How Far Would You Go to Live Longer?

Take dozens of supplements and teen transfusions? Extend menopause? Pay $75k for a gene-therapy shot? Live like a Bolivian villager? Artificially extending life isn't a fiction anymore.

So there’s this guy. He’s a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist. I don’t know him personally, but I know his kind, having covered California’s Silicon Valley as a news editor and having swum in its shark-infested waters as a failed entrepreneur myself. These mostly young bucks tended to self-obsession and callow machismo. They would say things like, “If you stop to eat lunch, you become lunch,” and “Sleep is a cousin of death,” as they worked all hours yet again.

Anyway, this particular guy made a killing when PayPal scooped up his company for a cool $800 million. Okay, good for him. One of his latest gigs, however, is what merits your attention, dear “Aging Graciously” reader. According to Fortune magazine, he’s turned himself into his own Next Big Thing. He calls it — or him — “Project Blueprint,” and it’s a plan with this ambitious goal: To reverse his age.

Not to just stop his biological clock, mind you, but to rewind it.

To hear him tell it, it’s working. At 45, he says he has the heart of 37-year-old. Impressive.

Then again, consider the costs. He spends $2 million a year on “Blueprint,” er, himself. He gets transfusions from his teenage son. He puts himself through more than 100 other daily protocols that also include choking down 61 supplements, dinner at 11:30 a.m. and bed by 8:30 p.m.

Whew. Good luck with that. When I told my pal the Winery Chieftain about this regimen, it took him all of two seconds to blurt, “It sounds like this guy is busier trying to extend his life instead of living it!”

Yet this is what it’s coming to. I’ve been watching developments and a mounting number of scientific and healthcare advances may allow many of us, even at our sunsets, to run our biological clocks ever longer and more slowly.

“Within the next ten years we’ll have the first approved drug that delays aging in humans,” predicts Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California. “Once this happens, I think the floodgates will open.”

—“The pill that can make us younger is only a decade away”

The Times of London

All of this begs a question: How far would you go to live longer?

For example, females, would you delay menopause if you could? Please, don’t think me rude by asking. Your ovaries have become a big target for aging research. Reason: They constitute the one human organ that ages faster than any other, and scientists see in them some of the secrets to why and how we age.

More good reasons and a fact of life: Once ovaries stop releasing important hormones biological aging speeds up. While women live longer than men as a rule, they suffer less healthy post-menopausal lives, often beset with various age-related afflictions such heart disease, autoimmune disorders, osteoporosis, and dementia.

The average age for menopause is 51. And there’s clear evidence that later menopause is better than a sooner one.

A 2021 study in the journal BMC Cardiovascular Disorders found that women who experienced menopause before age 50 had a higher risk of stroke and death. And last year, a meta-analysis that reviewed 22 studies concluded that later menopause was associated with a lower risk of dementia.

—”What If We Could Get Rid of Menopause?”

The Wall Street Journal

It appears that some pharmaceutical interventions to delay menopause are in the offing. Researchers at Northwestern University’s Center for Reproductive Science are looking into whether a drug already approved for treating pulmonary disease could be used to delay certain traits of ovarian aging, and, in so doing maintain hormone function longer. Ergo, better health outcomes for females.

What about paying $75,000 for an anti-aging shot?

Yep, one such treatment is already available from a company called BioViva, home address — and a lot else — unknown. It just so happens you can only get its injections by traveling to South America — beyond the reaches of America’s regulatory authorities. It’s a gene-based therapy. On the face of it, there appears to be some solid science. It’s been well-established by others our cells age because protective caps on our chromosomes called telomeres shorten. When they shorten too much, the cell can’t survive. It’s a fundamental mechanism of aging. What’s more, gene-therapies have a track record of curing some cancers.

The caution here, however, is that Patient Number One is the company’s founder and CEO. According to a story in Wired Magazine, she’s 52, and the company has issued a paper that claims she has a biological age of 25. Problem is BioViva hasn’t produced much evidence of efficacy, aside from a smattering of anecdotal results and the founder’s word. And who ever heard of biotech founder spinning a yarn that wound up pulling the wool over the eyes of regulators, investors, and the media. Oh wait, that would be Elizabeth Holmes, now serving an 11-year sentence for what she did at Theranos, her this-will-change-the-world (fake) blood-testing company.

Finally, to live longer, would you give up the good life and head for Bolivia’s outback?

According to yet another story in Wired, a Chapman University anthropologist has been working for years with the Tsimane and Moseten indigeous peoples in remote Bolivian villages.

His Eureka: In addition to having lower rates of heart disease, for example, it turns out the indigenous people end up with brains that shrink far less per decade than those of us who live in modern industrial societies — 2.3 and 2.8 percent for the Tsimane and Moseten, respectively, compared to 3.5 percent for industrialized populations. When they looked at the groups who reached their seventies, the differences nearly doubled.

Sad to tell you, folks, but our brains start shrinking at 40, and the atrophy is common to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.

What’s different about the premodern Bolivians, who live without running water and electricity? The Tsimane walk 17,000 steps a day, many of them in the hunt for their dietary staple, the pig-like peccary. They don’t retire. They take care of their grandchildren. In other words, they use up their calories. We don’t, and we end up paying a price in poorer cardiovascular health, shrinking brains and — yes you guessed it — diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, or so the Chapman anthropologist suggests.

To answer my own question, how far would I go? None of the above — if only because, surprise, I don’t have ovaries. I don’t want to spend my life living longer, I want to spend my life living. I don’t have $75,000 to spend on a shot, especially one that offers such scant evidence of working. (Oh, no refunds!) No, I don’t want to live in any part of Bolivia.

Then again, I’ve led a pretty lucky existence, one far more fortunate than I deserve. I’m enjoying retirement and my domestic life with the Beloved1 more than I ever could have imagined. Honestly, I don’t mind the thought of eventually making room for someone else.

What about you? Please comment below to share your thoughts.