The dreams of billionaires are something worth contemplating. Your maximum dose of travel is not a luxury excursion around the world, but, in the case of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, A trip to the edge of space, albeit as advertising tricks for their respective commercial space companies.
And when it comes to staying young, a hair transplant and a facial stretch are no longer enough. Why not try to postpone death by managing the aging process? This is the perspective behind High Labs, a company of Silicon Valley which led to some of the best known scientists in the field of aging. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is reported to be one of the sponsors. Another is Yuri Milner, a billionaire technology investor who created the Breakthrough Awards with Mark Zuckerberg, From Facebook, among others. Up to six prizes, worth $ 3 million each, are awarded in life sciences, basic physics and math, making them the most lucrative individual gongs for science (Nobel Prizes have a value each one million dollars).
Few researchers are likely to reject unlimited funding with dazzling conditions and wages. Among which the magazine MIT Technology Review confirmed that they will join Alts, which plans institutes in United States, United Kingdom and Japan, Is Steve Horvath, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who developed a molecular biomarker of aging, now known as the “Horvath clock.” Shinya Yamanaka, From Kyoto University, becomes an unpaid senior advisor.
Like Horvath, His name entered the lexicon of avant-garde biology: he shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for identifying four proteins now known as “Yamanaka factors.” We add these factors to a cell, and surprisingly, the cell can go back and acquire the coveted malleability of immature cells. He took advantage of this finding Manuel Serrano at the Biomedical Research Institute of Barcelona, which applied the technique not to individual cells but to complete mice, with mixed results.
Serrano he also boarded the new company, dedicated to “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. The ultimate goal, despite the blue sky mantra, is to discover the source of youth. Aging is one of the most difficult biological problems to solve, but the fact that parents with old cells can create young babies shows that nature has already mastered cell reprogramming.
We inherit genetic material from our parents, which is erased from age-related changes after fertilization to resemble something closer to the original genetic source. This process has not been easy to repeat in the laboratory: Serrano mice, subjected to the Benjamin Button-like treatment inspired by Yamanaka, showed signs of rejuvenation, but also developed teratomas. These are rare tumors that contain multiple types of tissue, including teeth, hair, and muscles, suggesting that reprogramming may awaken genes that cause cancer.
Rowan Hooper, An evolutionary biologist and science writer, presented Silicon Valley’s obsession with longevity in his book How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. He points out that Calico, from Google, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, created by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, share Alts ’view on aging: as a disease that needs to be cured. Peter Thiel of PayPal once described death as a problem to solve.
Alts is recruiting world-class scientists and funding research that will extend to the rest of science and medicine, although they do not provide an elixir of life in the short term. “
