Silicon Valley’s obsession with longevity

The tech millionaire Bryan Johnson announced this summer that he’d travelled to a crypto “start-up city” off the coast of Honduras to receive a highly experimental gene therapy.

So what? It was the latest step in Johnson’s quest to reverse the ageing process – a challenge Silicon Valley is taking extremely seriously. The result is a cautionary tale involving the confluence of

• plentiful funds
• a libertarian belief system
• a hunger for deregulation, and
• science driven more by hope than experience.

When? In 2013, the Honduran government passed a law to create free zones with their own laws, policies and police forces.

Where? Próspera, on the island of Roatán, is one of three such zones – and it’s the biggest. Its legal tender is Bitcoin and its handful of residents, a mix of Hondurans and international libertarians, sign a social contract before they move to the island and pay an annual fee.

Who? Among the investors in the enclave are: the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley super-investor Marc Andreessen, and OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

Who else? Johnson, who once went viral for siphoning a litre of his 17-year-old son’s plasma into his own body, is a “biohacker” – trying to optimise his body with supplements, injections, surgeries and implants. The hope is eternal life, or at least an improvement in sleep, muscle strength and organ function. Biohackers spend their time poring over promising early-stage trials, mouse studies and fringe science in search of the next miracle cure. And they experiment on themselves.

The new luxury. Silicon Valley is obsessed with longevity.

• Thiel takes human growth hormone pills and injects himself with two antidiabetic medications a week for weight loss and “cancer prevention”.
• Altman takes metformin, a diabetes drug promising to help you live longer.
• Both men have invested millions in anti-ageing, biohacking and longevity research, and both have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a company called Minicircle.

Minicircle is the firm administering gene therapy on Próspera, where

• its founders can bypass the FDA’s long and costly approval process; and
• its customers can pay $25,000 for an experimental muscle-building gene therapy that targets a protein called follistatin.

Bryan Johnson hopes it will make him stronger for longer. Other testers hope it will make them “shredded”.

Does it work? Johnson says his muscle mass is up 7 per cent. His follistatin levels are up 160 per cent. Thanks in part to this treatment, he says he now celebrates his birthday every 19 months.

Scientists aren’t convinced. In April Minicircle published a pre-print paper which claimed follistatin gene therapy was “a potentially safe, anti-frailty longevity therapy for both male and female human subjects across a near maximal adult age range”. Mark Kay, a professor of pediatrics and genetics at Stanford, reviewed the paper and called it “a scam”.

He noted that

• the paper was not peer-reviewed;
• there was no untreated control group in the study;
• much of the data shown in the study’s charts was “meaningless”; and
• the follistatin dose administered to patients was tiny.

“If this was a real therapy that could really do what they claim, the pharmaceutical companies would be all over it,” Kay concluded. Three other scientists Tortoise spoke to agreed.

Risky business. Gene therapies can be dangerous. Unregulated ones even more so. In 1999, an 18-year-old boy called Jesse Gelsinger, born with a rare genetic disorder, died after a massive immune response triggered by an experimental gene therapy treatment. After his death, all gene therapy trials in the US were paused. Multiple scientists said they were worried there could be a risk of death following the administration of Minicircle’s experimental, unregulated drug. Two said it could cause a cell mutation that could lead to cancer.

What’s more. Other companies hoping to attract medical tourists to Próspera include a subdermal implants lab promising to make “human cyborgs” and a centre specialising in stem-cell therapies that aren’t approved in the US. Even Walter Patterson, the baby-faced chief scientific officer of Minicircle, sounds a little unconvincing when talking about gene therapy: “We have not had a person expire because of receiving the therapy, yet.”

Further listening in this week’s Slow Newscast – The immortality bros: The business of living forever