THE IMMORTAL JELLYFISH
In 1988, Christian Sommer, a marine biology student in his early twenties, discovered immortality. This may be a shock to read so far into the book—but, of course, there is a catch. Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small sea-dwelling invertebrates whose appearance alternates between that of a jellyfish and soft coral, depending on where they are in their life cycle. His work took place in a picturesque setting—he spent a summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, and went snorkeling off the cliffs of Portofino every morning. As he snorkeled, he scanned the seabed for hydrozoans, scooping them up with plankton nets. One of the obscure species he found was the Turritopsis dohrnii. He put these hydrozoans in a petri dish with his other specimens and observed their reproduction habits. After a few days he noticed the Turritopsis dohrnii were acting strange and couldn’t come up with an explanation. Eventually, Sommer realized that these tiny hydrozoans appeared to be immortal.[1]
Sommer observed that this rare species of invertebrates was capable of aging in reverse, growing younger until it reached its earliest stage of development. At that point, instead of mercifully dying like Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button, the Turritopsis dohrnii began its life cycle all over again. Sommer didn’t immediately appreciate the significance of his discovery, and it was nearly a decade before scientists in Genoa released research detailing the strange abilities of the hydrozoans. The paper, titled “Reversing the Life Cycle,” described how the species would transform itself back to a polyp, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.”[2]
The authors of the paper were first to label Turritopsis dohrnii the immortal jellyfish, but the world didn’t erupt with wonder as one might expect. There were no demands to harvest the creatures for the good of mankind, and outside of the academic world, the paper was hardly noticed. Over time, interest increased, and progress has been made studying the species. It was discovered that the rejuvenation of the jellyfish is caused by either environmental stress or a physical assault, and during the process the cells undergo the same transformation as human stem cells—cellular transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is converted into another. Other discoveries emerged slowly, some more alarming than others. In the past few decades, immortal jellyfish have spread throughout the world’s oceans, hitchhiking on cargo ships to travel huge distances. Turritopsis have proven they are able to flourish in any ocean in the world. Immortal and on the charge, perhaps one day these jellyfish will inherit the Earth.[3]
The Turritopsis dohrnii is believed to be the only species which boasts biological immortality, but there are others with extremely long lifespans. Most of these can be found in the sea. Sponges—which are actually alive and classified as animals—live for an extremely long time. Estimates vary, but numbers have reached thousands of years, and one species, the Monorhaphis chuni, has apparently lived to be eleven thousand years old. Quahog clams are similar to sponges in that they have little or no personality but extremely long lives. One such clam, named Ming, died at the age of 507 when it was dredged up from Icelandic waters. The normal lifespan of the species is said to be around 225 years. And there are deep sea fish, like the orange roughy, which are believed to live to up to 175 years old.[4] On land, there are fewer longer-living species, but there are still a few surprising animals capable of surviving well past one hundred. They include Jonathan, a 189-year-old Seychelles giant tortoise, the oldest known terrestrial animal.[5] Jonathan is still alive as of 2021 and, despite losing his sight and sense of smell, reportedly spends his days eating, sleeping, and mating with his long-term lover Frederik.[6]
Tortoises survive so long partly because they live very slow, incident-free lives. Turtles, the umbrella species under which tortoises sit, are masters of survival and are built to survive even a lack of oxygen. They are the most evolved and complex animal that can do so, and are able to forgo oxygen for well over a year. For contrast, humans can only survive without oxygen for around two minutes before their brains are irreversibly damaged. In order to live without fresh air, turtles drop their metabolism rate to close to zero. They bring their energy production down to nothing by changing an enzyme which turns off their mitochondria, forcing the body to secrete proteins that protect cells. When faced with a lack of oxygen, turtles initiate an organized shutdown of fifty thousand processes in their bodies. They also don’t panic. Turtles turn off their stress-response proteins, allowing their bodies to focus on reshaping the cells to deal with no oxygen.[7] In comparison, human cells panic badly when they are deprived of oxygen. They turn on stress kinases, signaling proteins to respond to a potentially challenging situation. This process uses up a lot of energy, overloads the system, and can ultimately lead to death.
Jellyfish, clams, sponges, turtles, and tortoises are not remotely similar to humans, making it difficult for immortalists to learn any handy tips from them. But inspiration can be taken from mammals. Bowhead whales are a good example: they live longer than scientists would expect of an animal with its enormous size. They are the second-largest mammal still around, and their two hundred–year lifespan is double what scientists would assume given their vast proportions. Researchers have found that the whales have an extremely accomplished DNA repair process, which slows down the accumulation of damage in their genomes.[8]
Scientists usually look for similar qualities in species which are smaller. Mice, flatworms, and fruit flies are used in the majority of research as they are easy to work with, and there are plenty of genetic tools available that can be used on them. There is also an increasing interest in species which live longer compared to similar creatures. While a house mouse lives to just two or three years old, the naked mole-rat, a similar-sized rodent, can live for over thirty-five years.
These mole-rats, as their name suggests, are never going to win any beauty prizes. But while their looks may let them down, their durability is something to be admired. The burrowing rodents, which are native to East Africa, are highly cancer resistant. Only a handful of cancer cases have ever been observed in captive naked mole-rats, and scientists have rounded them up in ever-increasing numbers to find out why. In 2020, research from the University of Cambridge found the secret behind their cancer immunity is the cell’s microenvironment—the system of cells and molecules surrounding a cell—rather than the durability of the cell itself.
“The results were a surprise to us and have completely transformed our understanding of cancer resistance in naked mole-rats. If we can understand what’s special about these animals’ immune systems and how they protect them from cancer, we may be able to develop interventions to prevent the disease in people.” Dr. Walid Khaled, one of the senior authors of the study from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology, said.[9] Naked mole-rats also have other interesting traits. They are the only cold-blooded mammal, they lack pain sensitivity to chemical stimuli in their skin, and, like the turtle, they are able to withstand very low levels of oxygen.
Science is yet to establish exactly why some animals live longer than others, but it’s clear their genetic makeup is crucial. The same is true in humans who live longer than average. The oldest person to have ever lived is Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in August 1997 at age 122. Before she died, Calment became something of a celebrity. She was written about countless times and often threw out some zingers when interviewed. She once told a reporter, “I wait for death…and journalists.” She was reportedly still cycling when she was one hundred, only gave up smoking at 117, and was said to have had a mental capacity equivalent to people far younger than her. Eventually, time did catch up with her: by 1996 she was using a wheelchair and was mostly blind and deaf.[10]
Calment’s story took a strange turn about two decades after she died. In 2018, a Russian mathematician named Nikolay Zak published a paper with an extraordinary claim—that Calment was a fraud. He alleged that Jeanne Calment had actually died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne had assumed her identity in an attempt to avoid inheritance taxes. Zak came to his conclusion after digging through her biography and finding inconsistencies. Unsurprisingly, France did not take the accusations lying down and defended its national treasure while attacking Zak. But the thirty-six-year-old stood his ground. He published an extended version of his paper the next year, compiling evidence such as physical differences between the young and old Calment and discrepancies in the testimonies she gave while living in a retirement home. The people of Calment’s hometown Arles formed a group to disprove Zak’s claims and offered the sensational argument that Calment was considered so unpleasant by her neighbors, there was no way they’d have kept the secret on her behalf.
The debate continues today. Those seeking to disprove Calment’s claim say her DNA should be tested to find out whether she was Jeanne or her daughter. Others want to get hold of her DNA for other reasons. They believe that someone who lived so long should be studied in more detail, to extract any secrets relating to longer life. Aubrey de Grey is among that crowd—it was his journal, Rejuvenation Research, which published Zak’s paper initially, and there has been speculation he promoted the theory as a means to force the release of Calment’s DNA and blood samples, rumored to be held in a private genetic research center in Paris.[11]
If Calment truly did live to 122 years old, it’s clear her body was built differently than most. She avoided the diseases which usually finish us off—heart disease, diabetes, and cancer—for longer than anyone else, despite seemingly living a less than healthy lifestyle. This supports theories that healthy living and biohacking can only take a person so far, and that our death is already foretold in our genes. But there is hope for immortalists. Science is slowly making progress to ensure living longer isn’t a genetic lottery, partly by taking inspiration from plants, animals, and humans that live extraordinarily long lives.
One of the most promising areas is gene therapy, which is already used to treat some diseases. In 2021, a new type of treatment utilizing the genes of algae partially restored a man’s eyesight. The man, who hasn’t been named, suffered from retinitis pigmentosa—where light sensing cells on the surface of the retina die—and was completely blind. The treatment first involved gene therapy, where genetic instructions for making proteins called rhodopsins were taken from the algae and given to cells deep in the retina at the back of the patient’s eye. When light hit these new proteins, it sent an electrical signal to the brain, but not one that could be deciphered. They only respond to amber light, so the man wore goggles with a video camera on the front and a projector on the back. This getup captured what was happening in the world and fired a version onto the back of the eye in the right wavelength for the proteins. The patient then waited months for the levels of rhodopsins to build up in the eye, and for the brain to learn a new way of interpreting sight. He first realized the treatment was working when he went out on a walk with the goggles and saw the white stripes of a pedestrian crossing. He has since been able to grab and count objects on a table in front of him. [12]
Many consider gene therapy one of the most exciting areas of medicine, and immortalists have not missed the potential they hold for their cause. The practice itself has had a rocky history, but now appears to be entering into a new age of breakthroughs.
In 1972, Theodore Friedmann and Richard Roblin published a paper titled “Gene Therapy for Human Genetic Disease?” in the journal Science.[13] The two American scientists outlined the potential of inserting DNA sequences into a patient’s cells to treat genetic disorders. Each of our cells contains thousands of genes that provide the information for production of proteins and enzymes that make bones, blood, and muscles, which support most of the body’s functions. Issues arise when a whole or part of a gene is defective or missing. This can occur from birth or a gene can mutate during a person’s lifetime. When that happens, it disrupts how proteins are made and can cause major health problems or diseases.
Genetic diseases were once seen as completely incurable, but the 1972 paper proposed a solution: gene therapy. However, the two authors urged caution on the development of the technology and opposed any attempts at gene therapy in human patients.[14] The scientific community took note and waited eighteen years, conducting a lot of research before launching the first gene therapy trial in 1990. Ashanthi DeSilva, a four-year-old girl suffering from a rare genetic disease known as severe combined immunodeficiency, underwent a twelve-day treatment involving gene therapy. DeSilva’s condition meant she lacked an enzyme called adenosine deaminase (ADA), rendering her immune system almost completely useless. This put her at risk of dying from infection and forced her to live in isolation.
To boost DeSilva’s ADA levels, doctors introduced a functional copy of the gene that encodes the enzyme into the immune system. As you might imagine, it’s not easy to insert a gene directly into a person’s cells. It has to be delivered via a carrier, known as a vector. The most common gene therapy vectors—and what was used on DeSilva—are viruses because they can identify certain cells and carry genetic material into the genes of that cell. In order to make it safe, researchers remove the disease-causing genes from the virus and replace them with the genes that would help. When the viral vector containing the gene therapy was introduced, DeSilva’s immune system improved, and she was able to live a normal life.
The DeSilva case was celebrated around the world, kicking off numerous other trials in the field during the 1990s. But just nine years later, that progress was brought to a sudden halt when a clinical trial went tragically wrong.[15]
In 1999, Jesse Gelsinger, an eighteen-year-old suffering from the genetic condition ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, signed up for an experimental gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. The disease, which was caused by a genetic mutation, stopped his liver’s ability to break down ammonia, causing the toxic substance to accumulate in the blood. The trial introduced a functional copy of the missing gene to Gelsinger’s liver cells, using a modified common cold virus as a vector.
But four days after the treatment, Gelsinger suffered a catastrophic immune reaction and died. His death shocked the field and received widespread media attention. The FDA criticized the design of the trial and suspended the University of Pennsylvania’s entire gene therapy program, which was one of the largest in the world. The regulator also launched investigations into sixty-nine other gene therapy trials underway in the United States. In the fallout, gene therapy was accused of moving too fast, and viral vectors in particular were called into question. Researchers in the field were rocked, and progress slowed considerably. When it did rebound, the comeback was gradual.[16]
In 2003, China approved its first gene therapy, called Gendicine, which treated head and neck cancer. Russia then gave the green light to Neovasculgen, a therapy for peripheral artery disease, in 2011. The next year, the European Commission approved Glybera, a gene therapy treating lipoprotein lipase deficiency, an ultra-rare disease. Although it was heralded at the time as a great success for Europe, Glybera was a commercial failure. The therapy came with a one million Euro price tag, making it the most expensive treatment in the world. By the time it was withdrawn in 2017, the treatment had been prescribed to just one patient.[17] The United States didn’t approve such a treatment until 2017.[18]
Immortalists are among those seeking to speed up the introduction of gene therapies, believing the treatment could be used to reverse the effects of aging. Frustrated that the science was moving too slowly, one anti-aging advocate and entrepreneur took drastic steps to ensure gene therapies to reverse aging were at least being tested on humans.
In 2015, forty-four-year-old Liz Parrish traveled to Bogotá, Columbia, to receive dozens of experimental gene therapy injections, with the goal of turning back her biological clock. Her journey to Bogotá began in 2013, when she learned that her nine-year-old son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Parrish, who was already a keen researcher and advocate for stem cell therapies, was outraged by the amount of time and money it took for experimental treatments to reach patients, despite scientific breakthroughs in key areas in regenerative medicine. She traveled to medical conferences and badgered experts in the hallways, asking if their treatments could be applied to children. Eight months after her son’s diagnosis, Parrish traveled to Cambridge, England, for a SENS Foundation conference hosted by Aubrey de Grey.[19]
Among the presentations on gene editing, tissue regeneration, and calorie restriction, one word kept coming up—telomeres. As discussed in an earlier chapter, telomeres are a key part of the hallmarks of aging. Their full purpose was discovered in 1984 by Elizabeth Blackburn and her student Carol Greider. They identified telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens each strand of DNA before it is copied, compensating for the way cells shorten when they divide. Blackburn went on to establish the link between telomere length and cell health. Her research in the early 2000s with psychologist Elissa Epel studied the telomere length in mothers of children with chronic diseases and found that stress can prematurely age a person’s cells[20]—a worrying discovery which may make most of us assume we’ll die tomorrow.
At the conference, experts told Parrish she had to talk to one person, Bill Andrews.[21] By that point, Andrews was a key researcher in telomeres. His work at the biotech company Geron led to the discovery of the gene that controlled the production of telomerase—TERC. His team also found the protein component hTERT. The company tested turning off the production of telomerase in cancer cells and were able to kill them by accelerating their aging. In 1995, Geron published its discovery in Science and filed patent applications. The company faced a choice—should it begin work on a cure for cancer by reducing the number of telomerase in cancer cells, or focus on curing aging by adding or inducing it in healthy cells? Geron, despite being named after gerontology, the study of aging, chose to put its efforts into cancer first.
Andrews, shocked by the decision, left in 1999 and started his own company, Sierra Sciences, which would take the same breakthrough and apply it solely to aging. His new company took off, backed by major investors. It seemed only a matter of time before a telomere drug made its way to market. But the 2008 financial crisis changed everything. Funding evaporated, and Andrews’ march to immortality halted.[22]
When Parrish called Andrews in 2013, his company was struggling along on a meager budget. The pair got on well and hatched a plan to speed up the development of longevity drugs. Early in 2015, Parrish founded her own company, BioViva. In her frantic pursuit of treatments for children, her quest had turned toward anti-aging. She realized that by curing aging, everyone—including children—would suffer less. Parrish made her first public appearance as CEO at People Unlimited and told a receptive crowd of immortalists that she wanted to cure aging, and do it fast enough so they could all benefit.[23]
I spoke to Parrish on a two-hour Skype call in 2021, as the COVID-19 vaccination program was well underway in the United States. By this point she was double-vaccinated and keen to push on with her mission. She was a passionate speaker, extremely driven, and I quickly detected both stubbornness and charm—two things that will get you far in an investor’s boardroom.
In 2015, she raised enough cash to fund the Bogotá experiment, and already knew she would be patient zero. (A video of Parrish’s procedure is now available online.[24]) Prior to the treatment, she made jokes to the doctors. “I’m supposed to go in the corner, grab my face and shake around, and turn around and be young, right?” she laughed. “It’s not going to happen like that.” Wearing a white medical gown, she sat back for hours while a doctor and nurse administered more than one hundred injections in her triceps, thighs, buttocks, face, and below her kneecaps. By the time she was done, past midnight, she had created medical history as the person to receive the most potent dose of gene therapy ever, all in the quest to fight aging.[25]
The aftermath was messy. The company put out a press release two weeks later with the headline “BioViva Treats First Patient with Gene Therapy to Reverse Aging.”[26] There was no mention that Parrish was the patient, but she later told me she was wary about putting out the press release at all. A reporter contacted BioViva for a story about the ethical issues of the treatment, claiming nobody could really know the risks and give informed consent, and Parrish felt she had to get ahead of the game. She announced to the world that she was patient zero via Reddit.
Parrish and BioViva were bombarded with attention, some good, some bad. Being patient zero brought a lot of pressure. “There are a lot of expectations. People are constantly looking at me and saying, ‘Do you look younger? Do you feel younger?’ I’m a guinea pig.” At the time the news broke, Parrish was particularly disappointed with the media reaction. “Some misinformation comes out and then people write it, and it’s not true, and then everybody else just keeps writing the same crap,” she told me. “So the biggest battle is getting the truth out there instead of just some crap that some writer initially wrote about it. The most frustrating thing about trying to do something good in the world is you’re constantly misquoted and misrepresented based on someone else’s biased opinion when it’s supposed to be science. You get written into history based on what somebody wanted to write.”
The criticism didn’t just come from the press, however. George Martin, a gerontologist and member of BioViva’s scientific advisory board, resigned soon after, and George Church, another advisor, stressed the importance of proper clinical trials.[27] Among the longevity and immortalist crowds, however, Parrish became an instant hero. Finally, someone was taking the initiative in the mission to beat aging. A year after the treatment, BioViva issued a follow-up press release with the results. The company had compared blood drawn from Parrish before and after the procedure and found her white blood cells’ telomeres had increased in length by 9 percent. However, this was just one person’s results, and no study was published. There was not enough data to measure, and the news was dismissed as inconsequential by the scientific community. [28]
One person remained silent throughout. Bill Andrews had made the therapy Parrish was given in Colombia, but was not quick to either praise or condemn her. He later told Outside magazine he was “a chickenshit” and took full blame for what happened. Despite being so involved in the production of the therapy, he had declined to take any kind of part in the experiment itself, mainly because he didn’t want to jeopardize his career if something went wrong. Although Andrews praised the bravery of Parrish, he said he couldn’t even tell if she had “used a legitimate protocol” and added, “We don’t have anything we can really measure.”[29]
When I spoke to Parrish, long after she and Andrews had gone their separate ways, she acknowledged his abilities and research in the field of telomeres but appeared to still be unhappy at the way he approached the experiment. “I did it because I thought we might be able to help seven billion people. He doesn’t do it because he wants to live forever and he wants to make sure that all the kinks are worked out in that therapy.” Since the experiment in 2015, Parrish has been a ubiquitous figure on the immortalist speaking circuit. She spoke at the first RAADfest and was also there when I tuned into the online version during the pandemic. During her talk, she appeared to be the sensible voice in the room, looking to temper expectations rather than let dreams of immortality run wild.
“Just trying to increase healthspan with the limited resources this industry has, it’s a lot of pressure and people need to be tempered,” she said. “They need to realize that it’s good to say you want it, but it’s more than just wanting it. You can’t just have a tantrum. It takes a lot of work, and we are in the midst of a lot of work.” For Parrish, that work includes battling against the current system of regulation, which she believes is holding back crucial medical technologies.
When we spoke, she was writing her thesis for an MBA on a new regulatory system she is proposing called Best Choice Medicine. Parrish wants to make it easier for gene therapies and other regenerative medicines to enter human testing trials. “It’s medicine that performs better in animal models than anything that we have available to humans through a regulated market. These gene therapies are already performing better, hitting more points of metabolic disorder and dysfunction that happens with aging in animal models, and yet we continue to do animal models, and no humans get access to this?” she told me. “That’s what we were saying when I took the gene therapies in 2015. We were saying no, we have to jump, at some point you have to jump, and if you don’t jump you die of the same predictable diseases.”
Parrish’s model is not quite on par with the libertarian suggestions of some immortalists. She has no ambitions to destroy the FDA and is driven by a genuine desire to remove as much suffering as possible from the world. Some of her points are hard to argue against. She wants terminally ill patients to have access to therapies immediately after the patient is diagnosed, giving biotech companies the chance to test their treatments on humans rather than animals and patients an unlikely chance of a miracle cure. “The only way we’re going to create better drugs for humans is to get them in humans. We can continue to extend the lifespan of rats and mice now and we can move into cats and dogs—people think that’s the logical next step. I would say the logical next step is humans,” she said.
I wanted to speak to scientists in the gene therapy field to see how they felt about the rate of progress, so I contacted George Church, who was listed as an advisor on BioViva’s website.[30] Church is something of a legend in the scientific community. He teaches genetics at Harvard Medical School and MIT, heads up synthetic biology at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and is director both of the US Department of Energy Technology Center and of the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. His list of achievements is just as impressive as his job titles. He developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984 and helped initiate the Human Genome Project that year. In 2005, he helped launch the Personal Genome Project. Church has founded and advised numerous biotech startups and is seen as a major contributor to CRISPR technology, which edits genes.[31]
Unsurprisingly given his résumé, he is well connected and respected in the gene therapy space. On a video call, Church, who sports a bushy beard and glasses, patiently explained his thoughts and smiled warmly toward the end of his answers. He told me Parrish was not the only person he knew who had conducted self-experimentation attempting to advance science. He said he encourages these pioneers to use a double-blind placebo crossover trial, where there are two samples, one a placebo and one the real thing. The researcher then injects themselves, not knowing if it’s the real thing or not, and a few days or months later injects the other sample. That means at some point they get both the placebo and the real thing, but they don’t know what order they had them in.
Church described this as a cheap and easy way to make self-experimentation results more useful, but also said there was some value in the work Parrish and others had done. “If you have enough resources, it’s totally obvious what you should do—a full-fledged clinical trial. But it helps to do these little things because at a minimum it shows it’s not toxic. And if it’s nontoxic, a whole variety of people will want to try it out, and then you’ll find out if it’s toxic in a wide variety of people,” he said. “It’s hard to show efficacy, that’s the other thing you have to do, you have to very carefully do baseline. And if you know you’re getting the experimental over the control there are going to be all types of placebo effects. I know one of these people that self-administered lifted a refrigerator and said, ‘Wow, I can lift a refrigerator,’ and hurt his back. So you’re tempted to try things you don’t normally try and then report it anecdotally, so it’s much better if you don’t know which treatment you’re getting.”
Church told me he doesn’t consider himself to be working toward immortality or even longevity but focuses entirely on age reversal. He said human longevity was out of the scope of most laboratories, “even though they claim they’re working on it.” In age reversal, one of the more exciting companies to spin out from Church’s lab is Rejuvenate Bio, a startup cofounded by Church himself. The company wants to reverse aging in dogs by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.[32] These kinds of treatments have shown promise in worms, flies, and mice, and Church sees dogs as the next step. He believes any treatment that would make dogs live longer would be hugely popular and fund the next stage: clinical trials in humans. However, he doesn’t believe this would lead to immortality in the truest sense of the word.
“Age reversal is somewhat related to longevity, which is somewhat related to immortality. The problem with immortality is it’s vague about infinity. When you start dealing with infinities, it’s not the real world. Even the universe is not probably immortal. And it’s not even that old yet, it’s only about 13.7 billion years old. So if we put that extreme version aside, it’s likely that if you can reverse aging you can get another ten, twenty, forty years, although it will take a long time to prove that. If you get forty years, then you might be able to get another forty years, and so forth.”
Church sees two main pathways to reverse aging. One is the silver bullet approach, to find a way to address aging at a cellular level, which would help avoid the “whack-a-mole” effect of fixing one problem, only for another to quickly appear. He told me evidence of winding back the biological clock gives him hope this may work. “You have to hit all the organ systems and all the biochemical pathways, probably, to avoid the whack-a-mole. Evidence that you can avoid the whack-a-mole is that at the cellular level or tissue level, we’ve shown that for both humans and mice and a few other mammals that you can reverse the clock significantly, you can go from an eighty-year-old human cell that is senescent to something that is close to zero years old.”
The other approach is to address each part of the puzzle separately.
“I don’t really care which it is, I think our technology is capable of doing it either way,” Church said. “A lot of people love the one single silver bullet, but many of my inventions are complicated enough that I know the advantages of complication…Not everything can be E=MC2 or F=ma, there are some truly interesting complicated things, including our body. But I don’t think it’s so complicated that we necessarily have to control all twenty-five thousand genes. There’s going to be a few leverage points that may be sufficient.”
Although Church works with animals, he hasn’t found much inspiration in a lot of the longer-living species mentioned at the start of the chapter. He said the jellyfish was basically a yeast, and too far away from humans to really learn anything useful. The bowhead whale is more interesting to age-reversal scientists, as it’s similar metabolically and developmentally, according to Church. But even long-lived humans like Calment offer few hints at the secrets of reversing aging. “We’ve sequenced them, and we hoped we would learn something, but it’s very challenging because there are three million differences between each of them, and each other, and us as well. It’s underpowered statistically. We were hoping something would jump out at us, it might still…I don’t think we’ve learned that much from supercentenarians yet.”
Church works on the very cutting edge of science and told me he has always been attracted to technologies that operate on an exponential curve. It’s a concept similar to Kurzweil’s singularity, but more grounded in hard evidence. These scientific breakthroughs are a crucial aspect of de Grey’s longevity escape velocity theory, but it can be difficult to predict exactly when they’ll take off.
“Certain things are simple engineering, and you can kind of project the curve, but I don’t think aging reversal is one of those just yet,” Church told me. “We’re going to be going into clinical trials for a number of age-reversal therapies, but our mice and dogs are not living particularly longer, which I think is what people will care about. So I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but it’s exponential so it’s going to be fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened in our lifetime, if we got really good aging reversal technology and a bunch of other medical breakthroughs that impact the poorer parts of the world.”
Parrish and Church know and respect each other, but their differing attitudes show the chasm between scientists and immortalists. Parrish believes the finishing line is in sight and will do anything to reach that point faster, including self-experimentation. She is frustrated by the delays put in place by organizations like the FDA and wants answers now. Church is much more philosophical about his own area of study. He would like to see his own life extended by a breakthrough in his lab, but he appears to be quite calm about the issue either way. When I spoke to Parrish about stem cells and some of the comments researchers in that field had made about the unproven companies offering questionable cures, she was quick to reproach me for siding with the scientists.
She argued that they were out of touch with patients, and unable to see the damage diseases were doing to everyday people’s lives.[33] It was a populist view, which made me slightly uncomfortable, perhaps because for a while I wanted to agree. But the scientists brought me back to Earth every time, insisting patience was the key, not outlandish statements claiming eternal life was just around the corner. None of the major research labs working in stem cells, gene therapy, or other age-related fields appear to have immortality as their stated goal. Their mission is to extend healthspan, and while it does overlap with the aims of immortalists, it’s drastically different.
Over the course of my conversations with immortalists and during the talks I’d attended, two major topics were consistently brought up in an attempt to fill the major gaps on the path to immortality. One was nanotechnology. The other was uploading the human brain to a computer.