Some rich and powerful tech bros want to recast the US government in the image of Silicon Valley
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In all my years covering ageing research, I have paid little attention to the fringes, at which people (mostly rich white men) strive to cheat death, or at least add decades to life. Thankfully, journalist and social scientist Aleks Krotoski has, and her portrayal of “the immortalists”, as she calls them, is eye-opening, entertaining and disturbing.
The quest for eternal life is as old as humans, of course, but recently it has taken on a new, sinister twist. In the driving seat are Silicon Valley “tech bros”, who see ageing and death as just another problem to solve. They have what Krotoski calls “engineer’s syndrome” – a hubristic belief that any complex problem can be cracked using engineering thinking, even in fields (usually biological) about which they know nothing.
That is certainly true of the egotists who fill The Immortalists: The death of death and the race for eternal life. Most of the movers and shakers in Krotoski’s book have a background in computer science or engineering, and are steeped in the “move fast and break things” Valley ethos. When they do pontificate about the causes and possible solutions for ageing, they generally display a profound ignorance. They are wedded to the increasingly rickety idea that ageing is the result of accumulated damage, for example. Many biogerontologists see this as yesterday’s paradigm.
They are also not that interested in what actual scientists have to say. There is an extremely illuminating passage about halfway in, where Krotoski reports from RAADfest 2022, the annual gathering of an organisation called the Revolution Against Ageing and Death.
Most of the speakers come from the biotech and the wellness industries, but one, Irna Conboy, is a bona fide research scientist. Along with her husband Mike Conboy, she studies regenerative medicine at the University of California, Berkeley. Some years ago, the Conboys discovered that transfusing plasma from a young mouse into an older one (a procedure called plasmapheresis) has a rejuvenating effect. This, unsurprisingly, caused a bit of a stir in the radical life extension community, but Conboy sought to dampen down the hype.
Krotoski describes Conboy’s presentation, delivered via Zoom and titled “Old Plasma Dilution Reduces Human Biological Age: A clinical study”. It sounds like a standard paper at a scientific conference, with data, technical language and the careful conclusion that the procedure may one day reduce biological age.
But at this gathering, there’s no room for equivocation: the presentation goes down like a lead balloon. What the audience wants is plasmapheresis, now. Despite being told in no uncertain terms that it is “extremely unsafe”, RAAD co-founder James Strole wraps up the presentation by saying, “I can’t wait to get in there and get some plasmapheresis.” You will meet many similar characters in this highly readable and meticulously researched book.
You might think this is a bit of a lark, but Krotoski also documents the growing political power of the immortalists, who she says include some of the world’s richest and most influential people, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. All have varying ties to Donald Trump’s White House and, according to Krotoski, are behind moves to cut funding for research designed to help today’s older people in order to advance their own techno-utopian vision.
In this respect, the life extension and immortality agenda is less important than their wider goal: radically rewiring the US government in the image of Silicon Valley.
On whether all of this is a good thing, Krotoski is a stoic agnostic. Her goal is to open people’s eyes to what is going on so they can make up their own minds. She does it brilliantly.
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