Living beyond 100: We’ve officially entered the geroscience era
The Fountain, produced by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel, about a man searching for everlasting youth, had this chilling dialogue: “Death is a disease, it’s like any other. And there’s a cure. A cure—and I will find it." No other words are more apt than this film dialogue to describe this moment in human endeavour when Death is the unparalleled villain.
Movies often exaggerate or distort reality. Aronofsky, known for a zany brand of provocative storytelling, last year directed a docuseries for National Geographic that takes the death cure idea to test. Hollywood actor Chris Hemsworth plunges into Arctic waters in Limitless, dangles a thousand feet over a canyon while climbing a rope, swims in a fjord’s 36-degree water, fasts for four days, and prepares for his own eventual death—all in the pursuit of living long.
It is a hard show to watch. The action is riveting, the stunts seem pointless. The “blood boy" will probably be a movie character soon, too.
In 2017, a 33-year-old doctor named Jesse Karmazin started Ambrosia in Monterey, California, which was offering teen plasma to older people. After an FDA warning on its apocryphal, unethical nature, Ambrosia folded up in 2019. But demands continued, and with Johnson’s endorsement, the practice will likely again become popular.
In the epilogue of his staggering tome on the history, biology and mystery of the cell,The Song of the Cell, Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee dwells briefly on the moral framework that binds start-ups like Ambrosia. Mukherjee writes that Ambrosia, “supposedly rejuvenates the creaking but wealthy, shrivelling bodies of ageing billionaires". The mechanics of the plasma transfer process are elitist and unsavoury—and an extreme outcome of
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