The Immortality Hype
It’d be easy to miss the unobtrusive brown door to Joon Yun’s second floor office, tucked away next to a dry cleaners and a hair salon in downtown Palo Alto, California. But the address itself speaks loud enough.
Four-hundred-seventy University Avenue is located in the heart of a neighborhood that holds a special place in the lore of Silicon Valley start-up culture. A few minutes’ walk away are the early homes of PayPal, Facebook, and Google. Yet the early ambitions of these famous companies are modest when compared to the ideas I’ve come to discuss with Yun.
I’ve been led here by Sonia Arrison, a Silicon Valley local and author of 100-Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith. Arrison has agreed to show me around her strange Californian world, populated with very wealthy, very smart dreamers, who share her certainty that a longevity revolution is on its way. We’ve arrived on Yun’s doorstep to learn how and why he, along with a small group of big power players, plan to “cure” aging and extend human health span—and possibly even human life—by decades, if not centuries.
For Yun, a dapper, 40-something physician and prominent Silicon Valley money manager, the origins of his quixotic dream date back to his time as an undergrad at Harvard University.
“I essentially made a wager to myself that aging is a code,” Yun explains to me from across a shiny conference table. “If aging is a code, that code could be cracked and hacked. The current system in healthcare is a whack-a-mole of your symptoms until you die. It addresses the diseases of aging, but not curing the underlying process behind aging itself. The healthcare system is doing a good job of helping people live longer and stronger lives, but aging is still a terminal condition.”
In 2014, Yun created the Race Against Time Foundation and Palo Alto Prize, which will award $1 million to a team that can demonstrate the capacity to mitigate aging by, among other things, extending the life of a mammal by 50 percent.
“You need people to do incremental science and you need people to do long-shots,” Yun says. “I believe it’s inevitable we’re going to solve aging at some point.”
Faith that science will conquer aging is common in Silicon Valley these days. The language Yun uses to explain his dream—especially the use of the word “cure”—makes traditional researchers in the field of aging cringe. But few are complaining about the interest of the big-spending Silicon Valley crowd. In recent years, public institutions like the National Institutes of Health have been slow to commit any more than a token of their overall budgets to aging research. It is the private funders with big dreams who are galvanizing the field.
The Ellison Medical Foundation has spent nearly $400 million on longevity research. Oracle founder Ellison told
