Some claim human lifespans can be lengthened indefinitely

There is a story about a blues musician who, when questioned on his 100th birthday about his decades of smoking and drinking, responded that if he’d known he was going to live so long, he’d have taken better care of himself. Bryan Johnson is that apocryphal bluesman’s polar opposite. He has been taking care of himself for years to a degree as remarkable, in its way, as the deepest devotion to bourbon and bad choices. By sacrificing the now for the future, rather than the other way around, he turns disposable-soma theory on its head.

The daily regime which he and his many doctors have devised makes life in Biosphere 2 look sybaritic. A kilogram of vegetables, all before 11am, rigorous workouts lasting 45-60 minutes, and 100 pills, including metformin and rapamycin. His vital functions are subjected to the sort of continuous scrutiny more usually associated with laboratory animals. He says he is ageing at 69% of the normal rate.

Mr Johnson, who has been described as the most measured man in the world, can afford the team of medics, trainers and dieticians who minister to him because selling Braintree, an electronic-payments company which he founded, left him with a net worth of more than $100m. For mere mortals, however, a range of less intensive options are available.

One is a distillation of Mr Johnson’s accumulated experience, available on his website as “Project Blueprint”. Though he makes it available for free, he says implementing it could cost $1,000-1,500 a month, including groceries, supplements, drugs and trainers.

For those on a budget, or who would prefer to have their hands held, an entry-level product at around a tenth of that price is offered by Tally Health, based in New York. Tally is the latest brainchild of David Sinclair, who led early research on sirtuins. Members get a quarterly cheek-swab test to check levels of epigenetic methylation, thus providing a Horvath-clock-like age to compare with a client’s chronological age, and a daily supplement containing fisetin, quercetin, resveratrol, spermidine and alpha-ketoglutarate, a molecule involved in several biochemical pathways which seems to give lab mice longer, healthier lives.

Waiting in luxury

For a more substantial fee, Human Longevity, in San Diego, offers customers full sequencing of their genomes and mri scans of their bodies as well as a suite of other tests likely to leave them feeling like wired-up lab rats; for this they get a personal “longevity action plan” which the company will help them implement.

Human Longevity was founded in 2013 by Craig Venter, who, in the 1990s, ran a private rival to the Human Genome Project, and Peter Diamandis, a marketer, entrepreneur and all-round future-booster. Dr Venter later left, and though Mr Diamandis still has a stake in the business, his gaze seems to have shifted to a glitzier proposition. Fountain Life, his new venture, offers a similar package of goodies to that of Human Longevity, but with swimming pools and fluffy towels thrown in: “a country club for precision diagnostics”, as it says in its marketing literature.

Mr Diamandis’s stated vision of the future goes like this. For now, people should concentrate on not dying. Not dying is an obvious end in itself, but in this context it is also a means to a further end. Not dying gets the customer through to the moment when senolytic drugs are proved and approved and ageing curtailed. That in turn sees them through to the ultimate goal: age reversal via epigenetic reprogramming.

This approach can be traced to the ideas of Aubrey de Grey, a computer scientist with a remarkable beard who has been active in the field since the 1980s. Through entities like the Methuselah Foundation and concepts like SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) he did much to shape modern ideas about life extension while also providing some succour to those who saw it as a weird fringe pursuit. (Mr de Grey was relieved of his position at the SENS Research Foundation in 2021 after allegations of sexual misconduct, all of which he denies). One of his pet ideas is “longevity escape velocity”, a future state where science is extending people’s lifespans by more than a year every year.

There is certainly room for scepticism about Mr Diamandis’s attempts to sell people an inside track to that longed-for day. Even if the science were to come good quickly, the time it takes for new medical treatments to be approved tends to be measured in periods that will challenge the physiology of Fountain Life’s more elderly customers. Excited talk of bringing ai to bear on the matter (Fountain Life makes a hoo-ha about its use) has yet to produce much of a pudding, let alone one that provides any proof.

Scepticism is increased by the number of defunct ideas and firms that litter the verges of the road to immortality. Human growth hormone, which is part of another nutrient-sensing pathway, was once promoted as having anti-ageing effects. Subsequent work on animals suggests using it might actually be counterproductive. The same may be true of some of the anti-oxidant approaches built on theories about mitochondrial-DNA damage.

The excitement over resveratrol guttered. Companies founded with much fanfare have lapsed into obscurity. Calico Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which was the Altos of its day in 2013, has fallen completely out of the conversation. Grand science projects born of entanglements between the very wealthy and the not entirely mainstream do not always end well. Remember Biosphere 2.

A reasonable tendency to short-term scepticism, though, should not preclude medium-term open-mindedness. There is now a serious interest in understanding the biological underpinnings of ageing. There are treatments available which can almost certainly be used to extend healthspans, and possibly even lifespans, even though a lack of formal trial evidence makes it hard to see which of the touted options actually work. And there are promising lines of inquiry which may lead to bigger breakthroughs.

Evolution has no interest in seeing people live for ever, or even indefinitely. But that will not stop people trying. Whether it is feasible in practice is another thing altogether, for bodies contain trillions of cells that will need either rejuvenation or renewal. But less heroic measures towards smaller gains may yet yield fruit. And that alone is surely worth the effort. ■

Correction (September 26th 2023): This article has been changed. Tally Health uses a proprietary epigenetic clock, not the Horvath clock, for its epigenetic test.