The way we live now: tech billionaires manipulate mortality
Billionaires intrigued by the prospect of living forever have begun investing in rejuvenation companies, says The Sunday Times. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the backers of Altos Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up that is looking to understand why we age and how to prevent it. Bezos has shown an interest in “slowing the ticking of the clock” before: in 2016, alongside PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, he contributed to a $116m investment in
Unity Biotechnology, a start-up developing “therapeutics to slow, halt or reverse diseases of ageing”. Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner, 59, is also said to be contributing to Altos Labs. On its board is Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese stem-cell researcher who won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for working out how to reprogramme cells to become more youthful. The men behind Google and Facebook are also “dabbling in the dark art of manipulating mortality”. Eight years ago Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started and put $750m behind Calico Life Sciences, whose mission it was to understand the biology that controls ageing. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, set up by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, also includes curing, preventing or managing all disease by the end of the 21st century in its remit. Bill Gates, however, disapproves, deeming it “egocentric… for rich people to fund things so they can live longer” while we still have deadly diseases like TB and malaria.