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Statements posted on this blog represent the views of individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Law Science & Innovation (which does not take positions on policy issues) or of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law or Arizona State University.

LSI at the Cutting Edge of Silicon Valley’s Quest

If a scorched cactus can live to 300, why not a human being? (Yvonne Stevens)

On May 5, 2017, LSI will host its second healthy lifespan extension workshop.  Whatever one chooses to call it, age delay, anti-aging or life extension, the idea is the same: those supporting it wish to curb the inevitability of aging — along with the myriad of physical and mental side-effects that accompany the last stages of life.  While it sounds like science fiction, the goal is very real.

Silicon Valley — the well-known hub of high tech and high real estate, is leading the quest.  Its brilliant and forward thinking visionaries (read Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos & Co.) are investing in a special kind of software and hardware: themselves and ourselves.  The technologies that have sparked their interest, and which they are pouring billions of dollars into, are those that will ideally enable a healthy forever after.

The gamut of anti-aging enthusiasts are a diverse bunch — a mix of investors, celebrities, techies, scientific researchers and those savvy members of the general public who have caught wind of the possibility of delaying aging.  Even government agencies, such as the National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine (NAS), are in on the gig and have established the “Inaugural Grand Challenge: Aging & Longevity.”  Dr. Joon Yun, a physician and president of Palo Alto Investors, has led the march by providing two million dollars toward the NAS challenge.  Dr. Yun recently organized a Longevity Crossroads event in San Francisco, inviting LSI faculty director Gary Marchant and LSI faculty fellow Yvonne Stevens to participate.  Both took advantage of the opportunity to listen to prominent experts discuss the present and future of age delay within the context of scientific and technological revelations and innovations.  As noted by Tad Friend in a recent New Yorker article, according to Yun, “there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.”

From research into senescent cells, telomere length, young blood, epigenetics, caloric restriction and mitochondrial mutations, to drugs that are being evaluated with regard to their age delay and age-related disease-curbing properties such as Metformin and Rapamycin, those invested are serious.  They believe there are answers and intend to find them.  To put it in perspective, says Friend, “the great majority of longevity scientists are healthspanners, not immortalists.  They want to give us a healthier life followed by “compressed morbidity”—a quick and painless death.”  That sounds like a pretty good deal.  Does it not?