No more ‘playing God’: How the longevity field is trying to recast its work as serious science
“Why is it in popular culture, if you want to live forever, you are evil and you want to kill babies on the side?” says Martin Borch Jensen.
It’s fast approaching 10 p.m. on the first night of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and among a couple stragglers at a dinner for longevity CEOs, scientists, and investors, the conversation has turned from the practical or merely social to the philosophical.
It’s fast approaching 10 p.m. on the first night of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and among a couple stragglers at a dinner for longevity CEOs, scientists, and investors, the conversation has turned from the practical or merely social to the philosophical.
Borch Jensen, co-founder and CSO of anti-aging gene therapy startup Gordian, and Daisy Robinton, CEO and co-founder of Oviva, a biotech working to prevent ovarian aging, toss around theories as ice cream melts into leftover cobbler saucers on the bar behind them. Borch Jensen points to Harry Potter, where Voldemort divides his soul into pieces and hides each bit…
…Scientists and biotech executives hoping to extend human lifespan have long had a “story” problem. It’s not just “Altered Carbon” or “In Time,” where immortality is a plaything of the ultra-wealthy. Even nonfiction headlines center on billionaires hoping to live forever, sometimes by grisly, vaguely parasitic means: Blood transfusions from the young to the old, for example.
Rather than a serious scientific field, longevity has been treated as a hybrid vice: An unholy graft of Icarian hubris and robber baron rapaciousness. Or merely as a time-honored scam. Millenia before you could buy telomerase supplements on Amazon or elixirs of life from a 19th-century snake oil salesman, the Greek historian Herodotus was burnishing his popularity with the first tales of the Fountain of Youth.
Rather than talk about an aging drug, it’s “easier to think about a therapeutic area,” said Kristen Fortney, CEO of BioAge, which has raised $127 million from investors to target muscle, brain and immune aging. “It’s easier to say ‘you have a drug approved for x indication, we have another drug that is going after the same indication with a new target.’ And it’s just an easier model to understand.”
