has become the academic face of anti-ageing certainly feels happy making himself look far older than he is – although when someone asked him why, he joked in his TED talk that he was actually 158.)

One of de Grey’s friends, and adviser to Google’s Calico, is Ray Kurzweil, a 68-yearold Woody Allen-like figure who was presented with the National Medal of

WHAT HAPPENS TO SEIZING THE DAY, LIVING EACH ONE AS IF IT WERE YOUR LAST?

Technology and Innovation by Bill Clinton. He believes, as he wrote in his 2012 book How To Create a Mind, that “mortality is within our grasp”, and he practises what he preaches. Sitting with him at dinner a few years back, I watched him consume about 30 supplements; a measure which, he claimed, had given him a “biological age” at least a decade younger than his chronological years. But here’s the question: could you really be bothered? To take all those tablets three times a day, or do any of the other things that the burgeoning longevity industry suggests might possibly extend your life? Meditation. Mindfulness. Hormone therapy. Nutritional therapy. Fasting. DNA profiling. You could probably lose whole years of your life just reading up on all the research.

Gareth Ackland is a clinician scientist at the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, whose team, Generation X, is in the running for the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, one of many Silicon Valley-based funds encouraging scientists to “hack the code of life”. He tells me he is a Fitbit wearer, but also mentions several articles he has read recently discussing the potentially negative impact that things such as wearable fitness gadgets are having on people. “They could be counterproductive in that they’re making some wearers neurotic,” he says.

Presumably, though, your approach to wellbeing must – at some level – depend on how optimistic you are by nature. If you’re predisposed to believe some of these technologies might work, maybe you’ll get more benefit from them. That’s why a lot of the research into longevity is around how big a part mind-set plays in conquering illness and ageing. There are now scientific studies that point to the positive role meditation can play in promoting longevity, including reducing anxiety, enhancing the immune system, slowing down the rate of progression in neurodegenerative diseases and lowering blood pressure.

I decide to put the theory to the test by undergoing cryotherapy, one of the most extreme therapies available to the youth-prolonging enthusiast – it’s the younger and less Frankensteinesque version of freezing dead bodies for defrosting at a later date (something, incidentally, that both de Grey and Kurzweil have signed up for). Now very popular among the ageing-obsessed in New York and Los Angeles, it involves spending up to five minutes standing in a tank of liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 130 degrees Celsius. The benefits? Largely anecdotal, but enough to make you stop and think.

“I’ll be with you in a minute, I’m just with my leukaemia lady!” salon entrepreneur Alla Pashynska shouts to me across the basement from which she operates. I wonder how the leukaemia lady feels about such a public introduction, but before I’ve finished formulating the thought, she has emerged from the therapy room, clad in fluffy black, waving medical records at me. “It’s miraculous!” she says, telling me that after eight years of treatment, she came to see Pashynska in January and has been having twice-weekly sessions ever since. Her white-blood-cell count has reduced by three-quarters.

Next thing, I’m standing in the tank wearing only my underwear, plus Ugg boots and fleece gloves (extremities need to be protected because they take longer to recover). After 30 seconds I feel numb everywhere, and strangely giggly – euphoria is apparently a side effect of extreme cold. Pashynska tries to distract me by turning on some music and making me dance. I pride myself on an excellent pain threshold but the cold is borderline unbearable.

Afterwards, my limbs are as chilly as stone. I keep touching them and laughing – it feels as if I am a marble statue come to life, all cool and smooth. I’ve never felt my body so cold. Five minutes or so later, though, I am fully back to normal.

But would I put myself through this process week in, week out, just on a vague promise of anti-ageing? No way. I’m just not that committed.

The truth is, for all Silicon Valley’s audacious claims, there is a vast gulf between what the biogerontologists say may be possible a few decades from now, and what we can probably claim makes a difference today. This gulf is the reason Ackland is interested in forging links with California: “Currently there is scientific technology and there is medical technology,” he says. “What the [Palo Alto] prize does is attempt to engineer a direct and immediate dialogue between the dramatic pace of scientific technology and its biomedical application.”

But what’s in it for Silicon Valley? Can it be as simple as the idea that the longer people live, the longer they’ll need to use high-tech consumables? Or is it more to do with big pharma? Living longer certainly doesn’t mean an absence of illness, so it would surely be good news for the pill-dispensing pharmaceutical giants. There’s also an ego element; the tech supremos who have made billions don’t want to step off the train any time soon. (“When you’re young and you’ve just created something amazing that’s made a tonne of money, you do egotistical things,” Dave Asprey, chairman of the board of the Silicon Valley Health Institute, has said.) And we can’t rule out philanthropy: what else to spend all that money on? It’s thought that Google co-founder Sergey Brin may also be driven by his discovery in 2008 that he carries a genetic mutation that means he has a greater likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease.

It’s also been noted how many of the tech billionaires have married women who have a background in science. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan is a paediatrician. Sergey Brin’s ex-wife Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the DNA service 23andMe, studied biology. Pam Omidyar, wife of eBay’s Pierre Omidyar (who became a billionaire at 31), is also a biologist – in fact, the first two couples, along with others, founded the Breakthrough Prize, which last year gave six awards of US$3 million each to pioneering scientists, many of whom had projects related to longevity.

Ackland thinks that another motivation is the appearance of a new revenue stream. “Apps, wearable devices and other potentially disruptive technologies that can find uses in healthcare open up an unpredictably exciting area, in a field that’s often institutionally slow to react to technological change,” he says.

But let’s face it: living forever is also, for a certain kind of scientist, the most alluring problem to solve since Faust made his pact with the devil. Could eternal youth just be a matter of algorithms? de Grey thinks so. “Things are changing here first,” he had said, referring to why so much of the current anti-ageing research is coming out of California’s tech hub. “We have a great density of visionaries who like to think high.” (There’s also money available in that part of the world: the story goes that

when Kurzweil asked Brin and his fellow Google founder Larry Page how much he had to spend, they told him to let them know when he runs out of money and they’d send more.)

But who wants to live longer if you’re not actually in your prime? That’s where the longevity question starts to get even more complicated. Experts are already referring to “healthspan” rather than “lifespan”, to make the point that the focus of research should be on extending the period that a human being is alive before their health goes downhill, and the EU has an official goal of adding two years to healthspan by 2020. Where that figure comes from, though, and what it really means, is unclear. Does it mean adding two years to everyone’s life, or does it depend on how old you are to begin with? Or is it only applicable to babies born in 2020? The figures, as so often in the longevity “race”, grab the headlines, but the facts are hidden.

One explanation of “healthspan” is that each of us has a homeostatic capacity: the point at which our bodies stop being able to take things in their stride so easily. Somewhere around middle age, you might notice you get travel sickness where once you didn’t, or that getting up from sitting on the floor starts to be something you have to put effort into. That, for the longevity world, is the thing they want to stave off. Put that way, surely none of us would say no? But the ethical questions are massive, and something no-one seems prepared to tackle head-on. The murky worlds of population restriction, impaired brain function and a potential future where the rich are able to buy their way to longer lives are all part of the debate, and ethics committees so far don’t seem to want to commit.

There are also wider cultural questions around what becomes of someone when they don’t see an end in sight. What happens to seizing the day, living each one as if it were your last? What does it do to your relationships if there’s never a threat of anyone you know ever dying? How does it affect your sense of self? If youth was historically wasted on the young, what if you can now be youthful and experienced?

Maybe as transhumanists like Kurzweil believe, none of this actually matters, because in the future you’ll be able to use technology to overcome your biological limitations. In other words, it’ll be possible to reprogram yourself (using genomeediting technology) to alter and improve your capacity for pleasure, making you a delight to spend time with, 24/7.

But who, really, wants to spend all day surrounded by a bunch of computers and call them friends? Not me. And in fact, discussing this piece over the past few months, I’ve encountered far more people who are horrified by the idea of humans becoming more robotic than people excited about the idea of living forever.

One thing’s for sure, though: the idea of your body as a piece of software waiting to be “hacked” isn’t going away. There’s even a new school of thought that says we should teach children to code biology as well as computers, in order to foster the most seamless link between the two. And Stephen Hawking has also said that it’s already “theoretically possible” to download your brain onto a computer.

In the absence of indisputable proof, though, for now – as the mindfulness lobby seems to suggest – you really are as old as you feel. In our offices, we have a quote on the wall by Woody Allen (the real one) as a counterbalance to the deluge of antiwrinkle creams we receive each week. It says: “You can live to be 100 if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be 100.”

I wonder what Silicon Valley would have to say about that.