People are investing in longevity… and by ‘people’, I mean profit-seekers

“If you’re not getting older, you’re dead.” That is the astute observation of great American rock ‘n roll legend, Tom Petty.

Living forever. Immortality. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Most of us have thought about it. But living forever may not be the holy grail that we have made it out to be.

But before we talk about living longer, let’s see if we’re actually trending in that direction to begin with. I mean, living longer if you’re currently dying earlier than you used to seems like a big ask for society, doesn’t it? Recent United Nations data shows the life expectancy (how long, on average, a newborn can expect to live, if current death rates do not change) from 2019. Basically, if you’re anywhere outside of sub-Saharan Africa, you’re living into your seventies on average.

In August 2022, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vital Statistics System provisional life expectancy estimates were released showing a dramatic fall in US life expectancy. In 2019, a person born in the US had a life expectancy of approximately 79 years and at the end of 2021, that number had fallen to 76.1. To no one’s surprise, excess deaths due to COVID-19 and other causes in 2020 and 2021 led to an overall decline in life expectancy.

But this hasn’t stopped us from dreaming about longevity and pouring billions of dollars into ageing research. In fact, the National Institutes of Health has its own division called the National Institute of Aging (NIA), ‘which leads the federal government in conducting and supporting research on aging and the health and well-being of older people and seeks to understand the nature of aging and the aging process, and diseases and conditions associated with growing older’. It is estimated that there are over 50 million Americans over the age of 65 and that, by 2040, this number will rise to over 80 million.

But wait a minute.

There’s a difference between ageing research and longevity, isn’t there? And there’s a difference between actually studying the well-being of older people and the act of finding ways to make older people, well, older.

The NIA isn’t using its $4bn budget to advance the cause of living longer. The NIA’s mandate is simply to understand the nature of ageing and the ageing process (at least in large part). The NIA is really funding research and examining the ageing process without a specific goal of developing a method to increase life expectancy.

According to a 2022 report in MIT Technology Review, ‘the Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organisation called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1bn a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of ageing and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as “health span”’.

Stanford University has a Center on Longevity. There are entire venture capital funds devoted to longevity and backing/funding entrepreneurs who are looking for solutions to our ageing problems. And then there’s Bezos, Thiel, Ellison and a motley crew of other billionaires who have thrown nine-figure sums at ‘rejuvenation’ and longevity start-ups. There are also big companies focused on longevity, such as Google/Calico and Altos Labs.

So, there you have it. The government is funding longevity. So are billionaires. And entire nation-states. And big, publicly traded companies. And venture capitalists.

But who decides who gets to live longer? Along with gene editing, there may be no other social issue that makes people feel as queasy as ‘extending life’. Because, like gene editing, it feels unnatural.

It feels like we are playing with the natural order of the world. Because someone has to decide who gets to live longer and who doesn’t. Presumably the path to longevity will involve some pharmacological or medical intervention. At what cost?  Will it be subsidised or entirely underwritten by the government, because if it’s not freely available and widely accessible to every single person then, by default, someone is deciding to exclude a wide swathe of society. Or will it be available only to those who can afford it, which would simply widen societal inequity by allowing those of privilege (and their offspring) to live longer than the underprivileged.

The moral dilemmas here are stark but probably no starker than what the world faced during the COVID-19 pandemic when countries became embroiled in vaccine nationalism and denied mRNA vaccines to emerging nations, resulting in gross malfeasance. People will be left behind. Lots of people. There will be bad actors and rogue nations, and some will profit handsomely.

Suffice to say that if the availability of longevity interventions is not equally distributed across society, there will be a moment of reckoning that we will have to deal with at some future point.