Longevity might still be the hottest industry in Silicon Valley — with tech titans pouring millions of dollars into life extension, often using themselves as guinea pigs. But where US cities like LA and New York have been hotspots for the “live longer” industry, London is fast catching up. The capital is rapidly making a name for itself as a global hub for innovation in the field, thanks to its concentration of scientific expertise and high-net-worth individuals. You’ll probably have noticed the number of clinics, spas and gyms providing longevity packages that have popped up around the city — offering, in some shape or form, to make you feel and look younger. Read our guide to the hottest longevity-focused London health spas, here.
As Dr Richard Siow, director of ageing research at King’s College London, puts it: “Longevity is not extending our existence, but it’s trying to maintain wellbeing and prevent age-related conditions. It’s how we can age as healthily as possible to whatever number we reach.”
But what is the real aim? Is it to extend our lives and live to 150? Look to the biohacking billionaires who remain the recognisable faces of the longevity movement. Think Bryan Johnson, the founder of the Don’t Die “religion” and star of a Netflix documentary, who spends $2 million a year on trying to stay young, including blood plasma transfusions from his teenage son. He claims that for every 12 months, he now only ages seven and a half.
Or the world’s second richest man, Larry Ellison (who, it has to be said, looks remarkable at 81), who has donated more than $330 million to conquering age-related disease. While XPrize founder Peter Diamandis — who is 64, but claims to have a biological age of 39 — recently launched the Healthspan Prize, a $101 million competition challenging scientists to turn back the clock two decades. Of course, he also has his own chain of longevity centres for high net-worth clients, called Fountain Life.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all reportedly invested in biotech companies — from Altos Labs, which is racing to reverse ageing by rejuvenating human cells, to Retro Biosciences, a start-up which wants to add a decade to our lives through stem cell technology and which Altman has a $180 million stake in. Google even has its own anti-ageing project, Calico.
‘Healthspan’ vs ‘lifespan’
All of this tech bro activity seems to echo Yuval Noah Harari’s idea in his 2015 book, Homo Deus, that super-longevity will be the preserve of elites who can afford to upgrade themselves, using biotechnology and genetic engineering. But what is the technology that they are counting on?
There is research going on, in labs the world over, but little of it has been tested on humans and clinical trials are limited. However, the current list of potential “breakthroughs” that have been made is already sizeable. There are NAD+ supplements that may, or may not, replace the energy enzymes we lose through ageing, or treatments to extend telomeres (the caps on the end of DNA strands that shrink with age). Immunosuppressants such as rapamycin could help prevent age-related disease, while injecting peptides (molecules that make sure our bodies work well at a cellular level) is said to promote tissue repair, muscle growth and fat loss. Then there are nanorobots that can monitor and repair our blood, hormones, tissues and organs from within. Cutting-edge treatments from autohaemotherapy to cryotherapy and plasma therapy (some more controversial than others) are being studied for their potential benefits.
Weight-loss injections such as Mounjaro could also be already forming an important part of the longevity puzzle. Professor John Deanfield, one of Britain’s leading medics and a cardiologist at University College London, has said that the drugs can affect the biology of diseases of ageing, with evidence suggesting they may reduce the risk of cancer as well as heart, liver and kidney disease. Trials are ongoing into their effect on dementia but, Deanfield has said, these drugs may treat “the ageing problem, the longevity issue”.
Will these developments, which are predominantly the preserve of the few, leave “the many” drastically behind? The experts think not. At some level, many of us are already at it, whether we have a rigorous anti-ageing skincare routine, take collagen powders or track our VO2 max and cardiovascular age (9.5 years below my actual, thanks for asking) on our Oura rings. Thousands of people buy supplements offering longevity benefits — Johnson has his own called Blueprint, and even Martha Stewart is getting in on the game, with a longevity skincare range, Elm Biosciences, out next month. Little wonder that Allied Market Research has estimated the value of the global longevity market will reach $44.2 billion by 2030.
“It’s become a much bigger market than just the top one per cent going to clinics like ours,” says Kate Woolhouse, CEO of the exclusive
Hooke longevity clinic in London’s Mayfair, which offers its clients the chance to “live a longer, happier and healthier life” for £54,000 a year for top-tier membership.
When we talk about “longevity”, what do most of us actually mean? Not everyone feels the need to live to 150, but they would like to ensure that they live to 100 in good health. This is “healthspan” rather than “lifespan”: simply, we want to feel good (and look good) for as long as possible, hopefully adding a few years to our lives in the process, rather than break records for old age. It’s about being fit enough to trek to Everest base camp aged 75, not being hooked up to machines until we’re 250 or preserved in suspended animation à la Mel Gibson in Forever Young.
Woolhouse explains that this is where the market is really expanding. “There’s more available now, at lower price points, but whether they’re entirely legitimate or data-backed varies,” she says. “There are all sorts of things being attributed to longevity that may, or may not, actually be associated with lifespan or healthspan. You’re going to end up with lots of confused people out there who are popping supplements that aren’t doing anything and taking tests which are giving them no meaningful interventions.”
None of the experts I speak to promises to take years off my life and few people, anywhere, claim that anything approaching immortality is on the cards. Except perhaps Aubrey de Grey, the controversial and often polarising British gerontologist, who tells me over Zoom from California that he holds fast to his belief that humans will live to be 1,000 years old. His theory, called “longevity escape velocity”, predicts that we will reach a moment where advancements in extending the human lifespan will come thick and fast enough to stop time catching up with us.
“I talk about radical increases in both
healthy and total longevity, and I think we are within striking distance of achieving it,” he says. “I estimate at the moment that we should be
able to get there before the end of the 2030s, so 12 to 15 years from now. There’s a 50 per cent chance of that.
“People make up all manner of stupid excuses to try to pretend that ageing is some kind of blessing in disguise. Saying, ‘wouldn’t dictators live forever?’ And ‘where will we put all the people and how will we pay the pensions?’ They want to continue to put ageing out of their minds and get on with their miserably short lives because they’re terrified of getting their hopes up.”
The race to 150
So can we get our hopes up? After all, we’ve more than doubled global life expectancy since 1900, when it was 32, to 73 in 2024.
Has anything been definitively proven to work? No, or more people would be doing it. It does, however, seem like it may be imminent.
Dr Oliver Zolman says nanorobots could be as little as five years away. Until last year, the 31-year-old Briton was Bryan Johnson’s longtime longevity doctor, but now tells me that he rejects “one hundred per cent” the work they did together.
Of the Silicon Valley set, he said: “A lot of these people do biohacking stuff, and it’s not very evidence-based, and they don’t really have rational risk taking or scientific backgrounds.”
Zolman is in the process of convening a panel of scientists to work out how they can accurately measure the biological age of our organs and predict who might be the first person to live to 150. I tell him that I have a nine-month-old son — what might be a reasonable life expectancy for him? “It could be an indefinite lifespan situation. I think it’s possible,” he says. “There’s so much financial incentive to make it happen — it’s not a zero per cent chance.”
Others are more conservative. “There needs to be much more research to show that a supplement or a drug or any genetic intervention is actually going to make a difference,” says Siow.
“I believe we can reach 100 but we’re not doing ourselves any favours because of the lifestyles we live. It all impacts how we age and how quickly we pick up age-related conditions,” he says. “But we can take very simple steps to try and mitigate the effects of ageing without turning into Bryan Johnson. We can sleep more. We can have fewer high-sugar drinks. We can breathe healthier air. We can take a few more steps, we can drink a little less. We can look after our mental health. All of that is manageable and will make a difference.”
Zolman is prepared to go further. “If everyone followed that stuff perfectly? The life expectancy in the UK would be 90 on average, rather than 80,” he says. “But it’s an ongoing battle with biology. Even if you cure heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer, you only extend health and lifespan by around 10 years. So you need therapies which target the fundamental ageing process across many other different organs. Ageing is inevitable, but it’s also not impossible to reverse and slow.”
If everyone slept more, had fewer high-sugar drinks and breathed healthier air, the life expectancy would be 90 on average, not 150
Which begs the question: should we? After all, getting older by itself isn’t a disease. And what are the implications for society of attaining such god-like abilities? Harari writes about deepening inequality, with a superhuman strata of society and a “useless class” who are left behind by not being able to access technological progress. Not to mention there’s a chance that it might not make us happy, after all.
“Does everyone want to undergo gene therapy and is it sustainable?” asks Siow. “Bryan Johnson may be able to afford it, but probably you and I can’t. Or maybe we don’t want to — we don’t know what the safety risks are.”
The ethical case for living longer and healthier
Woolhouse thinks it is an “ethical duty” to extend our healthspan. “Absolutely, we should be striving to be healthier for longer and to live longer, as long as we’re being productive with it,” she says. “It’s for the greater good, because what’s happening at the moment is people are ageing, but they’re being unwell, so they become a huge burden on society and the medical system.”
There’s another obvious tension: that while some of us might be wary of trying to become biologically younger, many of us want to look younger. According to a recent British Beauty Council report, the beauty industry is growing four times faster than the wider economy, mostly down to cosmetic procedures and tweakments. It’s unlikely, should we live to 150 in the future, that we’d actually want to look it, too.
“There’s a very strong correlation with how healthy you are and how young you look,” says Woolhouse. “The beauty industry is quickly integrating itself with the longevity movement and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think if you probe people about why they want longevity, for a lot of them there’s a huge aesthetic element.”
Which, a cynic might suggest, could go some way to explaining why those Silicon Valley biohackers are suspiciously smooth-skinned, as well as — they say — biologically younger than their years. Interestingly, though, none of the experts I speak to think the first person to live to 150 will come from their corner of California.
“I hope not,” says Zolman. “Hopefully it’ll just be a nice, friendly Italian grandma.”
