Tech billionaires claim we can 'hack' ageing. Photo / Getty Images
The longevity business is booming and for high society, the quest for eternal life has become an expensive hobby
Automatic doors open on to a cavernous lobby that could double as a spaceship. Reclining on white leather chairs are several young-looking men, glow-in-the dark intravenous drips attached to their arms.
In one corner sits a man wearing what looks like a scuba mask attached to a computer. Machines beep. Doctors in lab coats murmur.
This is Hum2n in Chelsea, one of London’s first biohacking centres, which offers cutting-edge treatments in the booming longevity business. That scuba mask is actually a ReOxy device that mimics low oxygen conditions to stimulate lung and heart performance as well as souping up your metabolism. At the helm is Dr Mohammed Enayat, a supreme biohacker himself who has a staff of 28 and plans to open more clinics in London and Saudi Arabia.
The 40-year-old doctor practises what he preaches, travelling the globe trying out treatments himself before giving them to patients. He has twice-monthly IV drips of NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which targets ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the cell’s store of energy. He also has regular injections of Cerebrolysin, a mixture of peptides derived from pig brains, for his brain health, and epitalon to stimulate his glands to support stem-cell production. He detoxes using intravenous ozone. And he travels to California for stem-cell-derived exosome infusions. ‘I’m doing it for short, medium and long-term vitality,’ he says, ‘for energy, mood, and to prevent disease progression – in short, health span.’
In 2025 the pressing question in Silicon Valley and among the upper echelons of British male society is no longer, ‘Who am I?’ Instead they’re asking, ‘How can I become immortal?’ Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, the pop star of the longevity world, recently addressed the topic on X. ‘If you turned 100 today and felt like you do now, would you want to die? Of course not. So asking how long you want to live is pointless. The right question is, “When do you want to get frail and sick?”’
Male baby boomers watched their parents die and didn’t like what they saw. This is motivating them to take their future health into their hands. I have noticed in my own circles that those willing to spend thousands on biohacking technology, and the kit that goes with it, are men.
Rich men, I should add, who can afford to undertake this quest for the fountain of youth, and assume the world will want them around for another 100 years. The women I know who have the means to seek eternal life don’t. They’re worried about being stuck as carers for their antique men, or running around, post-menopausal and wrinkled, after their great-great-grandchildren. Then there’s the economics of it all. If we live for more than a century, who’s going to pay for it? Certainly not our children. And don’t count on investments holding up.
For the moment, though, such considerations are not on the minds of the billionaires pioneering research into longevity. Never mind superyachts, ageing well is set to become the world’s most expensive hobby. The entrepreneur Bryan Johnson spends $2 million a year on living longer, while maintaining that he’s investing ‘for science’. Silicon Valley, and its UK outposts, is ploughing billions into the field.
The biggest spender is OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who in 2022 invested £180 million ($405m) in Retro Biosciences, a start-up with the stated aim of adding 10 years to a healthy human lifespan. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has put $3.5 million into the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to make 90 the new 50 by 2030. Thiel has claimed it will be possible to ‘reverse all human ailments in the same way we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.’ Also on the longevity bandwagon are Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, all of whom have invested millions into companies such as Altos, whose Cambridge lab aims to ‘reverse disease and injury’.
Slapping the word ‘longevity’ on a package can sell anything from protein powders to cosmetics and supplements, hotel spa programmes, gym memberships and even fancy concierge services. One of these, Knightsbridge Circle, has an affiliation with a longevity clinic, Eterna Health, which advertises cell and gene therapy on its website. Netflix devoted a documentary to Johnson, whose activities have included harvesting his own son’s blood to inject into himself in the name of immortality – or at least the supplements brand, Blueprint, he now touts. Pale and slim with long hair and the air of a guru, Johnson, 47, is divorced and spends much of his time alone indoors, attached to a machine.
This seems to fly in the face of the fact that ‘health span’ is predicated on the strength of our familial relationships. Adam Rutherford, a British geneticist, recently tweeted that Johnson ‘is going to get in serious medical trouble quite soon’, because, despite his claims, he is ‘lite’ on scientific evidence.
Nevertheless, according to Allied Market Research, the total value of anti-senescence therapies worldwide will grow from $25.1 billion in 2020 to $44.2 billion by 2030. Ever since Japanese scientist Dr Shinya Yamanaka identified four key genes in mice that could be reprogrammed to transform them back into their younger, healthier selves (for which he received a Nobel Prize in 2012), we’ve been waiting for similar developments in human medicine. But despite the promises, we haven’t yet been able to turn the clock back. Even the mice from Yamanaka’s initial experiments developed embryonic tumours and that was that. He’s since tweaked the genetic cocktail but so far no news flashes.
Dr Enayat has tried many longevity treatments, including rapamycin, which is normally used in liver-transplant patients to suppress the immune system. Off-label (used for a purpose it wasn’t designed for) it has been shown to extend the life of fruit flies and worms by 20 per cent. Some American vets give it to elderly dogs. Stem cells may offer hope, but unregulated stem-cell treatments can go very wrong. In 2017 elderly patients in Florida went blind after undergoing stem-cell therapy in a private longevity clinic.
Currently, the only proof of the longevity pudding is how you feel. Simon Ingram, a 70-year-old financier based in Switzerland, is one of Dr Enayat’s patients. Before he started the longevity programme last year, he was struggling to work out because of low energy levels, and he slept badly. He wanted some professional guidance.
Since starting at Hum2n, Ingrams has stopped drinking and cleaned up his diet (eating mostly superfoods), and has lost weight and gained muscle. He works out six days a week. ‘My strength has increased by 20 per cent,’ he says. ‘I now have enough energy to work out in the morning then play golf in the afternoon.’
Ingram visits the clinic once a month for three days for an NAD IV drip, ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, cryotherapy, time in the ice closet, EmSculpt (to build muscle) and EmSella (for pelvic-floor strengthening) as well as ReOxy. He estimates that he spends £20,000 ($44,970) a year on all his treatments. ‘My friends think I’m mad, that I always take things too far,’ he admits. But as well as the gains in strength and fitness, he no longer needs to take medication for a long-term digestive issue. He plans to try peptides next.
These days, leading experts in longevity medicine are looking at five specific areas. These are epigenetics, which is how your behaviour and environment change how your genes work; telomeres, the DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes, which shorten with age; senescence and cellular repair, which involves understanding why cells go rogue and how to stop it happening; stem cells, and anti-ageing regenerative medicine. The last of these involves five-hour-long NAD drips to repair DNA damage and increase energy; metabolic manipulation with Ozempic, and intermittent fasts, and all the hi-tech stuff such as wearable tech that gives instant feedback as to the state of your various organs.
The current fad in longevity circles is to state your biological age (as gauged by the GlycanAge test, which measures your cellular levels of chronic inflammation), rather than your actual date of birth. Is this popularity related to the fact that everyone, including me, seems to notch up a GlycanAge that’s 10 years less than their birth certificate proclaims? This had the inevitable consequence of leading Dutch positivity coach Emile Ratelband, at 69, to attempt to have his passport age adjusted downwards to 49, to reflect the age he felt himself to be, to get better Tinder dates. He failed.
Diet, exercise (which promotes stem-cell creation), sleep (how we renew and detox), nutrition and, most of all, human interactions, are key to ‘health span’. Something as simple as a flu jab can influence cells, says Dr Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer of the private hospital company Cleveland Clinic. ‘The main thing to understand about rebooting your life is that you are a genetic engineer,’ he says. Meditation alone can elongate telomeres and thus slow down ageing. So may inhaling menthol, drinking black coffee, wearing a hearing aid to stay connected, and lashings of virgin olive oil. Genes account for only 25 per cent of how we age. ‘The rest is environment and lifestyle,’ says Dr Thomas Perls of Boston University. ‘Though this flips on its head as one approaches the age of 100.’
Clinique La Prairie (CLP) in Montreux, overlooking Lake Geneva, is where the rich, the famous, and the royal come for the most advanced anti-ageing procedures in Europe under the eye of 50 medical specialists.
The Swiss health resort has recently thrown itself big time into the longevity business, with plans to open 10 new resorts and 40 ‘hubs’ worldwide. John Cleese has been coming here every 12 to 18 months for the past two decades to buy himself some extra years. Its big sell is the seven-day ‘revitalisation’ programme, which relies on a secret, patented CLP Extract formula, first created in 1931.
Part of the CLP programme is epigenetic testing. This is a new way of pinpointing biological age and specific areas that can be targeted to reduce it. In my case, cutting back on alcohol could dramatically change my age, the doctor told me. The test is so sensitive it even detected that I had recently been to India by picking up certain pollutants. The clinic also tests bloods and stools, and screens for heavy metals in the body using a new device, the OligoScan.
In order to prepare the body for the mysterious CLP Extract (which they combine with immunostimulants), guests are given multiple injections of glutathione (an antioxidant), as well as a dose of an immunomodulating bacteria along with a potent drink derived from grapes for maximum oxygen uptake in the small blood vessels. Though sadly, it’s not wine. None of these steps can be skipped or fiddled or the magic won’t work. On top of that is the anti-inflammatory plant-based diet, and treatments including cryotherapy, sound therapy and infratherapy in a tunnel-like sauna that makes you sweat out impurities from deep within. I could see grey flecks on the towels I used after the sauna. They were either from the pollution that I was sweating out, or perhaps my body was saying goodbye to the cadmium that can be found in even the most expensive chocolates.
The youthful-looking Dr Adrian Heini oversees the revitalisation programme, which can cost upwards of £25,000 ($56,000) for the week. He won’t reveal what goes into the age-reversing potion but says, ‘We prefer to keep it natural.’ Guests who come annually report feeling considerably more energetic and suffering from fewer colds. Many say they never caught Covid. An attendant told me that most clients used to be older men, but now there are young ones too. And women as well as men. Those I saw did not fraternise – tables are spread far apart in the dining room – but they ranged in age from 20s to 80s. CLP recently launched a supplement version of the age reversal formula called Age-Defy which retails for £655 ($1470) for a two-month supply. It claims to combat oxidative stress, targets telomeres and includes many popular anti-senescent agents such as the plant extract fisetin, as well as a proprietary antioxidant formula.
The thing about longevity is that you have to buy into the promise. Proof is thin on the ground – how can we know if someone made it to age 90 because of NAD drips rather than lucky genes? And what if all the biological tweaks make no difference at all, or even speed up cancer, which is a genuine risk of some longevity treatments?
But there are profits to be made. Newly opened in Marylebone, Clarify Clinic offers to rid your blood of all microplastics, chemicals and inflammatory cytokines using a process called apheresis – and you won’t get much change from £10,000 ($22,480). I know long-Covid sufferers who have spent £50,000 ($112,400) and more on this treatment abroad, only to get sicker. Henry S Lodge, the co-author of the best-selling Younger Next Year (2004), died of cancer aged 58.
An early death is something many anti-ageing experts have in common.
Whenever we get excited about the latest age-cracking revelation, someone comes along and sticks a pin in it. Take the ‘blue zones’ research, which looked at lifestyles in relatively poor areas of Sardinia, Okinawa and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, where people appeared to live to extreme old age. The study concluded that to make it to 110 you have to eat algae, chat in cafés and walk 20 miles (32km) a day (I paraphrase). However, the methodology of the research was debunked when separate researchers found that almost all the centenarians involved were in fact long dead and their relatives pretended they were still alive to keep collecting their pensions. It is, I suppose, one form of immortality. Dan Buettner, the author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer, nevertheless now runs a mini empire of which the Blue Zones Kitchen ready-meal range (Heirloom Rice Bowl, Peach Pecan Steel Cut Oatmeal…) is one manifestation.
We will crack the ageing code, or some of it at least, but for now we should curb our enthusiasm, says Dr William Mair, director of the Harvard TH Chan School Aging Initiative. ‘There are increasing numbers of health influencers who have almost an evangelical following and make bold statements about how to live longer, [using] for example, ice therapy, heat shock, and so on,’ he recently wrote in a Harvard publication. ‘What they are doing is extrapolating data – from simpler organisms, small sample studies, and non-causal correlative studies – and telling people it’s the truth. That’s not how the scientific process works.’ When I asked him if humans will be able to live to 300 one day, he replied, ‘I don’t know, yet. But that’s not going to get me a lot of hits on TikTok, is it?
New York Times: You can get the same workout and build strength without heavy equipment.