6

THE VALLEY SHADOWING DEATH

Since the 1980s, wave after wave of technological change originating from Silicon Valley has crashed over the world. Each jump in progress has spawned new industries, fortunes, and even universes. A growing band of geeks steadily grew wealthier, and their influence expanded along with their bank balances. Behind each multibillion-dollar company was a flock of venture capitalists who readied their checkbooks when young startups needed them most and reaped the rewards when they grew into the monoliths that now prop up the American economy. Since the birth of the personal computer, the moment when high-technology made its way into the home, Silicon Valley has swallowed industries whole, one by one. The internet changed commerce forever, enabling all-conquering profit machines like Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. Ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft quickly engulfed the transportation industry, while Airbnb and Seamless revolutionized hospitality. Technology transformed finance, logistics, media, and entertainment. It was only a matter of time before Silicon Valley turned its now all-seeing eye to the health care industry, America’s most broken, and profitable, institution. Biotech companies have always fit snugly into the startup template. They begin as cash-hungry long shots, and when their treatments are approved, they pay gigantic dividends. When the men with the money sensed a quickening in anti-aging, they fell over each other to pump cash into young companies addressing just the kinds of fields that make immortalists so hopeful.

And so the world of immortalism crashed headlong into Silicon Valley and all its billions, guided by the man who has done more for the cause of immortality than anyone else. Aubrey de Grey, already mentioned in previous chapters, enjoys god-like status in the immortalist community. Over time he’s publicized the goal of defeating aging and even made it somewhat fashionable. His rejuvenation theories, once scoffed at, were slowly accepted as fact by the scientific community, and he now sits at the center of a network patiently built over decades, in the middle of the science, the money, and the immortalists, his adoring fans.

De Grey has always appreciated the value of the media in his quest and has been interviewed for magazines, newspapers, websites, and documentaries countless times. He makes for a great spokesperson for such an eccentric community. Past articles noted his Rasputin-like beard, wild auburn hair, and tendency to crack open a beer at all times of the day. When we spoke on a video call, de Grey dialing in from his Silicon Valley base, I was relieved to see he lived up to all the hype. His beard was suitably wizardly, his red hair graying but still untamed, and not long into our call I heard the sound of a beer bottle hissing open at midday, California time. He talked like an idiosyncratic member of the old English aristocracy, rapidly and without pause, and at times I got the sense I’d signed up for a lecture rather than an interview.[1]

When de Grey was between eight and nine years old, his mother pressured him to practice the piano. The young Englishman resisted, and even at that tender age that instinct intrigued him and warranted further introspection. He concluded he didn’t want to practice the piano because he wanted to improve the quality of life for the whole of humanity. He still doesn’t know where that urge comes from, but it has driven him his whole life. “It led me to be very sure I never wanted to have kids, because for sure that’s a very time-consuming thing that prevents you from doing other stuff,” he told me.

After deciding scientists were the people who made the biggest difference to the world in the long run, de Grey began learning computer programming when he was fifteen and quickly found he was extremely adept at it. He went to the University of Cambridge to study computer science in the early 1980s, then worked for six or seven years in artificial intelligence research. De Grey always considered aging to be the greatest challenge of humanity but was content believing it was being addressed by the world’s biologists, and he began fixing another issue, “the fact that people had to spend so much of their time doing stuff they wouldn’t do unless they were being paid for it.”

But at a graduate party in Cambridge, de Grey met the fruit fly geneticist Adelaide Carpenter, who he later married. His relationship took him into the world of biology academia, and he was shocked when he discovered aging was way down the list of priorities in the discipline. “It took me a couple of years to come to terms with that, really, but once I did I realized I had no choice, I just had to switch fields,” he recalled.

De Grey first gained notoriety when he published his 1999 book The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which he argued immortality was theoretically possible for humans. At the center of his thinking was a concept called strategies for engineered negligible senescence, abbreviated to SENS. In 2005, MIT Technology Review announced a $20,000 prize for anyone who could successfully argue that de Grey’s theories were more fantasy than science. To claim the prize, the entrants had to prove that SENS was “so wrong it was unworthy of learned debate.” There were five submissions, of which three met the terms of the challenge. But the judges decided none of them met the criteria for victory and disproved SENS. [2]

“The scientific process requires evidence through independent experimentation or observation in order to accord credibility to a hypothesis. SENS is a collection of hypotheses that have mostly not been subjected to that process and thus cannot rise to the level of being scientifically verified. However, by the same token, the ideas of SENS have not been conclusively disproved. SENS exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt,” Nathan Myhrvold, one of the judges and cofounder of Intellectual Ventures and former chief technology officer of Microsoft, wrote.[3]

In 2009, de Grey set up the SENS Foundation, a nonprofit and the world’s first organization dedicated to curing aging. Through the charity, de Grey was able to place himself in a position to link the scientists working on rejuvenation—who could prove him right—with sources of investment. None of the labs that received money were required to declare they were working toward immortality, or even extended life, and some of the most respected scientists in the gerontology field received funding.

SENS is based in Silicon Valley, where the billionaires have deep pockets and don’t shy away from a difficult challenge. De Grey thinks the Valley’s forgiving attitude toward failure is the secret to its success. “That made Silicon Valley what it is today in IT, and more recently in biotech,” he said. “And it continues to be an absolutely essential ingredient for anything where you’re in the real vanguard. Anything that isn’t really a thing yet but is on the way to becoming a thing. Of course, longevity is very, very much that.”

It does help to have money, as well. More and more of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have developed a personal passion in health and extended life over the past decade. Tad Friend’s 2017 New Yorker article titled “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever” most notably described the obsession. Friend’s reporting from a symposium held in an aging expert’s living room in Los Angeles documented celebrities and Silicon Valley elites gathering to grill biologists on their chances of making death optional.[4] A handful of the wealthiest people in the technology industry have spent huge sums of money on projects attempting to defeat aging. Some see this as an altruistic endeavor which can help the whole of humanity, others as the quickest route to living longer themselves, while a fair few consider it merely as a profitable industry of the future.

The technology industry’s participation in the field of aging, both in a personal and professional capacity, has been relentlessly mocked the world over. The HBO comedy drama Silicon Valley featured moguls pumping the blood of the young into their veins to extend their lifespan, one of the many practices touted as the next big thing in life extension.

One of the characters who is heavily rumored to have invested in this field is Peter Thiel.[5] Thiel cofounded the payment giant PayPal and several other successful startups but is perhaps best known for his litigiousness and pseudo-libertarianism. He bankrolled the former wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the publisher of Gawker in revenge for an article written about Thiel years earlier that outed him as a homosexual.[6] A self-declared libertarian and a supporter of the Libertarian Party, he migrated quickly in 2016 to feed off Donald Trump’s bare-faced nationalism and xenophobia.[7] In recent times, his name has been repeatedly linked to startups offering young blood transfusions similar to those seen on TV, which has only bolstered his reputation of having something of the night about him. In short, if ever there was a powerful reason to abandon life extension research, it might be the thought of Peter Thiel living forever.

Experiments in young blood transfusions have shown early promise. In tests on mice, older subjects injected with youthful blood were found to be more active, although any experimentation in humans has been less encouraging.[8] That hasn’t stopped people profiting from the practice. California-based startup Ambrosia attracts the most attention in this field. The company, founded in 2016 by CEO Jesse Karmazin, began by charging patients $8,000 for one liter of youthful plasma. Karmazin leaned heavily on the prospect of immortality to sell its services. The startup is named after the mythical food that made Greek gods immortal, and the founder said in interviews the treatment “comes pretty close” to immortality.

In February 2019, the FDA weighed in on young blood transfusions, declaring the benefits unproven and side effects potentially harmful. “We’re alerting consumers and health care providers that treatments using plasma from young donors have not gone through the rigorous testing that the FDA normally requires in order to confirm the therapeutic benefit of a product and to ensure its safety,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote in a statement. “We’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies.”[9]

Karmazin said the FDA did not contact him directly before or after issuing the statement and didn’t take any action against Ambrosia. Regardless, he put his business on hold almost immediately after the statement was issued “under an abundance of caution.” In August that year, it was reported the company had shut down entirely and Karmazin had moved on to another business, Ivy Plasma.[10] The website for the new company suggested it would be offering the same services as Ambrosia, but the plasma would not be sourced specifically from younger people. Karmazin later said the Ivy Plasma website was part of an effort to rebrand, but he soon decided customers wanted to buy their blood from Ambrosia, not Ivy Plasma. By October, the old website was operational again, and Ambrosia began to offer its services once more. Despite graduating from Stanford Medical School, Karmazin is not licensed to practice medicine and can’t perform the transfusions himself, so instead he contracts doctors to carry out the procedures. As of 2021, the Ambrosia website is still accepting customers, although the prices have dropped, and one liter of young blood now costs only $5,000.[11]

Young blood transfusions, despite apparently finding a consumer base in Silicon Valley, remain on the fringes of longevity offerings, and as of now can be safely considered similar to snake oil. But the technology industry’s march into life extension is not limited to crazed opportunists; some of the biggest names in the world are involved. Like Google.

The founders of the search engine giant, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced their intention to cure death in 2013, when they created Calico. Bill Maris, the CEO of Google’s venture capital arm, did the initial legwork. His father died of a brain tumor when Maris was twenty-six, an event that forced him to confront the finality of death.[12] Maris built a reputation as a shrewd investor in young technology companies that went on to be massive, like Uber and the smart thermostat startup Nest. When he made the decision to build a company that would tackle death, he consulted Ray Kurzweil, one of the most revered figures in the immortalist community. Kurzweil first popularized the concept of the technological singularity, a single moment where progress explodes and artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans, leading to us merging with computers to become superpowered immortals. He is a renowned inventor and technologist who has produced many best-selling books. In 2012, Page personally hired Kurzweil to work at Google. Kurzweil is also a registered member of Alcor and will be cryopreserved if he dies before the singularity. He predicted in the year 2000 that cryonics would figure out how to reanimate patients within forty to fifty years.[13]

Kurzweil approved of the idea, but Andy Conrad, a geneticist who led Verily, the life sciences division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, told Maris how difficult his task would be to execute. Unperturbed, Maris pitched his idea to one of Google’s top investors, John Doerr, in 2011, asking the billionaire why he’d ever want to die if he was so wealthy. Of course, Doerr lapped it up and took the pitch to Google’s founders, Brin and Page. The duo soon declared the plan would be executed in-house at Google.[14]

Calico, which is short for the California Life Company, launched shortly after with $1 billion in funding.[15] Anti-aging advocates, gerontologists, immortalists, and other groups grew excited at the thought of such a gigantic company entering into this field of work. “Calico added a tremendous amount of validation to aging research,” George Vlasuk, the head of a biotech startup called Navitor, told The New Yorker.[16]

But their hopes were soon dashed when it became clear Calico intended to keep almost all of its progress completely secret. The company vacuumed up a lot of talent from labs all over the world but has released barely any details about its work.

And even for those with the inside track on what was going on, the company has turned out to be a bitter disappointment. “They have totally fucked it up. I mean, they have royally fucked it up,” de Grey told me. “Basically, just by not listening to me and deciding that I was actually a bit too crazy for their taste. And they’ve ended up completely blowing it.”

De Grey insisted it would be “an extremely unlikely accident” if Calico ever contributed anything significant to the quest to end aging, simply because of the way it’s organized. He said the company is set up to conduct discovery-based research, where researchers “find things out for the sake of finding things out, the way people do in academia,” and then develop the means to turn proof of concept into a product at the end. But the middle section, where concept is converted to proof of concept, is completely missing. De Grey is clearly furious at how the company turned out. “It’s fucked up. It’s absolutely unforgivable, and it’s all Larry and Sergey’s fault,” he fumed.

De Grey is also angered by the secrecy. He said it was to be expected from a company requiring absolutely no outside funding, but from a humanitarian perspective, it was inefficient. “But honestly, I don’t care very much because they’re set up so badly in the first place that there is a low probability that anything they are discovering is of any interest anyway, so they can just carry on wasting their money, as far as I’m concerned. The main problem right now is they are by far the biggest organization by budget, and so it’s extremely tragic that so much money is being poured down the drain. But they may not be the biggest for very long.”

Longevity enthusiasts and immortalists didn’t have to wait too long until another set of tech billionaires threw their cash behind an anti-aging startup. In September 2021, it was reported that Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner gathered scientists at his Silicon Valley mansion to discuss biotechnology that could make people younger. That meeting led to the creation of an anti-aging company named Altos Labs, which is developing biological reprogramming technology. According to MIT Technology Review, Altos Labs’ list of investors includes the figure immortalists had hoped would enter the fray for many years, the world’s richest man: Jeff Bezos.[17] The creation of this new mega-funded startup marked the latest round of billionaires seemingly unwilling to accept anything other than an extended life. Milner, aged fifty-nine, is estimated to be worth $5.9 billion, while Bezos, fifty-seven, has a net worth of around $200 billion and counting. Time may be running out for these two men, but their bank balances will not.

De Grey believes the influx of private sector companies into the anti-aging space is the most important recent development. He told me this increase in outside funding began no more than five or six years ago, and in earnest only a couple of years ago. Before then, the anti-aging industry was still seen as something of a joke—if anyone was selling anything that claimed to reverse or slow aging, it was a scam. “It was all about products that already existed but didn’t work. Now it’s the opposite. It’s about products that don’t exist but there is enough science and enough scientific authority behind them to allow investors to believe that they probably will exist fairly soon, and that they will work.”

Research by CB Insights showed the number of investment deals in longevity startups jumped from less than five in 2013 to twenty-five in 2018.[18] Since then, the figures have increased even more rapidly. In 2019, the Bank of America issued a report stating technology was on the verge of bringing “unprecedented increases in quality and length of human lifespans” and predicted the market would grow roughly sixfold to $600 billion by 2025.[19] Further research from the Aging Analytics Agency showed that the United States dominates longevity funding. A study showed 3,475 longevity companies had attracted a total of $93 billion worth of investment in the US, compared to just 113 companies receiving $17 billion in China, the country with the second highest longevity investment.[20]

One such anti-aging investor is Sergey Young, the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund, a $100 million investment vehicle launched in 2019. He has set himself the goal of extending the healthy lifespan of 1 billion people and to personally live until he’s two hundred. Young is one of a new breed of investor in this space, and his first longevity fund was the largest ever. “This is crazy, for you and me $100 million is a lot of money, but in financial industry terms $100 million is really peanuts,” he tells me on a video call. “So we still need to realize that longevity is heavily underinvested and usually doesn’t receive as much focus as you would expect.”

When I spoke to Young, he was halfway through a promotional push for his new book, The Science and Technology of GROWING YOUNG, in which lays out his strategy to increase the average lifespan. Like every significant effort in longevity, de Grey is involved. He was on the scientific advisory board of the Longevity Vision Fund, and Young described him as a “beautiful soul” and a “great mind.” But the two don’t agree on everything, particularly around the topic of immortality. Young does not consider himself an immortalist at all. “I’m not a big fan of immortality, if you take death out of the human cycle, we’re not going to be humans, or we’ll be different types of humans. I’m not in that game,” he said.

Young also doesn’t believe in cryonics. “This whole cryonics thing is from forty years ago. It was the only brave school of thought, a breakthrough idea you can have back in 1980, but the world has changed since then. So we are not interested in cryonics at all. I’m interested in billions of people to be healthy, and have access to affordable and accessible version of health care, not preserving a couple of hundred bodies and for them to wake up in two hundred years from now and commit suicide if they can.”

However, he told me he still has respect for the older crowd of longevity enthusiasts, including the immortalists. “We are united by one dream, to live longer, happier, and healthier on Earth,” he said.

Many factors are fueling this rise in investment, but perhaps the most significant of them is the increasingly worrying demographics of major nations. The problem, to put it simply, is boomers. The boomer generation, as of 2021, is aged between fifty-seven and seventy-five. In the United States, as that generation gets older, the number of people aged sixty-four or older is expected to almost double from fifty-two million in 2018 to ninety-five million by 2060. The percentage of the population represented by these over-sixty-fives will rise from 16 to 23 percent.[21] This will bring huge economic and social challenges. The aging of the boomer generation could mean a more than 50 percent increase in the number of Americans requiring nursing home care, from 1.2 million in 2017 to 1.9 million in 2030. And the cost of social security and Medicare is also expected to increase, from 8.7 percent of the gross domestic product to 11.8 percent by 2050.[22]

The baby boomer generation is a ticking time bomb just beginning to explode. As this group ages, it will put a huge strain on health care systems around the globe, not helped in the United States by rising obesity rates. There is expected to be a steep rise in the number of Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s disease—the figures could more than double, from 5.8 million to 13.8 million by 2050.[23] With these numbers in mind, it’s easy to see why the world is starting to take aging research a lot more seriously. If rejuvenation is possible, and elderly people can take preventative medicine to revert their bodies back to a younger state, the boomer generation won’t be so much of a problem.

Investors do not bet on a wild hunch or a belief system, and they were partially spurred on by many of de Grey’s theories being proven more correct than most scientists originally believed possible. “Back when I was first talking about rejuvenation and about damage repair as the way to go, about twenty years ago now, I had a lot of trouble getting my expert colleagues on board with it. They really didn’t understand a word I was saying at first. I was bringing a lot of new ideas and concepts from areas of biology they were unfamiliar with. It took a bunch of time. But over the past ten years, that’s over. Everybody gets the damage repair concept,” de Grey told me.

It should be made clear the startups attracting the big bucks from Silicon Valley are not touting immortality as their product. Most of the biotech companies in the aging space are focused on healthspan, not lifespan, a much more palatable concept for people handing out millions of dollars and expecting a return. De Grey is not shy in talking up his role in anything, but even after speaking to a handful of gerontologists, it seems his summary of recent events is largely accurate. So why is he still so divisive? There’s a big difference between longevity, extended healthspan, extended lifespan, and immortality. Longevity is generally an umbrella term that includes the other three. Extended healthspan refers to making people less sick for the normal amount of time they spend alive. In an ideal world, someone with an extended healthspan would still die at eighty, ninety, or one hundred, but their demise would be quick, and they would be reasonably healthy and active for a large proportion of those years. Extended lifespan refers to the number of years we spend here on Earth and could possibly lead to a long, drawn-out affair where we live a lot longer but live miserable lives. Immortality is something different altogether, but de Grey insists it is very much possible.

While biologists broadly agree on de Grey’s rejuvenation theory, they have never accepted the concept he named back in 2004: longevity escape velocity. This way of thinking suggests that once we are able to obtain a twenty- or thirty-year postponement of death, the job is done. At that point, he explained, we can be “very nearly certain that we will be able to continue improving our therapies fast enough to stay one step ahead of the problem. And therefore, that is functionally equivalent to having completely solved aging and staying youthful indefinitely.” This is an extremely important part of the immortalist handbook. It gives them hope that they only have to hold on a little longer. But scientists can’t accept something so obviously based on faith.

“They still don’t think it sounds like science. And that’s okay, and that’s kind of correct, because it isn’t science,” de Grey said. “We’re not saying ‘this is how we’re going to do this,’ which is what you could say is science. What we have instead is simply an appeal to the typical trajectory of other technologies in the past.” De Grey says although it’s tough to predict when the initial fundamental eureka moment will happen, once it’s made, similar to Kurzweil’s singularity, the refinement of that breakthrough will occur at a rapid and predictable rate.

Before I spoke to de Grey, I asked some members of the biology field what they thought about him. Most were unflattering in their responses, calling him a “crackpot” and a “crank,” and some stated they didn’t think de Grey believed in immortality but rather used it as a means to an end. One scientist told me he was an incredibly good salesman for the ideas he peddles and begrudgingly accepted de Grey had never personally attempted to make money out of them. I asked de Grey why some members of the scientific world spoke about him in this manner, and he gave me a typically flawless answer—one I had trouble proving, disproving, or even believing. According to de Grey, most academics rely on government funding for their research, and in this competitive field they can’t do anything which would give the authorities reason to rule them out of the running. One such reason could be being seen colluding with someone like de Grey. He told me he knows most of the scientists in the field, is perfectly friendly with them, and is happy for them to distance themselves from him as much as they need, providing they are doing the right type of research to advance the cause of longevity. He’s content with his position connecting money with science.

“I am the guy in the middle with the biggest network because I’ve been prominent for a long time. I’ve viewed being the nexus as a big part of what I can do over the years, which means that I can do it better and better as the years go by, and that applies to the private sector as it does within the nonprofit world. I spend my life making introductions between investors and founders, or investors and other investors, or whatever. As such, it’s very gratifying for me that I’m continuing to be able to make a difference. Even though on the science side of things I can still make a contribution, but I’m not as necessary as I used to be,” he said.

De Grey may find his ability to make a difference severely hindered in the future, as he was fired from his position as Chief Science Officer of SENS in August 2021. Earlier that month, two members of the longevity community accused him of sexual misconduct. Celine Halioua, now CEO of Loyal, a biotech company attempting to extend the lives of dogs, claimed de Grey pressured her at a dinner to have sex with donors. Laura Deming, the founder of one of the most prominent longevity investment vehicles, The Longevity Fund, said de Grey harassed her via email when she was as young as seventeen years old.[24]

Both women made the claims in public blog posts, and SENS hired an independent law firm to investigate the accusations. De Grey, however, was soon found to have interfered in the investigation by trying to contact one of his accusers through a third party. As a result, he was removed from his position even before the investigation was completed.[25]

When the law firm published the results of the investigation, almost all of the accusations were upheld. The report by Van Dermyden Makus Law found that de Grey did send two emails of a sexual nature to Deming, “with the purpose of developing a romantic and/or sexual relationship.”[26] One of the emails read:

Heh…an admission for you—you probably know (it’s public) that I have a fairly adventurous love life, and I’m not coy in talking about it, but I’ve always taken care to avoid letting conversations stray in that direction with someone so young as you, and I confess that that has always felt quite jarring given that I could treat you as an equal on every other level. Maybe those days are over…

At the time of receiving the messages, Deming was seventeen and eighteen years old. [27]

The report also confirmed that de Grey pressured Halioua to “use her sexuality” to solicit donations to the SENS foundation at a dinner at the University of Oxford. In a bizarre defense, de Grey attempted to claim he hadn’t done this to Halioua because he’d done something similar previously and learned his lesson. However, he continuously insisted that everyone should be “using all the weapons [they] have, including weapons that are not just intellectual,” in the battle against aging. Aside from damning him in the eyes of the investigators, this viewpoint also shed some light on the authenticity of his own media-friendly appearance. In an email to the unnamed person he admitted to pressuring into using their own sexuality to advance the cause, he said: “I have a mission in life, and I have no compunction whatsoever in furthering it by means that have nothing to do with my intellect, whether that be my ability to feign a reasonably aristocratic accent or my own physical attributes.”[28]

De Grey admitted to sending the emails to Deming and apologized, although he denied they were sexual in nature. He also denied Halioua’s claims or that he attempted to sabotage the investigation. At the time of writing, he was adamant that he would clear his name. In social media posts during and after the investigation, he refrained from placing any blame on his accusers, but his denial drew hundreds of comments of support, and resulted in angry attacks on both Deming and Halioua. [29]

De Grey is not the only big name in the immortalist community, of course. Another is the renowned geneticist David Sinclair. He boasts much more gravitas in scientific academia than de Grey, but also often throws around the word immortality. Sinclair, born in Australia, moved to the United States in 1993 when he was twenty-four to become a postdoc at the MIT lab of Leonard Guarente, who was studying aging in yeast. Aging research was still considered to be fairly niche at the time. But Sinclair was determined to change that. After three years at MIT, he made a groundbreaking discovery explaining a mechanism of aging in yeast and raised hopes the same process could be manipulated in humans. It was a turning point in Sinclair’s career. He soon left MIT and set up his own lab at Harvard Medical School, where he became an assistant professor of genetics. He built on his previous work with sirtuins, a family of proteins found in all living beings. In yeast, activating these dormant proteins enhanced health and extended life.[30]

Sinclair set out to find a substance that could mimic the effects of calorie restriction in yeast and believed he’d discovered it with resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine. That breakthrough kicked Sinclair’s career to another level, and suddenly wealthy investors were extremely interested in the work he was doing. In 2004, with the aid of biotech entrepreneur Christoph Westphal, Sinclair founded his first company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which would attempt to create drugs based around the resveratrol molecule. His lab studies continued, and a paper published in 2006 made him the most well-known aging researcher in the world. His study showed that overweight mice fed resveratrol stayed healthier and aged more slowly than counterparts which had not been given the molecule.[31] The paper made the front page of The New York Times, and Sinclair was soon giving interviews all over the world. It was at this point that Sinclair’s claims grew bolder and bolder. He told Science magazine that resveratrol was “as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.”[32]

Sinclair’s respect went beyond the field of aging and into the mainstream. He became rich when Sirtris went public in 2007 and was bought one year later by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million. But despite his success, many of Sinclair’s peers either doubted his research or disapproved of the publicity he generated. After his initial study on resveratrol, two former colleagues at Guarente’s lab published a paper saying they were unable to replicate Sinclair’s results and suggested his conclusions were false. A few years after that, a pharmaceutical company named Amgen also raised questions over the same paper. In 2010, the pharma giant Pfizer released a paper stating not only was Sinclair wrong about resveratrol, his theory on sirtuins was also incorrect. Sinclair was not happy and disputed the paper.[33] But the bad news kept coming. The same year as the Pfizer paper, GlaxoSmithKline canceled a Sirtris trial in humans because of potential side effects.[34] Then, just five years after buying the company, the pharma behemoth closed down Sirtris altogether.[35]

Sinclair had overpromised, and his company never delivered a product. The Sirtris fiasco warned investors off aging companies for a while, but breakthroughs like Sinclair’s were always going to bring them back. One scientist in the field of aging told me Sinclair had “oversold” his research, and his claims that immortality might be possible were motivated by his desire to sell his various products.

Despite this, Sinclair, along with the likes of de Grey, have ushered in a new era for longevity and the battle against aging, where Silicon Valley investors provide the cash and legitimate scientists the know-how. The immortalists cheer from the sidelines, many watching every move and reading every scientific paper with hawk-like vigilance.

The goals of the biotech companies, the scientists, and the majority of investors are not completely aligned with the congregation of the Church of Perpetual Life. They all want to address aging and reverse its effects, but beyond that they’re building toward different futures. For now, though, the immortalists are just happy to see the progress, and they look to their heroes, like de Grey and Sinclair, for inspiration. In 2019, Sinclair released a book co-authored with journalist Matthew LaPlante. Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To was a New York Times bestseller. In it, Sinclair discusses the hallmarks of aging, a series of processes that form the core underlying mechanics of how our bodies age. “Address one of these, and you can slow down aging,” the authors wrote. “Address all of them, and you might not age.”