Venture Capitalists vs. The Grim Reaper
The New Yorker has an intriguing article this week entitled "Silicon Valley's Quest To Live Forever: Can Billions Of Dollars' Worth of High-Tech Research Succeed In Making Death Optional?" Apologies for spoiling the suspense, but the answer to that question is: Not any time soon (and if you ask this non-scientist, likely never). Still, it makes for a fascinating journey, in which Silicon Valley plays the roles of funder, research engine, potential provider—and most likely customer—in a quest whose very mission is so audacious that few outside the Valley would ever realistically embark on it. As I say, I wouldn't read it in the hopes of discovering imminent solutions, but the article is written by the entertaining Tad Friend and includes some trademark Friend-ian (Friend-ly?) quips. He says of one researcher, "Since the F.D.A. requires an authorization for any new tests on humans, he began trying therapies on himself. He'd read the literature on self-experimentation, and tallied the results: eight deaths... and ten Nobel Prizes. Coin toss." Elsewhere, Friend notes, "the most proven way for a man to live fourteen years longer than average is to become a eunuch. Good news/bad news."
In the end, the article is as revealing of the Silicon Valley mindset as it is of science. For example:
All the leading immortalists started out in tech, and all had a father who died young (as Ray Kurzweil's did when he was twenty-two), or absconded early (as Aubrey de Grey's did before he was born). They share an early loss of innocence and a profound faith that the human mind can perfect even the human body. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, lost his adoptive mother to cancer when he was in college—and later donated three hundred and seventy million dollars to aging research. "Death has never made any sense to me," he told a biographer.
from FORTUNE magazine
