HUBRIS AND HYPE
THE SEARCH FOR IMMORTALITY Emily K. Abel
Walking to the September 3 celebration of the Chinese military to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of living forever. Putin’s translator remarked, “Biotechnology is continuously developing” and then added, “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.” Xi responded, “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”
We know about this exchange because China’s state TV caught it on a hot mic and sent it to news outlets throughout the world. Although humans have tried to combat mortality ever since they learned of its inevitability, we can assume that many Americans dismissed those comments as examples of the hubris of Communist heads of state. (Trump appears to have limited his search for eternity to placing his name on buildings, golf courses, skating rinks, and possibly ballrooms and triumphal arches.) Trump has, however, surrounded himself with tech billionaires who not only entertain the same thoughts as Xi and Putin but also try to actualize them. The attendees at his inauguration included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman, all of whom have invested millions of dollars in research seeking a path to immortality, or at least a radical extension of the life span. Although Peter Thiel missed the inauguration, he was a major funder of Trump’s presidential campaign and is another critical supporter of longevity research. One of the recipients of his largesse is the Methusela Foundation, a non-profit based in Springfield, Virginia, that funds researchers trying to find a cure for aging and ultimately death. Its mission is “making 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
Billionaires seeking to invest in the longevity industry have many options to choose from. Seven hundred biotech companies with a combined value of $30 billion currently engage in research to extend the life-span. A very high proportion are in the US. Rather than concentrating on the specific diseases that cause death, the companies focus on the underlying mechanisms of aging. Many make extravagant claims about developing treatments to slow, stop, or even reverse the aging process. Several scientists, however, express caution. “There’s so much interest in aging,” remarked the biochemist and Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, “and there’s also so much hype.” Ramakrishnan’s 2024 book Why We Die/ argues that the new understanding of the biology of aging holds the promise of developing anti-aging treatments someday, but we cannot expect them to appear anytime soon. Every treatment that has been developed to extend life reduces the ability to fight infection. Other scientists point out that although a few animal studies of anti-aging remedies have shown remarkable results, we are very far from conducting clinical studies, and that although the human life-span has increased thirty years since 1900 as a result of public health reforms, it probably has reached the upper limit of possibility. Aleks Krotoski, a British broadcaster, writer, and academic, warns that because many of the anti-aging treatments under investigation rely on technology, they will change the very meaning of what it means to be human.
Rather than funding companies that seek to develop remedies for aging, some tech billionaires experiment on themselves. The most prominent biohacker is Bryan Johnson, a venture-capitalist who calls Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. his friend. Johnson leads a movement called “Don’t Die,” and he spends $2 million a year to obey that injunction himself. He infused himself with his teenage son’s blood plasma for six months before tweeting, “Discontinued therapy…no benefits detected.” Nevertheless, his daily regimen remains rigorous. Adhering to the algorithm devised by his thirty doctors to reduce his biological age from 46 to 18, he follows a strict vegan diet, eating a precise number of calories at certain times of day, wears glasses to block blue light two hours a day and a device on his penis at night to measure his nighttime erections, exercises an hour a day in addition to an intense workout three times a week, and goes to bed and wakes up at the same time each day. Despite warnings about the dangers of consuming large numbers of supplements, he swallows more than a hundred pills each day. In addition, he submits to various medical procedures, using MRIs, ultrasounds, and colonoscopies to test the results. “I’ve become the most measured person in history,” he told an interviewer. “My data is outputted and referenced to scientific data and a protocol is created, and I follow that protocol with perfection. My mind is not involved. My mind cannot look at a menu. It cannot peruse the pantry. It can’t participate in a spontaneous pizza party. ” Johnson’s assistant and disciple Kate Tollo acknowledges that she has sacrificed “all the [small] things I’ve come to cherish.”
Another option for those who have money to spend on ever-lasting life is to join one of the hundreds of US longevity clinics that have opened in the past decade. According to the Wall Street Journal, Health Extension in New York charges clients $250,000 a year for the “Superhuman” package, which includes biological age-testing, full-body scans, and plasma exchange. By that measure, Fountain Life, one of the most famous clinics, is a steal. For an annual fee of just $21,500, clients can purchase the APEX membership and receive concierge medicine and a wide assortment of diagnostic tests. Fountain Life’s founder is Peter Diamandis, who recently told an audience of 200 doctors and scientists that they will be able to have a limitless life within ten years: “It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem—and we’re going to be able to fix that!”
Are all the tests these clinics offer useful? Fred Pelzman, an internist and associate professor at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Science, thinks not. “Just last month,” he writes, “a patient brought me 10 pages of blood tests results, along with the results of their total body MRI, their fat/muscle/bone density composition test, their stress test, their CT angiogram, and their cardiac calcium score, as well as 24 pages of health advice and recommended supplements from the provider who’d gotten all of this testing.” Although Perlzman didn’t find much that was new in the advice, he also didn’t find much “that would hurt anybody.” The “massive battery” of test results from “longevity doctors,” however, raised “the possibility of things being found that were of no clinical significance and cause more psychological harm than benefit.”
For many years gerontologists have defined “successful aging” as maintaining good health throughout the later decades. Despite the social determinants of health, genetics, and the randomness of fate, we are expected to harness the resources and self-discipline required to avert disease and continue to flourish in our 70s, 80s, and 90s. Now the stakes are even higher—aging itself has become a personal failure.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, often guided by the tech billionaires who seek immortality, eviscerates the government programs that keep all of us healthy. The wealthiest Americans already live ten years longer than the poorest. If any of the life-extension plans come to fruition, the disparity will become astronomic.
SOURCES:
“Hot Mic Picks Up Putin and Xi Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality,” Reuters, September 3, 2025.
Peter Baker, “Trump’s Search for Eternity,” New York Times, October 30, 2025.
Venki Ramakrishnan, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality (Harper Collins, 2024).
“Why We Die—and How We Can Live Longer, with Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan,” April 2024,
https://news.uchicago.edu
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Tad Friend, “Life Longer and Prosper,” New Yorker, August 11, 2025.
Aleks Krotoski, The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life (Bodley Head, 2025).
S. Jay Olshansky, et al., “Implausibility of Radical Life Extension in the Twenty-first Century,” Nature Aging, November 2024.
Alex Janin, “Want Better Health and Status? For $250,000, Longevity Clinics Promise Both,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2025.
Ashlee Vance, “How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year,” Businessweek, January 30, 2023.
Charlotte Alter, “The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever,” Time, September 30, 2023.
Ashwin Rodrigues, “A Plea from Doctors: Cool It on the Supplements,” New York Times, July 10, 2025.
Jonathan Wosen, “Wealthy Nations Might Be Reaching a Life Expectancy Limit, Study Suggests—at Least for Now,” Statnews, July 10, 2024.
Jason Mast, “No More ‘Playing God’: How the Longevity Field Is Trying to Recast Its Work as Serious Science,” Statnews, January 30, 2023.
Joe Kloc, “What Have We Learned from Centuries of Chasing Immortality?” New York Times, January 18, 2025.
Methuselah Foundation, “Making 90 the New 50 by 2030,” www.mfoundation.org.
Berit Brogaard, “The Quest for Immortality: What Do Scientists Say?” Psychology Today, November 15, 2025.
Amy Ermann, “Immortality at a Price: How the Promise of Delaying Death Has Become a Consumer Marketing Bonanza,” The Conversation, June 8, 2025.
Fred Pelzman, “Longevity Forever! What Should We Do with the Outside Test Results Patients Bring Us from Longevity Doctors?” MedPage Today, December 15, 2025.
Emily K. Abel is Professor Emerita at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her most recent book is Gluten Free for Life: Celiac Disease, Medical Recognition, and the Food Industry (New York University Press, 2025).