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Monetizing Immortality: How Silicon Valley's Tech Titans Are Trying to Disrupt Death

Tech titans search for the Fountain of Youth.
Who's going to live forever? These guys! Via Google

On Wednesday, Google announced that it is getting in the immortality game, with the launch of an absurdly ambitious new venture that literally aims to stop death. It burned through the media, spurred by a TIME cover story. But Google is hardly the first Silicon Valley giant to fight old age.

Tech titans have poured millions into the multibillion dollar anti-aging industry, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Valley remains a hotbed for the transhumanist movement, which aims to fundamentally transform the human condition, using new technologies to enhance our intellectual, psychological, and physical capabilities—including our ability to live forever.​

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So far, we don’t know much about this new Google company, except that it is called Calico and will be led by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, who is also chairman of the board at Apple. According to the Google press release, Calico—an abbreviation for California Life Company—“will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases.”

But in an exclusive TIME magazine interview that accompanied Wednesday’s announcement, Google CEO Larry Page made it clear that his ambitions for Calico are far more grandiose. The new venture is a “moonshot,” Page says, a word he uses to describe Google’s often outlandish attempts to bring the world into the future.

"Are people really focused on the right things?" Page told TIME. "One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you'd add about three years to people's average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that'll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it's very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it's not as big an advance as you might think."

In other words, curing cancer isn’t big enough. In fact, Page suggests that the ultimate goal of Calico is to cure, or rather “solve,” aging and death—a quixotic goal even for a company that is building a driverless car and wants to use helium balloons to expand Internet access.

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But while Calico may be one of the most most high-profile and well-funded attempts to stop the aging process, Page and Co. are hardly the first Silicon Valley dreamers to search for the Fountain of Youth. Here’s a rundown of Silicon Valley’s recent attempts to find immortality:

Ellison Medical Foundation:  Founded by billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the fifth-richest person in the world,  the Ellison Medical Foundation doles out more than $40 million a year for research in the biology of aging, according to executive director Kevin Lee. The ultimate goal of the Ellison Medical Foundation is not immortality, Lee said, but to find cures for the diseases that accompany aging. "It's about remaining healthy for as long as possible," Lee told me. "I think this is very possible. There's good reason to remain optimistic."

Ellison, who is said to be obsessed with youth, age, and science, is perhaps the most prominent Fountain of Youth seeker in Silicon Valley. "Death has never made any sense to me," Ellison told his biographer, Mark Wilson. "How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there? Clearly the reason they're not there is they're off doing something else… Death makes me very angry. Premature death makes me angrier still.''

Prior to creating the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Oracle billionaire invested in the now-failed biotech firm Aeiveos, which had planned to study the genetic makeup of centenarians. The company, which barely survived past its infancy, was created by an early Oracle employee Robert Bradbury, an Extropian who believed that genetic engineering could prolong life.

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Founders Fund: Led by billionaire PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Founders Fund's motto is "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Thiel, Silicon Valley's leading techno-libertarian futurist, has been known to dabble in transhumanism, and his venture capital fund invests heavily in biotech and artificial intelligence. Although these investments have been hit-or-miss—Halcyon Molecular, whose founder claimed he would live for “millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years," tanked last year—Thiel isn't likely to give up on his search for the Fountain of Youth.

The SENS Research Foundation: Another Thiel-backed venture, this Mountain View nonprofit is dedicated to the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, a range of regenerative medical therapies that repair damage to human tissue with the ultimate goal of postponing aging. The foundation was co-founded by British biogerontologist and notable transhumanist Aubrey de Grey, who claims that "the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today." Grey is also the co-founder of The Methuselah Foundation, which also received a hefty donation from Thiel.

Glenn Foundation for Medical Research: Funded by a nine-figure endowment by veteran California venture capitalist Paul F. Glenn, the Glenn Foundation's stated objective is  to “extend the healthy productive years of life through research on the mechanisms of biological aging.” Like Thiel, Glenn has also donated to de Grey's Methuselah Foundation.

Elixir Pharmaceuticals: A genomics-based drug company, Elixir is trying to make a pill that would slow down the aging process and forestall age-related diseases. The company was co-founded by Ellison Scholar Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist known for discovering a gene that extended the lifespan of worms 300 percent.

Maximum Life Foundation: Founded by human longevity advocate David Kekich, the Maximum Life Foundation identifies and supports emerging medical technologies with the goal of reversing the human aging process by 2033. According to the foundation's website, Maximum Life has "developed a creative investment strategy that combines capital preservation, liquidity, an annual dividend and venture capital returns… while developing technologies that are designed to extend healthy lifespans by 20 years or more."

The 2045 Initiative: Although not technically a Silicon Valley venture, the pet project of Russian multimillionaire media mogul Dmitry Itskov is one of the more ambitious attempts to make human beings immortal. The 2045 initiative aims to achieve immortality within three decades, and plans to do so by changing human evolution as we know it. From Itskov's manifesto on 2045.com: "We believe that before 2045 an artificial body will be created that will not only surpass the existing body in terms of functionality, but will achieve perfection of form and be no less attractive than the human body. People will make independent decisions about the extension of their lives and the possibilities for personal development in a new body after the resources of the biological body have been exhausted."