![]() Klausner was speaking “as if he had drunk some Kool-Aid.” “He was evangelical about something which, at the moment, is interesting but very preliminary and shaky ground,” says Martinez. Martinez, whose lab is at the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, wrote back that he had to hold his stomach while he watched, so grandiose were the claims. To get a reality check on Klausner’s lecture, I asked an embryologist and stem-cell specialist, Alfonso Martinez Arias, to watch a recording. If there is a fountain of youth in the genome, the first to locate it could reinvent medicine and revolutionize how we treat the myriad of diseases that plague our old age. Klausner admits that the details of why reprogramming works remain a “complete mystery,” but that too helps explain the sudden rush to invest in the idea. “There is no reason we couldn’t live 200 years.” David Sinclair, Harvard Universityīut all the unknowns are part of what makes the reprogramming phenomenon so attractive. Some say it starts at conception, while others think it’s at birth or after puberty. Indeed, there’s no real consensus on when in life aging even begins. These huge expenditures are being made despite the fact that scientists still disagree on the causes of aging. In addition to Altos, whose $3 billion ranked as possibly the single largest startup fundraising drive in biotech history, the cryptocurrency billionaire Brian Armstrong, the cofounder of Coinbase, helped bring $105 million into his own reprogramming company, NewLimit, whose mission he says is “radical extension of human health span.” Retro Biosciences, which says it wants to “increase healthy human lifespan by 10 years,” raised $180 million. But the doubters this year were drowned out by the sound of stampeding investors. Critics see ballooning hype, runaway egos, and science that’s on uncertain ground. It’s this type of claim that raises so much skepticism. “There is no reason we couldn’t live 200 years.” ![]() “I predict one day it will be normal to go to a doctor and get a prescription for a medicine that will take you back a decade,” Sinclair said at the same California event. One proponent of the technology, David Sinclair, who runs an aging-research lab at Harvard University, says it could allow people to live much longer than they do today. ![]() Some say they will be genetic therapies added to people’s DNA others expect it’s possible to discover chemical pills that do the job. These are all examples of cells being reprogrammed from age to youth-exactly the phenomenon companies like Altos want to capture, bottle, and one day sell.įor now, no one has a firm idea what these future treatments could look like. When Barbra Streisand had her 14-year-old dog cloned, cells from its mouth and stomach were returned to her as two frolicking puppies. Millions of babies are born every year from the aging sperm and egg cells of their parents. Yet rejuvenation is all around us, if you look. To be sure, the word “rejuvenation” sounds suspicious, like a conquistador’s quest or a promise made on a bottle of high-priced face cream. “This is the opposite of precision medicine,” Klausner said. That is because if you can make cells act younger, healthier, and more resilient, you might have a general-purpose means of forestalling many diseases all at once. ![]() Yet even for him, rejuvenation is wildly ambitious. He is a heavy hitter who has also been behind some of today’s most high-profile biotech ventures, like the cancer blood-test company Grail. Klausner is the former head of the National Cancer Institute and onetime leader for global health at the Gates Foundation. “We think we can turn back the clock,” he told the audience. During his talk, he showed slides marked “Confidential” claiming that fat mice had recovered from diabetes after treatment, and that others were able to survive normally lethal doses of painkillers-all thanks to a healthy dose of the medical rejuvenation. And Klausner has data to suggest it might already be working. This may be possible, Klausner says, because youthful cells have more resilience and can bounce back from biological stress in ways old ones don’t. The objective of Altos is to tame this phenomenon, understand it, and eventually apply it as a treatment to reverse a wide range of diseases.
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