Valley of the Gods Read online

  The Immortals

  Laura Deming was about to present to the 2015 Forbes Women’s Summit, but she couldn’t decide whether or not to mention one of her most radical ideas for human life extension. She knew it sounded extreme and kind of crazy. Should she just settle with “Avoid sugar,” the pat advice she knew was the one proven thing you could do without the help of drugs? But there was this other idea too.

  She had learned that when the gonads were cut off worms, they lived 60 percent longer. “I can’t really tell people to take out their ovaries,” she said sheepishly. But she was torn. Evidence really did suggest that eliminating reproductive potential seems to increase life-span in worms and in people and possibly in mice. “Korean eunuchs live a quarter longer than their contemporaries,” she said. The reasoning? She guessed that having nonworking sex organs would make an animal’s body think they were just temporarily not working and therefore would “have to hang around longer” to have time to reproduce. Or, she thought, because animals spend so much energy in pursuit of reproduction, maybe not having that need would let cells relax a bit. Whatever the case, Deming found it fascinating.

  It wasn’t just the science that fascinated her but also the idea that such a long-held belief—that everybody dies—could be wrong. She didn’t expect to find the answer during her lifetime, but she didn’t consider it out of the realm of possibility. Deming had wanted to “cure” aging since she was eight years old. Homeschooled by her parents in New Zealand, she was encouraged to teach herself math. She remembered her father telling her how beautiful math could be, describing the “intricate spiraling numerical patterns,” and how they “could—and did—save the world on a daily basis.” “How we were a walking, talking summation of billions of tiny biological calculators, each calculator a cell, and each cell a miniature cosmos in its own right,” she explained.

  John Deming, a former investor, painted for her a colorful picture of science’s heroes, such as Archimedes, Galileo, and Nikola Tesla. “I couldn’t believe they were all dead, and that I would never get to meet them and hear them talk,” she recalled.

  However, there was one legendary living scientist to whom she could talk. Deming had long followed the work of Cynthia Kenyon, an MIT biologist. Kenyon had been working on ways to extend human health and life—and it seemed like she was making progress. She had doubled the life-span of a roundworm by disabling a single gene.

  So when Deming was eleven, she wrote to Dr. Kenyon to see if she could meet her. A year later, Deming went to see the famed scientist when she was at the University of California in San Francisco, whose faculty Kenyon had joined in 1986. Kenyon asked her if she wanted to work in her lab. Laura was thrilled she’d be able to perform real experiments. Her family moved with her from New Zealand to California so that Deming, at age twelve, could take Kenyon up on the opportunity.

  “I got to fiddle with lasers, scoop up mounds of microscopic worms, and stare mesmerized as the modified, glowing creatures writhed and wriggled around a plate,” Deming remembered. She learned how to decode scientific papers and look for proteins and pathways. “I got to feel the elation that comes when you discover something nobody else has seen or known, the satisfaction of clicking in the final puzzle piece,” she said.

  At UCSF, Deming was an anomaly. After all, she was twelve. She sat in on lectures and met professors and lab students who helped her get through an advanced course load. But still, she wanted to go to MIT to study biology as an official college student. At UCSF she had self-structured her curriculum with a collection of online MIT lectures to supplement what she was doing at UCSF.

  By the following year, at age fourteen, she had matriculated to MIT as a freshman biology major. She still felt a bit out of place. She worked with mentors at the Weiss Lab for Synthetic Biology, where she learned about quantum mechanics and advanced biology, and eventually decided to look for a way to extend human life.

  Deming applied for a Thiel Fellowship with the idea to extend human life. She wanted to encourage and fund new ways to study how to do that. When Laura gave her presentation back in 2011, there was one audience member who was particularly intrigued by her. Aubrey de Grey, whom Thiel had funded, wanted to help her.

  • • •

  De Grey entered Thiel’s world a few years before, in 2007. Dressed in ripped jeans, a denim shirt mostly covered by his foot-long beard and long, greying hair, the professor was sitting on the windowsill in his cramped New York hotel room facing a drab inner atrium. He was disappointed. He had just flown over from Cambridge University, where he is based, to appear on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America, but the show’s producers had canceled last minute because they feared he was “apparently too technical for their dumb audience,” as he put it. De Grey had just written a book called Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, in which he put forth his theory of longevity: basically, there were seven reasons why we age, and if we got rid of each one by one, then we could cure aging. It would be easier to cure than cancer, he thought. And since we’ve developed cures for so many kinds of cancers, we couldn’t be that far from an aging panacea.

  For the past twenty years, de Grey had been researching how to reduce cellular degeneration through mitochondrial mutations and free radical pollution, both of which contribute to aging and disease. Stroking his beard, he described the three “bridges” in his program. “Now all you can do is keep healthy through exercise and longevity therapies. In bridge two, we’ll have gene therapy.” He was already studying how to take genes out of the body and combine or replace them with other genes before injecting them back into the bloodstream. Today new genes were often rejected because they were inserted directly into the body, so the immune system kicked in when it detected a foreign body and destroyed it. And the third bridge, he said, was nanotechnology, in which cell-sized robots would be engineered to enter through the bloodstream to fight off diseases.

  But that was all a ways away. At the moment, he was focused on funding—from Silicon Valley. There they were more open to his sometimes zany-sounding ideas. “It’s a bit edgy, a bit controversial,” he admitted. One problem was that people wanted to invest in a closer exit strategy, and this was more of a long-term possible payoff. “Another problem is that these guys worry they’re going to be laughed off the golf course,” said de Grey, adding with a smile, “There’s a herd mentality even among billionaires.” A major coup was getting a $3.5 million donation from Thiel to research extending human life-spans by curing aging. “Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries in this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all,” Thiel said at the time. “I’m backing Dr. de Grey because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives.”

  It took Thiel a year to decide whether or not to fund de Grey, ultimately making the decision in 2007 because, as de Grey put it, “I was sufficiently out of the box so I wouldn’t be swayed by academia, but I had the right credentials being at Cambridge and so on.” The professor said that Thiel had been instrumental in introducing him to investors in San Francisco. “Peter is a visionary,” he said, “and San Francisco is the epicenter of the visionary billionaire demographic.” In San Francisco, de Grey hired an event planner named Allison Taguchi to organize dinner parties and speaking engagements to fund-raise for his research.

  De Grey thought the power of his persuasion hinged on proof of concept, which he planned on demonstrating through “robust mouse rejuvenation,” which would be funded by the billion dollars he hoped to raise. For mouse rejuvenation to work, he would need five hundred scientists studying a strain of long-living mice (three years), wait until they were aged two, and then try to extend their lives until their fifth “birthday” using SENS tactics such as stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and nanote
chnology. “If this is achieved,” he posited, “the scientific community would be convinced.”

  De Grey himself was convinced already. While he conceded that there was nothing that could be done at the moment to extend life, “as long as you don’t smoke or get fat,” he hoped the robust mice will prove that the longer you live, the more likely you’ll be alive when his treatments are available for humans. De Grey compared the human body to a car. “If you maintain an old car, it will work indefinitely,” he said. It’s a concept high-level CEOs can understand: according to de Gray, Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos had expressed interest in his work, as had erstwhile junk bond king Michael Milken, a survivor of prostate cancer who founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

  By the time Deming was involved in longevity efforts, the drive to live forever, or at least exponentially longer, was a popular topic in Silicon Valley. Just like hacking other problems, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs wanted to solve the problem of death. There were a variety of methods already being tested, such as being frozen at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, like Todd Huffman of Langton Labs was planning to do.

  It wasn’t a new strategy after all. For decades, billionaires such as Howard Hughes and Edward O. Thorp, author of the 1962 bestseller Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One, had been hoping to live forever.

  • • •

  Back in 2007, around the same time that Dr. Aubrey de Grey was making his tech world fund-raising push, Edward Thorp was sitting in his spacious Newport Beach, California, office opening up his translucent orange bottle of pills when his cell phone rang. “Give me your name and number!” he demanded, and then snapped, “I can guarantee you I’m never going to buy a Honda!”—in the process spilling about twenty horse pills and even more tiny white ones all over his desk.

  Upon hanging up, he bent over to sweep up the stray medication, picked up one, and asked, “Want to try one?” Thorp was talking about the bigger pills, a cocktail combination of “life extension” drugs that he’d ordered from the Life Extension Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He procured copies of its brochure, newsletter, and order form from their prominent position in a stack on the windowsill looking out to a sunny day above a nearby mall. Inside were articles on recent studies about the longevity benefits of common nutritional supplements such as omega-3, resveratrol (found in red wine), and grape-seed extract, and some not so typical, including velvet deer antler, optimized cat’s claw, and shark cartilage. There were also ads for the inaugural Life Extension Cruise in Miami aboard the Norwegian Sun. Inside Thorp’s pill bottle, though, were only the company’s life extension mix of pills and baby aspirin, “to reduce inflammation.”

  In recent years, the computer science pioneer had become increasingly focused on his own longevity. While his supplement and exercise regimen had kept him at least ten years younger, with smooth, tan skin and a balmy grin, Thorp wasn’t leaving his future up to medicine. He was a member of Alcor, a foundation that practices cryonics. Thorp did not plan on dying but freezing—or vitrifying, rather—for the next few hundred years, or at least until someone came up with the technology to “reanimate” him.

  It all started when he read a book called The Prospect of Immortality, first published in 1962 by a science fiction writer named Robert Ettinger, about coming back to life after freezing. Ettinger went on to start his own cryonics institute that still exists today in Chicago. “It all made sense to me as a possibility,” Thorp said, squinting as he made a gagging expression (he had swallowed a longevity lozenge). As he looked around for one of the suitably named Glacia mints he has on hand in case he has trouble swallowing, he explained how he found someplace to have cryopreservation done himself. Cryonics International, the company founded by Ettinger, was low cost, at $28,000 a head, but the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the country’s largest cryonics lab, was the facility he settled on. He was impressed that Hall of Famer Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox baseball legend, had entrusted the lab with his body to freeze upon his death at age eighty-three in 2002. “I once saw him play in Boston toward the end of his life,” Thorp said nostalgically, still sucking on his Glacia mint. “I could see that he was different from anyone else out there. Maybe I’ll see him bat again one day.”

  While Williams elected to have only his head frozen, Alcor offered the possibility of having one’s entire body frozen, for $120,000. The organization, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, was started in 1972 as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia, as a nonprofit in California. In 1967 Alcor performed its first cryopreservation (staff members still wince at the word freeze, since their technology, they explain, does not technically freeze people but “suspends,” or vitrifies, them in temperatures below minus 120 degrees), and by 1990, membership had grown to three hundred. A few years later, Alcor relocated to Arizona. Apparently the risk of earthquakes in California was too high, but Thorp said it had more to do with red tape regarding the rights of the cryopatients. Now, with more than eight hundred members still living—and seventy-six cryopreserved in large silver thermoses, known officially as “Bigfoot” dewar containers—Thorp believed it was an institution “that would be around for a while.” This was an important consideration, since he planned on being suspended there for two hundred to three hundred years. He went with the whole-body option, because while others trusted that bodies could eventually be cloned from the DNA in your brain, “there’s more memory in your whole body than your brain. It would be weird to adjust to a new body,” he said.

  Alcor’s strategy rested on the concept that the body didn’t die immediately upon “legal death.” The idea was that in the first ten minutes after cardiac arrest, the brain was still warm and working, and there would be little damage to the bodily organs. That’s when Alcor’s suspension team would rush in and begin rapid cooling and transportation to an Alcor thermos. Todd Huffman had instructions tattooed on his body describing how to do it. The sooner they could get there, the better, from a preservation standpoint.

  So when Thorp felt he was nearing his deathbed, he would notify Alcor’s suspension squad to be on standby should he perish. They recommended, however, that members relocate to cooperative hospice facilities in Scottsdale. In any case, Alcor personnel would wait for Thorp during this critical near-death time twenty-four hours a day. When his heart stopped, they would race in (assuming he would be at a hospital that allowed cryopreservationists to intervene) and place him in an ice water bath before restoring his circulation and breathing artificially with a heart-lung resuscitator known as a Lucas chest compression device, or cardiopulmonary support “thumper.” Then they would hook up his corpse to an intravenous line and administer free radical inhibitors, anticoagulants, pH buffers, anesthetic, and other drugs to maintain blood pressure. Once his temperature dropped to a few degrees above water’s freezing point, they would drain out Thorp’s blood and replace it with an “organ preservation solution,” or cryopreservant, since blood has a tendency to crystallize at low temperatures.

  “It’s like chicken,” said Thorp, swirling around in his chair with jackknife-straight posture. “If there are ice crystals, it doesn’t taste the same as if it were never frozen.” The old technology at Alcor was to freeze patients, which would break cell walls. Now the outfit had a solution that maintained the structure better. “The old line was you can’t turn a hamburger back to a cow. Now it’s not a hamburger anymore,” explained Thorp. This transfer of blood out and cryopreservant in could take hours, which was why Alcor recommended being close to the facility. After this “cryoprotective perfusion,” Thorp would be cooled by nitrogen gas fans to prevent ice formation. Then, over the next two weeks, he would be cooled further to minus 196 degrees. (The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was minus 129 degrees in Antarctica in 1983.) At this point, he could be lowered into the dewar full of liquid nitrogen, where he would remain at that temperature for the next few centuries—or however long it would take a new gener
ation of Alcor employees to figure out how to wake him up again.

  Thorp had thought a lot about what would happen when he was eventually reanimated. He had put away a multimillion-dollar trust (he won’t say how much, but has previously put the number at $50 million) that would collect interest over the years and fund the science required to turn him back on. He was less concerned with the physical part than with the psychological aspects of reawakening in the future—since he figured that by then, he would just be able to go to a blood bank to get new blood, and scientists would be able to clone whatever body parts had suffered wear and tear from the many years of being inside a thermos.

  “Who knows what the world will be like then,” he wondered aloud. “You could wake up, and the language could be different.” Shaking his head, he added, “But none of these things are very likely. I just always think of extreme cases, since that’s paid off for me in the investment world.” While Thorp put his chances of coming back at only 5 percent, that’s up from 2 percent a few years ago, when he learned about new research in nanotechnology. Plus, he had recruited family and friends to join him for the long haul. “It would be nice to have a group of people going through the same thing,” he said.

  • • •

  Deming was skeptical of Alcor’s ability to extend life. “The question is, I’d be a lot more afraid of the integrity of the business surviving than the science,” she said. However, Laura thought there was proof that freezing some parts of the body could actually work, explaining, “Some portion of you is preservative.” She believed that coming back to life after being frozen was unlikely but “not infeasible.” What she found less likely was that the business would still be around after any of us was living, let alone the thawed corpses. “That to me is way more disconcerting than the whole science part.”

  This reasoning motivated others in Silicon Valley, such as Thiel and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They, along with Sean Parker and executives from Facebook, eBay, and Netscape, were pouring millions into biomedical research, much of it aimed at living a lot longer. Google even hired futurist Ray Kurzweil to become a director of engineering. There he works on enhancing human capability through technology. He believes he will live forever.