Video: Elite funds secret experiments on human immortality
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
Mad scientists, speculators, crooks and real geniuses - all these people gathered on the west coast of the United States in response to a simple request from American billionaires: to create a "ticket to immortality." Billions of dollars are spent on the most fantastic and top secret life-extension experiments. What are the prospects for these studies?
“In our world, only two things are inevitable - death and taxes,” said Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait has adorned the $ 100 bill for over a century. Silicon Valley IT moguls have found many ways to avoid taxes and are now looking for ways to cheat death itself.
In 2013, Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page invested $ 1 billion in Calico. Its full name is California Life Company. At the opening, the then head of Google Ventures, Bill Maris, announced that Calico would extend human life by at least 500 years. Newspapers came out with headlines like "Google is about to hack death." The promise was loud, but the noise around it instantly died down.
There is nothing to be surprised at: the Calico company still exists, more than one and a half billion dollars have already been invested in it, but its activities are classified. The research laboratory is hidden in an underground bunker somewhere on the outskirts of San Francisco. The press is not allowed into it, its employees do not publish scientific papers, and every visitor is forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Neither the management nor the Google PR specialists give any comments on this matter.
"All of this is a little unnerving for the rest of the scientists," Felipe Sierra, the head of the department at the National Institute of Aging, admitted to the Technological Review at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. - We want to know what they are doing there. Then we could develop other directions or collaborate with them on their topics. They are a research laboratory, so what are they researching there?"
Calico employs renowned specialists in genetics, biology and artificial intelligence, but they are extremely vague about their work. The only thing that is known for certain is experiments on naked mole rats - small rodents that do not feel pain, almost never get cancer and live ten times longer than any other rodents.
Calico CEO David Botstein (photo: Jane Gitschier) |
You need to understand that these mysterious experiments are not just a special case of the whim of billionaires. Immortality is the hottest trend in Silicon Valley. The owners of the largest companies invest in it. The theme of longevity and eternal health is being developed by numerous startups. And public IT oligarchs practice the strangest habits, sincerely believing that they will prolong their youth. A special Palo Alto Longevity Prize was even created. This is half a million dollars intended for anyone who can significantly prolong the life of a mammal.
Despite the fact that the bigwigs of Silicon Valley position themselves as modern intellectuals, their pursuit of immortality is based on banal, purely human emotions, with which religion used to be successfully managed.
Sometimes it's sentimentality. So, the director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, at 69 years old, cannot come to terms with the death of his father and keeps everything that is left of him - photos, letters, bills, receipts, hoping to someday create a virtual avatar of Kurzweil Sr. According to him, scientists will soon be able to transplant human intelligence into a "non-biological" carrier. Thus, the body can disappear, and the personality continues to exist in the computer. Then Kurzweil Jr. will be able to live with his father forever in one information "cloud".
The problem is that scientists do not even have a rough idea of how human intelligence functions in the interweaving of hundreds of billions of neurons and hundreds of trillions of brain synapses. There is still no scheme for transferring this complex system to a computer, and the forecasts for it are disappointing. But in case the case drags on, Kurzweil ordered to bury himself in liquid nitrogen, and then, when technology still conquers death, unfreeze and extract the brain.
Sadness for loved ones dictates the motives of one of the founders of Oracle Larry Alison. His adoptive mother died of cancer while he was still in college. After becoming rich, he donated $ 335 million to research on aging.
In the case of Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, the sentimental feeling is complemented by his own fear of an incurable disease. Maris was also traumatized by the loss of his father - he died of a brain tumor when the future billionaire was 26 years old. Now Maris leads a healthy lifestyle, trains every day, does not eat meat, and is regularly examined by doctors. “But when I'm alone, my thoughts are very dark,” he admitted to a New Yorker journalist.
It was Maris who persuaded Larry Page and Sergey Brin to launch Calico. According to him, an important role in this decision was played by the fact that Brin was found to have a gene responsible for a predisposition to Parkinson's disease.
Both outspoken charlatans and serious scientists are interested in the issue of life extension among super-rich IT people. In itself, Calico has provided a great opportunity for geneticists and biologists to focus on basic research in an environment where no one is demanding a quick return. The famous American biologist David Botstein, who heads the company, has already stated that his laboratory will not provide any results in less than 10 years.
It is in Silicon Valley that serious gerontologists from the University of Illinois at Chicago are trying to find 65 million dollars for their research. In a six-year trial on volunteers, they want to know if metformin, a drug for diabetics, really prolongs youth. Especially for investors from the IT industry, they composed a sonorous slogan for their grant application: "This is your ticket to immortality."
But speculators of all stripes, who understand that only in Silicon Valley, they will be able to get hundreds of millions of dollars for the most incredible startups, play no less effectively on the emotions of wealthy investors. Jun Yoon, who runs a hedge fund that invests in healthcare, attracts tycoons using their favorite jargon. “I think aging is coded in us,” he announced at a party to celebrate the next Healthy Longevity Award. - And if something is encoded, then there is a code that needs to be solved. And having solved the code, it will be possible to crack it! The audience, which consisted of the bosses of the IT industry, burst into applause.
Often, IT oligarchs, who made huge fortunes overnight and revel in their own intelligence, are bred for investments with the help of good looks and a well-hung tongue. In 2016, creator of biotech startup Unitu Biotechnology Nathaniel David successfully hired progressive gay billionaire and Pay Pal creator Peter Thiel. David's company offers drugs that slow down cancer in mice and increase their lifespan by 35%. But there is a subtlety: tests have not yet been carried out on humans, this is not even a question. How did David manage to persuade an experienced investor Thiel to pour tens of millions of dollars for such a startup?
In an interview with a journalist of the same "New Yorker", he said that his appearance helped him - the "Dorian Gray effect" worked. 49-year-old David “looks good 30. He has thick dark hair and not a single wrinkle on his face, "- describes him" New Yorker ". “Some investors worry about my youthful appearance,” says handsome David modestly. "But guys from Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel are worried about people who look over forty."
Soon, Thiel was joined by the richest man in the world - Amazon creator Jeff Bezos. In total, the youthful David raised $ 116 million in Silicon Valley.
While the drug is being tested in mice, Thiel is practicing more well-known anti-aging methods. They say about him that he regularly resorts to blood transfusions. For people like him, another special startup called Ambrosia, created by physician Jess Karmazin, has sprung up in Silicon Valley. Its specialists transfuse blood from young people into the bodies of their aging patients. The medical effect of the procedures has not been proven, but older people claim that transfusions do rejuvenate them.
According to unconfirmed rumors, Thiel spends $ 160,000 a year to get blood transfusions from 18-year-old patients. He himself refutes this, but Ambrosia does not complain about the lack of customers. And this is despite the fact that Dr. Karmazin set the price for one transfusion at 8 thousand dollars, although there is no shortage of donors - local youth like to donate blood at Ambrosia, this is a good part-time job for students.
Together with biologists and pharmacists, oligarchs are actively campaigning for immortality and outspoken humanitarians.
Sergei Brin, for example, was strongly influenced by the books of the Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, in which he announces that in the near future the super-rich will successfully secure for themselves both immortality and new intellectual abilities. Thus, they will create a race like gods or supermen, while the rest of the population of the Earth will be in insignificance.
To date, the real results of this whole battle for immortality are not visible. Just like ordinary people, billionaires die of cancer and suffer from dementia. The owners of powerful intellects and billions of dollars in accounts look as naive eccentrics as the Chinese emperors, who swallowed handfuls of mercury pills, believing that this would provide them with eternal life.
But all these whims have another side - the Silicon Valley oligarchs are changing the course of the development of medicine as a science. Over the past two centuries, the latest advances in medicine have rapidly spread to the masses and have improved the life of mankind as a whole. All the great discoveries that radically changed the lives of huge masses of people were cheap and widely available. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming, quickly spread throughout the world. Vaccination against dangerous diseases was literally imposed on the population and was, of course, free. Any student could always buy contraceptive pills.
Modern medicine goes a different way - its developments are privatized in advance by investors. And among the sponsors of the struggle for immortality there are not only sentimental billionaires who do not know what to do with their money, but also calculating entrepreneurs who plan to properly cash in on possible discoveries. So, if in the mysterious Calico they manage to discover a "cure for death", there is no doubt: its investors will do everything to consume it in splendid isolation. For everyone else, the price of the "ticket to immortality" will be overwhelming.
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