My quest began in February in a Regent’s Park mansion that boasted two doormen, a fireplace in the foyer, and no visible street number. As the plus-one of a friend, I had joined an exclusive list of invitees to a presentation from the leader of a longevity clinic. Uniformed servers proffered pale-green “nutrient-dense” mocktails. I sensed immediately that I was underdressed. It was the kind of gathering that makes you feel you are losing the race of life to people with far better shoes.
The speaker was an ageless blonde in a navy silk top and flowy trousers, which seemed very much on brand. “Our specialised diagnostic capabilities allow us to target senescence before it happens, so you can improve mitochondrial health and slow ageing at the cellular level,” she told us. While my fellow guests nodded along knowingly, the talk felt, to me, like it was in a foreign language. Here was a whole new vocabulary: functional medicine, hyperbaric chambers, epigenetics, biohacking, ionic revitalisation, cellular detox, biomarker optimisation, peptides, NAD+ IV therapy, GLP-1 receptor agonists, senolytics, wearable biosensors, genomic science, glycaemic index. If the speaker’s aim was to sow panic, she had succeeded with me. Could I master this arcane new world before my time ran out?
There is a movement afoot in the culture, a movement that marshals deep science and high anxiety, and it goes by the name of “longevity.” Ageing gracefully is out, ageing “purposefully” is in. For some members of the movement, that means not ageing at all. The longevity clinics sprouting up in the finest postcodes of the world’s major cities are surfing the upper-class heights of the trend. Life extension is now the ultimate status symbol. Keeping up with the Joneses has become an existential challenge.
The industry is certainly in “growth” mode. Wealth management firms such as Rothschild & Co describe longevity as a “new frontier for ESG investing.” According to Julius Baer, a Swiss multinational banking firm, the global longevity market is presently valued at more than $6 trillion. Globally, longevity clinic services alone are estimated to be worth somewhere between $6bn and $11bn and are expected to surge to over $33bn by 2034.
The beauty industry has certainly caught on: take Sisley’s Longevity Essential Serum, £435 for a 30ml tube. The luxury travel industry has also glommed on. Time was when the Four Seasons Hotel Singapore might have sold itself on fine cuisine and impeccable service. Now it boasts the Chi Longevity clinic. Forget the crispy pork belly; you come here for genetic and biomarker testing, epigenetic analysis, inflammation analysis, metabolic and endocrine blood panels—all under the guidance of a doctor, who follows up with medical, dietary and supplement action plans.
The longevity service on offer in the Regent’s Park mansion turns out to be—surprise, surprise—not cheap: roughly equivalent to a luxury vacation weekend to Switzerland, every month. I start to question my life choices. I’m here on the journalist-friend package. I’m going to need a different plan if I am to “live optimally”, as our speaker puts it. I gulp down a second nutrient-dense mocktail and head out into the rain.
From the safety of my browser, I order a range of food supplements from Bryan Johnson, the founder of Project Blueprint. A winner of the tech-mogul lottery who has re-invented himself as a wannabe immortal, Johnson occupies the extreme edge of the longevity movement. He boasts that his multi-million-dollar longevity project has led to his being “potentially the most measured person in human history.” The other way he’s going to be better than Jesus, it would seem, is that he plans to be the first human to live forever. His motto leaves no room for ambiguity—“Don’t Die”—and his talent for self-promotion cannot be denied.
Johnson follows a rigorous daily schedule centered on slowing “or reversing” the ageing process by maximising sleep, prioritising exercise, monitoring every physiological marker of his existence and optimising everything that comes into and out of his body. He eats all his food in a six-hour window, monitors his erections, has infused himself with the blood plasma (donated at will) of his teenaged son, and pounds supplements in the way that cinema-goers scarf popcorn. This freakish regimen has at the very least produced a slightly cadaverous appearance: photos show a man with a seemingly hairless body and waxy skin.
The controversial Peter Thiel is apparently out there on the limb with him. The chairman of Palantir seems equally fascinated with “parabiosis”: transfusing the blood of younger men just might let old billionaires live forever, or at least squeeze a few more years out of life. Jeffrey Epstein, it may be worth mentioning, was also interested in life extension. He cultivated relationships with researchers in the field including Peter Attia, cofounder of Biograph, a fee-for-membership ($7,500 to $15,000 per annum) startup that specialises in early-disease detection through full-body MRIs, blood biomarkers, cardiac imaging and more. Attia, like Johnson, is spreading the gospel that we are better positioned than ever to prevent “the diseases that will kill you” as well as “the diseases that won’t kill you, but which will annoy you and make you unhappy to be old”.
Longevity science may do much for the body, but will it improve your soul? Perhaps not. Attia’s communications with Epstein spanned 2014 to 2019; his name appears in the Epstein files more than 1,700 times. Several of Attia’s letters to Epstein are literary Ozempic: if you read them, you will likely be too nauseated to eat anything at all for some time.
But what of Johnson’s products? Reader, the Longevity Mix supplement is, in my view, disgusting. Undissolved powder cakes your mouth like an unholy mixture of toothpaste and cornflour. The pineapple-yuzu flavour takes me back to the sugar-free boiled sweets that emerged, along with used tissues, from my elderly grandmother’s purse. I can say with conviction that this slurry will not allow me to live forever. And if it does, I might well choose the other option, so I can enjoy a decent meal.
Johnson has managed to package the narcissism and anxieties of the billionaire class and sell it to the little people. But the advice he offers on his website, for free, is very much in line with what I learned from my grandmother: get some sleep. Eat your vegetables. Lay off the junk food. Go outside and make some friends!
I pack my bags for California, where people dream of still other, hopefully more agreeable ways to add days to our lives.
I land at a private Silicon Valley-adjacent conference of thoughtful people engaged in “rethinking” life. The people here aren’t the billionaires, but the ones who work for them, programming for AI in the morning and meditating on the future of humanity in the evening.
I ask a young man working on robotics and AI if the robots will kill us all. “In about 30 years,” he tells me, matter-of-factly. “But until then, it’s going to be awesome!” Most of the attendees at this gathering are qualified optimists about the power of technology to improve human life—and the power of humans like themselves to choose new, better, healthier, calmer ways of living. Another attendee floats the idea that houses all need to be rotated 180 degrees. Put the roads and cars behind the houses, and have the front doors spill out into generous, communal front gardens. The approach to longevity here has the same “why not?” vibe.
This part of the longevity movement rests on two key thoughts, and Nathan Price, our featured speaker from the Buck Institute, which bills itself as the world’s first independent biomedical research institute focused exclusively on ageing, articulates them well. The first is that our so-called healthcare systems are merely disease management systems. We devote most of our resources to treating people, most of them old, suffering from illnesses, most of them chronic. Little effort goes into the positive mission of helping people attain higher levels of health and longer lives. The second big idea is that new technology—biotech research along with AI—has created tremendous opportunities to approach the true question of health—longevity—and often from outside the existing
medical establishment.
These two ideas seem to bring forth a curious mix of serious science and wacky futurism. Price is a systems biologist and bioengineer, and his talk is very strong on the seriousness quotient. The Buck Institute has around 350 staff, a roster of prominent researchers, and hauls in tens of millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health, the US’s national medical research agency. It has contributed to the development of drugs that address various chronic diseases and promises to help resolve many more. If anti-Alzheimer’s medications ever live up to their potential, it will be through the kind of work done by places like Buck.
Price’s talk makes sense in a way that Bryan Johnson’s supplement-babble does not. Supplementation, he warns us, can help with specific issues, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. They should optimally be considered alongside a person’s genetics. Choline, for instance, is strongly linked to brain function, so taking it as a supplement can help stave off Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, as Price tells us, in about 15 per cent of the population, gut bacteria metabolises excess choline into trimethylamine N-oxide, which is strongly associated with adverse cardiovascular events.
Alzheimer’s treatments and other potential wonders of the new science of ageing may seem like aspirations, but it wasn’t long ago that non-small-cell lung cancer was a death sentence. Today, lung cancer patients with some genetic mutations can live for a decade or more. What new discoveries await?
Following Price’s talk, the floor is turned over to the kind of people who don’t want to wait for tomorrow. I decide to try the AI-driven app from a group named Rythm Health. The app comes with a subscription to a brilliantly painfree system of at-home blood-sample collection, touted as “the world’s easiest blood test”: a device made by the US firm Tasso heats your skin, drawing blood to the surface through capillary vasodilation. The device then gently vacuums your blood into a microtube. The whole process takes about seven minutes. The blood is then sent to a lab for analysis. It’s a perfect combination of the twin pillars of the longevity movement’s “can-do” wing. The subscription gathers an immense amount of data from your blood tests—biomarkers that put numbers on every major organ system in your body. The AI then assesses your present condition, notes nutritional deficiencies and makes specific recommendations in ingratiating prose for optimising your life.
As the data starts to flow in from the tests, I develop a morbid fascination with my numbers. Did you know that my inflammation markers are low? I ask friends and family. And just take a look at my kidney metabolites! Those numbers that are not so optimal get me worked up even more.
Back in London and eager for a second opinion, I opt for the Everywoman Full Body Health Check from Randox Health (at the time of writing just over £400), where you go in person for a blood draw and it, too, gives you biomarkers.
The Rythm Health AI tells me I don’t have enough in the free testosterone or iron registers. “Eat protein with every meal!” it urges me, or words to that effect, and thoughtfully offers recommendations. I promptly order a lamb kebab and some Greek yogurt. This app clearly knows what’s good for me.
This conference aims to be for longevity what the gun show is for gun nuts in the US
Then the results from Randox Health come in, and it says my hormone and iron levels are just fine. Contradicting test results are quite common. The tests are not always as precise as the many decimals suggest, and results vary from test to test according to any number of factors, such as what you ate last night or how well you slept. The long scoresheets aren’t an X-ray of your physiology so much as an impressionistic cloud of data points, like the lines on your palm, waiting to be deciphered.
When I tell the AI about my Randox results, it drops the steak-for-breakfast plan and urges me to eat cruciferous vegetables high in fibre—leafy greens, broccoli—probably because it tells everybody to do that. For a moment, the AI gives me the feeling that it is channelling one of those theme-park fortune tellers. On first hearing, everything sounds so true and right. On second thought, you realise that its gnomic utterances mean much of what you want them to mean.
My hopes for life-extension lead me to The Longevity Show, a two-day event held at the end of June at Tobacco Dock in London. This is where it gets real. Forget about unaffordable longevity clinics, freaky billionaire mummies and California dreamers. This conference aims to be for longevity what a gun show is for gun nuts in the US—a place where the common woman can get her hands on the real tools of the trade.
The conference includes daily fitness classes, a “Monk Cold Plunge”, various testing and diagnostics services, and The Sanctuary, “a dedicated space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with yourself”. Practitioners offer for-a-fee tests on every health system imaginable. Activities include a longevity rave. The crowd is decidedly stylish and incredibly fit. The VIP room feels like a pricey health club only open to the beautiful.
The first speaker on the Headliner Stage is Rangan Chatterjee, a doctor and television presenter who hits the major themes in a manner that fully expresses the profound contradictions of the longevity movement. His patter about the shortcomings of our disease management system sparkles with serious, science-y language, served up with can-do prescriptives and a warm smile that promises to turn your life around right here, right now!
What follows is a series of presentations on major subdisciplines of the longevity trade. Medical directors walk us through the latest research on cellular health and microbiomes. Physical trainers abound with flashlight smiles and vitality. Sophie Bostock, perhaps best described as a sleep guru, reminds us that bedtime is the most important time of our lives. The data armies are out in force.
To judge from the crowds buzzing around the skincare exhibits, much of the interest in longevity is driven by a desire to look good. But what about the bits you can’t see in the mirror? I opt for a diagnostic session with Sens.ai, an outfit that works in partnership with the Buck Institute and other top-flight research establishments. Their setup, which includes a wearable headset—they call it a “wearable brain-age clock”—uses EEG (electroencephalogram) and other technologies to capture brain signals, before delivering the results. Any scepticism evaporates as the programme delivers a recognisable map of my mental strengths and weaknesses, including memory, attention, situational awareness, reactivity, and other measures. Did I mention distractibility? Brain fog? Fortunately the programme comes with recommended strategies for improvement.
The happiness trainers also get my attention. Carolyn Paul, EMEA chair of health at the global communications firm Edelman, presents research showing that the quality and quantity of your friendships strongly influence how long you live. Several speakers argue that time outdoors in nature is the key.
It all rings true. But it does make me wonder. The earnest, quasi-spiritual aspect of the event seems at times to have less to do with extending life than with coping with the inevitability of death. A wander through the exhibit hall takes me deeper into this strange mix of medical science, promise and hucksterism.
But the longevity industry remains silent about the single most important fact of longevity. Setting aside genetic factors, the single best predictor of how long you will live is how much money you have. If you want to live long, plan A should therefore be to get rich. This conference, I realise, is all about plan B. This supplement, that test or device or lifestyle hack—it’s the lower-rent version of the concierge service in Regent’s Park.
The frenetic pace of the conference leaves me a little fatigued and I decide to take a break. I meet up with friends at the pub, order a pint and try to explain what I learned. Eat your veg, they repeat back. Get some rest. Make time for yourself and your loved ones. This longevity business, I realise, isn’t so new after all. It’s not that different from what my grandmother used to say, she of the boiled sweets and the long life.
