Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth. Can current-day billionaires achieve what he couldn’t?

Lately, I’ve been fascinated with reports about billionaires devoting themselves and their fortunes to the quest of a longer life. An article in the August 11 New Yorker talks about the moves these men are making to realize their dreams of encountering a personal Fountain of Youth.

Leading or engaging with groups with such titles as Don’t Die, Healthspan, and Fountain Life. the objective of these men is not just to stick around for a very long time, but to live in a body that’s escaping arthritis, cancer, and other impediments to comfortable longevity. The goal for some is to at least double the current average lifespan, which is now seventy-seven for men. These articles don’t mention women, who’s average lifespan is eighty-one, except in the context of needing to replace them with ones able to provide the old men a chance to enjoy their great, great, great, great great grandchildren. In other words, “Bye Bye Baby.”

Despite the billionaires’ enthusiasm and determination to quickly solve the problem of natural death, the obstacles are great. Given our forty trillion cells, in many situations one problem is solved while another is created. Quoting from several New Yorker paragraphs, “For biohackers”*, an antibiotic called Rapamycin inhibits the senescent cells that cause inflammation, but having too few senescent cells is dangerous because these block tumors.” Research is unclear about many things. And some of the products being sold sound like the work of snake oil salesmen.

What’s most interesting is that some of the men are devoting their days to every imaginable protective treatment so they can live longer. They take huge quantities of supplements, fill their veins with “young” blood, engage in different therapies, act as guinea pigs with various elixirs, and cut calories significantly, in one case to 1977 a day. (Google says “Most adult men require between 2,000 and 3,200 calories daily.) They’re also measuring their internal organs to determine whether the ages of different organs match their chronological ages.

Maybe the billionaires are right that in time humans will live much longer and their research will show the way, but I have many questions about this new frontier. For this blog, I’ll just stick to one. Is spending one’s life doing daily monitoring of every aspect of one’s body considered living?

*playing with genetic research material free from concerns about ethics