Why everyone’s talking about... Eternal life

AMAZON boss Jeff Bezos has hired top scientists to help his firm Altos unlock the secret of eternal life – or at least delay death. So what’s the plan?

They’re working on ways to rejuvenate ageing cells, which could repair organs and end diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. Other gene therapies target ‘telomeres’, DNA fragments stuck to the end of chromosomes like the plastic ends on your shoelaces. These seem to shrink with age, so the idea is to lengthen them, and thus your life. It’s worked on lab mice, and a 44-year-old American woman tried it to no noticeable effect, good or bad. Other scientists are looking to rid the body of ‘zombie’ cells which stop working but refuse to die, and are linked to arthritis and diabetes.

Will any of these work?

Optimists think life expectancy can lengthen indefinitely. Brits born in 1920 lived to 49 on average, now it’s 80.6. Last year a major study suggested an ‘absolute limit of human lifespan’ of about 150. Yet some say the first person who’ll live to 150 has already been born.

Just 150?

Pah! Russian tech billionaire Dmitry Itskov wants to live to 10,000. He aims to transplant human brains into cyborgs by 2045 and eventually upload a mind in digital form. But he’s already behind schedule.

Another tech tycoon?

They’re all at it. Silicon Valley thinks the body’s a machine, and death just an engineering problem. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn says ‘involuntary death is clearly morally bad’ and satellite radio pioneer Martine Rothblatt wants to upload her wife to the cloud. Immortality has long been a rich man’s folly. China’s first Qin emperor drank mercury, thinking it was the elixir of life. It fatally poisoned him.

Any other ideas for immortality?

You could cryogenically freeze your body, for about £150,000, but it may damage your cells irreparably. You could leave a lasting legacy. But as Woody Allen said: ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.’