Immortality Has a Funding Problem

How much money would immortality be worth? If you guessed "quite a lot," you're probably close. In legend and history, kings and emperors have splurged fortunes trying to obtain the elixir of life and cheat the grim reaper.

Today, in an increasingly ageing world, anyone who found a formula to prevent or just slow down the process would no doubt make a killing. But the controversial scientists working to engineer a fountain of youth claim that, despite an increased interest from Silicon Valley types over the past few years, they're still low on funds.

Exact figures for the amount of capital globally injected into longevity research are hard to come by, but David Orban, former director of the transhumanist collective H+ and advisor at future-oriented Singularity University, estimates that it's "close to a billion dollars" a year.

The financial side of the quest for eternal life piqued my interest when I went to the UK premiere of American documentary The Immortalists last month. The film follows two scientists working in the field of radical life extension, and in one sequence near the end, the philosophical talk about immortality is set aside as the issue of money takes centre stage.

One of the protagonists, Nevada-based biologist Bill Andrews, looks nervous as he struggles to find investors willing to help him pay the seven-figure sums needed to carry on his research. The other, British anti-ageing boffin Aubrey de Grey, is trying to get a hefty cheque to fund his Silicon Valley research facility SENS.

Research on life extension doesn't have to be particularly expensive. Aubrey de Grey told me that to run his brainchild, SENS, "The procedures and machinery that are needed are very much the same as for any biology research," with high-precision equipment such as microscopes accounting for the biggest expenses.

The often hostile response to life-extension work surely plays a role in the equation, with many suggesting the idea of curing ageing is simply snake oil or outright dangerous.

But even if you buy into the idea, there's a lack of foreseeable payoff. Investing in such ventures could potentially yield big returns—but only in the long term. While de Grey is convinced that the first person to live 1,000 years has already been born, the prospect that one of the laboratories working to beat ageing will hit the jackpot any time soon sounds farfetched to most.

"People want to invest today to make money tomorrow, that's the thing," said de Grey. "With life extension, things take a little longer."

Right now, life-extension research is still research, pure and simple. Scientists exploring the uncharted territories of longevity mainly tinker with cells and telomeres, or strive to spawn long-lived mice; so far the opportunities for life-extension institutes to churn out marketable products are virtually non-existent.

"There are many drugs on sale to treat the diseases of the elderly, but there is not a single product that targets old age itself, if we exclude a pseudo-market of dietary supplements," Avi Roy, a biomedical expert from Oxford University, told me in a phone call.

If some breakthroughs along these lines were achieved, the life-extension sector has the potential to be a hugely profitable industry. In 2013, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts, people worldwide spent $195.9 billion to keep the signs of ageing at bay with products aimed at countering such nuisances as wrinkles, hair loss, or faltering memory. Just imagine if feasible treatments emerged to tackle those problems at their root, eradicating ageing altogether.

That's why, for transhumanist enthusiast Orban, the current dearth of funds doesn't make any sense. "My argument is the following: Health is a huge business, and illness is a huge business too. If we can offer products to live longer it'll be a huge business. What will the value of future gains be? It'll be huge. What is worth investing in it? Let's say 100 billion dollars a year, but actually any amount is worth spending," he said.

Obviously, the less money put into longevity research, the less it will be able to deliver. It's gridlock, where the only way out can be provided by people who are rich enough and risk-taking enough to engage in this transhumanist wager.

There is one place you can find some such investors: Silicon Valley. Moneyed, forward-looking, and usually with a penchant for bold challenges, Valley types have shown more and more interest in this kind of research in recent years.

PayPal's co-founder Peter Thiel, for instance—currently the main sponsor of de Grey's SENS–has spent millions to fight the battle against what he calls "the problem of death." More recently, big corporations have stepped into the field, with Google's multi-million anti-ageing project Calico the most conspicuous example.

That's good news for people like de Grey. "It's not just about having more funds: the sector still is in need of money, even if it's certainly faring better than, say, ten years ago," he said. "It's more about the attitude, the way people are talking about life extension in an optimistic way."

He said the involvement of big names in tech is beneficial image-wise: "Google, Thiel, [geneticist Craig] Venter, who runs a company called Human Longevity … These are names that are recognised by other investors, and which may attract them."

And perhaps the Silicon Valley touch could be the thing to transform the longevity dream into a more market-oriented sector. Last September, for example, Calico signed an agreement with British pharmaceutical company AbbVie to create a joint R&D to devise treatments for neurodegeneration and cancer.

Immortality isn't for sale just yet.