Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been looking for space for the future of humanity. But the richest man in the world is also trying to prolong the life of humanity here on Earth, according to a report published in MIT’s Technology Review.
Bezos, valued at $ 200 billion, is one of several investors in Altos Labs, a Silicon Valley startup working on technology to rejuvenate cells and potentially prolong life, Technology magazine reported. Review. The startup also features Yuri Milner, a Russian tech billionaire and founder of the $ 3 million Breakthrough Awards, as a sponsor.
Altos Labs is working on what is called reprogramming technology, a method of reversing adult cells that specialize in stem cells, which have the potential to become any type of cell, according to the technology magazine Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Scientists say reprogramming it has great potential to treat vision loss, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and other age-related body degenerations. In a 2018 study, Salk Institute biochemist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte declared it “the elixir of life” and said that “aging is not an irreversible process.” The following year, Izpisua Belmonte was part of a team working in China that created monkey-human hybrids called chimeras, which received criticism from medical ethics.
Now, Izpisua Belmonte is scheduled to join Altos Labs, according to the Technology Review. Other preeminent scientists are also joining the startup’s staff, including Steve Horvath, a geneticist at the University of California who developed a way to detect aging cells from their molecular markers. Shinya Yamanaka, who received a Nobel Prize for her reprogramming work in 2012, will chair Altos Labs ’advisory board.
Stopping the disease and prolonging life seems to be a key interest for Bezos. In his 2020 letter to Amazon shareholders, the 57-year-old founder of Amazon quotes British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote to his investors: “Avoiding death is something you have to work on. … if living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their environment and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That’s what happens when they die. “
Bezos concluded in his shareholder letter, “Never, never, don’t let the universe smooth you around.”
Bezos Expeditions, the billionaire’s investment firm, did not respond to any requests for comment from CBS MoneyWatch.
According to Bezos Expeditions, the billionaire is involved in several other companies conducting cellular research, including Nautilus Biotechnology, Sana Biotechnology, Denali Therapeutics and Juno Therapeutics (now part of Bristol Myers Squibb).
Along with technology billionaire Peter Thiel, Bezos has also invested in Unity Biotechnology, a startup that develops technology to delay aging at the cellular level.
The project to save death is popular in Silicon Valley. In 2013, Google launched Calico, a research and development lab to treat aging. A year later, the Palo Alto Award for Longevity offered $ 1 million to researchers who could make old organisms young or extend the life of a living thing by 50%. Today, researchers in 50 countries can earn about $ 30 million in prizes available through the National Academy of Medicine’s “healthy longevity” challenge.
Nir Barzilai, director of the Aging Research Institute at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, expects $ 4.5 billion to be invested in life-length science this year, he told New York Post.