Valley of the Gods Read online

  Some viewed the body as similar to an advanced piece of computer machinery that could be reprogrammed and enhanced. Just as computers had improved, so could biotech, and biomedical research. The nanobot revolution could be right on the horizon. Gene therapy and reprogramming the neocortex were just a couple of the other ways that life extension could happen. Buying a lottery ticket, maybe. But if you won, the payoff was far greater than money. They already had cash.

  As Deming was trying to raise money for her Longevity Fund, the field was getting more crowded. In 2013 Larry Page started Calico Labs, devoted to antiaging research. A year later, Calico recruited Deming’s mentor Cynthia Kenyon to leave UCSF and join him. Google invested up to $750 million in the company billed as a health venture start-up aimed at “curing” death. The goal was to coax life-extending abilities out of animals.

  Deming was still in touch with her early mentor, but was looking at smaller companies she could have more influence on. Still interested in the science herself, the young woman worked in the lab a few days a week and was fascinated by how the genome could be realigned. It was hard to explain those interests to investors, though. “The big problem with biology is there’s no way to logically talk about things,” she said.

  Fund-raising was slow going. “Starting a fund is really, ­really, really hard,” she said. “It’s so much harder than I thought it was going to be. You have to convince very skeptical people to give you their capital to invest.” It was a real hard sell in her case because the results were so far away. She said she spent two years just figuring out how to talk to people.

  There was the problem of explaining to prospective investors what the companies did. One company made simple modifications to drugs that would enable new versions of it to be easily approved and used. Another company was involved with gene editing, which meant cutting the genome in a specific place and inserting new genetic material. It was still far from commercially accessible, however, since before, putting the gene in the wrong place could possibly cause cancer, or worse. But with this technology, the gene editing was so targeted that it could be safely used. Deming was working with advisors to figure out which version would be the best bet. Her days consisted of meeting founders, trying to find companies, and then asking her investors whether they’d want to invest. At the same time, she had to translate their work into lay terms.

  Deming wasn’t sure if her backers were as excited about biology as she was. Most people just wanted to hear about a magic pill to live longer. So that’s what she started working on.

  Two existing drugs, metformin, prescribed to manage type-2 diabetes, and the immunosuppressant rapamycin had proven to have the side effect of extending the life of mice. She thought these pills could be refocused on longevity, if only they could minimize or eliminate the rather unpleasant side effects such as chronic nausea, shakiness, and dizziness. A distilled version could provide this magic pill everyone was looking for. It could potentially become available to the public within ten years and possibly cure aging. A pill, she thought, would eventually make people live an extra twenty to thirty years, and at age sixty or seventy, it could make people feel thirty.

  In summer 2015, the FDA approved a trial to look into the antiaging possibilities of metformin. Over five years, the medication would be studied to see if it had the same effect on humans as it did on mice. It would be given to three thousand elderly people who were already at risk for life-threatening diseases.

  She and other scientists didn’t know yet whether the drug would merely make people older for longer—posing problems to the health care system, the job market, and the pension system—or would make them healthier for longer. Scientists were trying to make sure they were extending “health-spans,” not just life-spans. Maybe aging didn’t have to mean declining health. Maybe it could mean extending health, and maybe that could happen through a pill.

  Ideally, one of these pills would mimic calorie restriction, a proven way to increase the life-spans of animals, at least. But there were other ways to stay young. Deming was investigating a company that said it could delete old cells from the body. Scientists there were testing it in mice. They also injected older mice with young mice’s blood, which Laura conceded sounded kind of gory, but it worked.

  • • •

  One of her advisors was Dr. Joon Yun of the private equity firm Palo Alto Investors, where he worked as a venture capitalist investing in health care companies. He too became intrigued and decided to start a biology prize similar to Russian investor Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize, offering an enterprising scientist $1 million to “hack the code of life” to uncover even more possibilities for delaying the aging process. Like Craig Venter, the geneticist who first sequenced the human genome in 2003, and Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur who started the XPrize, his focus had turned to extending life-spans. Dr. Yun didn’t see a limit to human age.

  Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, also supported antiaging research, and was trying to find ways to at least extend the health-span, if not live forever. Google, meanwhile, was working on “ingestible tech”: a capsule full of iron-oxide nanoparticles that would enter the bloodstream and identify cancer tumor cells for early detection of many kinds of cancers. Another company, Proteus Digital Health, was developing a sensor pill that would send information it uncovered in the body to a person’s smartphone. And Diamandis’s foundation was working on a device that could discover indicators for diabetes, tuberculosis, and abnormal blood pressure, all with a drop of blood that could be taken at home.I

  Deming had joined a community of bigwigs whose new focus had become the same as hers. She found herself being asked to speak on panels throughout the valley. She was awarded prizes left and right, mostly because she knew something about the ­science—and had a handle on this magic pill that so many people wanted so desperately.

  * * *

  I. “Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success,” by Betsy Isaacson, Newsweek, March 3, 2015.

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  Five Minutes of Fame

  Laura Deming had become the darling of Silicon Valley’s aspiring immortals. Her seeming proximity to this magic pill was a pull so strong that unlike the other dozen or so fellows who had quietly gone back to college (three her year), or given up their ideas, her presence was expanding.

  “Too Young to Fail” read the headline of the MIT Technology Review’s story about her a year into her Thiel Fellowship. But on the inside, Laura wasn’t so sure it was true. The way the press had covered her, it was like she had already succeeded, but she still felt she had little to show for it. Article after article, in the New York Times and the MIT Technology Review, called her a prodigy. The young woman was styled, groomed, interviewed, and featured. She was asked to speak at conferences alongside experts in the field; after all, she was a shock to behold. Next to a panel of white-haired scientists wearing lab coats, here was this gorgeous, passionate vixen—an oxymoron in a biologist’s body.

  “The cool thing about Silicon Valley is that, though people might be skeptical of youth, they don’t actually know that you’re not smart enough or capable enough to make it work,” she told Technology Review. At least she had confidence in her scientific intelligence, if not her business acumen. It was an odd sensation, though, riding the wave of publicity but scrambling to keep afloat at the same time. As she scoured the tech news, reading about billion-dollar company valuations, one after the other, she wondered whether the same thing was happening in those larger cases. Theranos, the biotech company that promised to inexpensively perform dozens of blood tests with a pinprick instead of a vial, was worth billions—but the device turned out not to work as claimed. Whereas Deming tried to court biotech investors, she noticed that Theranos had attracted investors with little scientific background. They had previously invested in enterprise and social media tech companies. Was that how no one realized Thera
nos’s real abilities, or lack thereof?

  What did these valuations mean? It seemed like much of the publicity in Silicon Valley was generated by a handful of operators. They were part of the networking machine of which she was becoming aware. Out in the valley, where newsprint newspapers were practically an anachronism, news came through blogs and tech platforms such as TechCrunch, and lately the Information, a tech news site started by a former Wall Street Journal writer, Jessica Lessin. There was also Recode, a collaboration between Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Tidbits were insidery, and these outfits often provided ways to meet as well.

  The yearly TechCrunch conference was where Thiel had made his original announcement to convince students to drop out of college. Run by an entrepreneur named Michael Arring­ton, TechCrunch had become more than just news. It was a database for company founders to post information about their businesses. It had become a status marker, listing valuations, partnerships, and funding rounds. Then there were PandoDaily and the Hacker News, written by insiders for insiders, often about engineering issues. Many of these revolved around who to hire. Good product designers were hard to come by, and the big companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple had serious pay packages to offer.

  There were the gossip sites such as Valleywag, for instance, that existed mostly to taunt wealthy executives. Valleywag outed Thiel as gay in 2007. By January 2016, it had closed, in part thanks to a lawsuit filed by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, and funded, to the world’s surprise, by Thiel. Ever since Valley­wag attacked him, Thiel had been out for Valleywag’s parent company, Gawker Media. So when Hogan (Terry Bollea, in the real world), sued Gawker for posting a sex video of him with his friend’s wife, Thiel anonymously contributed more than $10 million to the fight, leading legal experts and Gawker founder Nick Denton to wonder why Bollea refused to settle multiple times for amounts as high as $8 million and $10 million. In March a Florida jury awarded him a whopping $140 million in damages.

  Finally, Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times received a tip that it was Thiel who was the mysterious benefactor in the case against Denton. At the end of May 2016, Thiel admitted it, saying it wasn’t revenge but just to deter Gawker from attacking others. A month later Gawker filed for bankruptcy, leading to a wave of fear that a billionaire with bad press could eradicate an entire media institution. Thiel argued that his case was a form of philanthropy, helping people persecuted by “terrorist organizations” like Gawker to defend themselves. He later wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End with Gawker,” arguing for the passage of the Intimate Privacy Protection Act, nicknamed the Gawker Bill, which would make it illegal for outlets to distribute intimate images. Still others considered Thiel a hero, standing up against a company that many in the media didn’t even count as legitimate.

  Until its abrupt demise, Valleywag salivated over its characters’ trials, twists and turns. Its writers went wild on the news that former Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao was suing the firm, tearing into Kleiner’s leadership.

  The media outfits in Silicon Valley that stuck around longer were more “collaborative” with tech companies, such as TechCrunch, which took part in the start-up economy. Arrington considered his website a start-up as well, not a separate estate covering the industry, as many East Coast–based media outlets were.

  Lessin, of the Information, also thought of her site as a start-up. She had married Sam Lessin, the founder of the file sharing company Drop.io, and moved to San Francisco with him. In the Bay Area she realized there was an absence of real media. Granted, all the major outlets had bureaus there, but there was no real technology-focused authority aside from TechCrunch, which many of the major venture capital firms worked with directly. So she started a subscription service for in-depth tech news called the Information, which costs $400 a year. To Lessin, a niche audience would be attracted to these kinds of deep investigations.

  Still, the media world out there was different from what it was on the East Coast, where she’d covered tech since graduating from Harvard in 2005. Out in the valley, there were no media hangouts or circles of reporters. Many reporters just hung out at the Battery, a new social club in downtown San Francisco that was the closest thing the city had to a private club, like the British import Soho House in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. At the Battery, journalists mingled with venture capitalists in an artfully exclusive members-only atmosphere.

  The Battery opened in late 2013 with fanfare. An art installation featuring San Francisco–based artists gave the space an effortful edge. A neon sign doubling as an art installation read: “Hogwarts meets Victoria’s Secret meets Guantánamo Bay meets Lilith Fair meets the DMV.” The lofty ceilings and animal heads on the walls coupled with bright pieces of contemporary art looked as though they were built for a warehouse party in Berlin. But the people there didn’t seem effortlessly hip or chic like one might imagine at a private club; they looked like they’d never left their dorm rooms. Still, the space, in a former marble-cutting factory, was a new kind of Silicon Valley chic: geek chic. There was the twenty-person hot tub, the five bars, the secret cigar rooms, and a sprawling penthouse suite.

  Founded by two entrepreneurs, a husband and wife named Michael and Xochi Birch, who started the social networking site Bebo, the club was based on London’s social clubs. The Birches sold their company to AOL in 2008 for $850 million and then bought it back five years later for $1 million.I

  Building a London-style club in San Francisco was a risky experiment. They didn’t want only tech people, but somehow it seemed as if everyone camped out there was involved in tech or covering tech. It was the home away from home; a fancier Starbucks with massaged kale instead of Mocchachinos. On a recent visit, the club was filled with venture capitalists and tech reporters. Parties were hosted by media outlets or culture organizations such as the San Francisco Film Society and the Financial Times. It was all manufactured buzz.

  In San Francisco, manufacturing buzz was the new media. It seemed so easy, after all. You could just “hack media” like you could hack anything else. Facebook had started it, allowing each person to manufacture his or her own buzz, all day, anytime, in essence writing their own personal profile that they could update eternally and embellish. Much of this effort was left to certain queen bees of buzz manufacturing. Some women were considered doyennes of Silicon Valley’s skeletal social scene. It was much like the buzzing of the Hollywood publicists shepherding actors and actresses in and out of interviews, but these women were more than that. They helped the Silicon Valley geeks socialize. They made matches and conjoined founders to investors. In a place where social norms were anything but normal, publicists were as much facilitators, networkers, and strategists all at once.

  One of these women was Marcy Simon. Petite, with long, bright blonde hair, tanned skin, and clothing showing off her curvy, toned figure, Marcy Simon grew up in New Jersey, far from the companies she now worked with. She started out in broadcast journalism and later made packaged video news for corporations and executives at companies such as Microsoft and Sony. She went on to consult for Microsoft, helping to launch products and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 1989 to around 2006.

  She married a businessman and had three children, but when she divorced, she expanded her team to begin working more in Europe and Asia, starting with consulting for Alibaba in 2004. Through her network, Simon soon became known for getting people into prestigious events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In the mid-2000s, she worked for the World Economic Forum, helping the conference become digital.

  She helped brand a series of other conferences, such as the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland, and assisted with lining up moderators and panelists at design conferences such as DLD (Digital-Life Design) in Munich, Germany. The conference system served as a perfect go-between for Silicon Valley founders temporarily between companies or trying to publicize companie
s, so that they could relay their own news rather than depend on a reporter who would be unlikely to get their message straight.

  She had been a guide to a host of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking for access, and counted people such as Hyperloop One chairman Shervin Pishevar, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick as her friends. She was also friendly with “super-angel” Ronald “Ron” Conway, who she said introduced her to a number of successful entrepreneurs.

  With her Twitter handles “@teflonblondie” and “@marcy,” she used social media to help promote clients’ companies and even lobby lawmakers on their behalf.

  One of Simon’s stomping grounds was South by Southwest Interactive, a place that had become the Sundance Film Festival of the start-up world, where established Silicon Valley executives seek out new companies, and new start-ups try to go big. The official conference is at the Hilton in downtown Austin, Texas, but all the action takes place in the lobby of the city’s two best hotels: the Four Seasons and the Driskill. One year, in 2012, Simon was holding court at the downstairs bar of the Four Seasons, which had turned into a heat map of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

  All around was engineering royalty, divided into two camps: the nerd clan and the frat clan. The nerd clan embraced their intrinsic nerdiness, nerding out with thick-rimmed glasses and loose T-shirts emblazoned with obscure coding references covering an either skinny or portly physique. The frat clan were the nerds who worked out.