Is Jeff Bezos on a journey to achieving immortality?

HOW MUCH CAN YOU PAY TO LIVE FOREVER?

That is the biggest question that has ever faced mankind, the desire to live forever without the cells and organs being shutdown as a result of age. What if at a price, technology can be invented which work uniquely on the cells making them to revive themselves in the process of aging or even rebuild themselves, the effect if this possibility can be achieved would definitely be mind buzzing. There will no longer be old age and grey hairs, the skin will not be shrinking anymore hence making it a little bit of an uphill task to differentiate between a fifty seven year old man and a 19 year old teenager.

It is not a story that is totally new that man has been fighting for long to find a back loop, a means of defeating mortality and death, the modern day has seen the advent of a life supporting machine which has the propensity of sustaining human beings who are almost at the door of death. The instinctive desire of man to achieve life longevity can be dated back to many centuries ago. I think we should go down a bit to memory lane to track man’s quest for immortality.

In AD 361, Emperor Mu of the Eastern Jin dynasty of China died but unfortunately he had not a single heir, so the mantle of leadership fell luckily to his cousin Sima Pi. Sima Pi was enthroned as the new ruler and subsequently he started receiving the title of Emperor Ai. Sima Pi so much believed in Daoist spiritual philosophy which happened to be one of the most ancient in the world, The young emperor was so dogged in the belief of immortality and this transcended to more like an obsession. Emperor Sima Pi he employed the services of magicians to develop a chemical formula that would make him immortal thus living without aging or dying. In 364, the magicians gave the obsessed Emperror the result, the “pill of immortality,” and the emperor out of excitement never thought twice before ingesting the pill. 

After taking the pill, Emperor Ai became seriously ill, so he had to leave his position as ruler after only three years on the throne. In a great irony, Sima Pi finally died in 365, at the young age of 24. His obsession with living eternally ended up killing him before his time. As he also died without leaving heirs to the throne, his brother Sima Yi became the new emperor of the Jin dynasty.

Elizabeth Parrish is the founder of an American biotech company called BioViva Sciences. One of the purposes of this company is to extend the life expectancy of human beings through gene therapy. This revolutionary technique is based on modifying the DNA of a person with advanced programs and then reimplanting the modified genes into the patient. Over time, these genetic changes spread through the body of the person and begin to produce effects. And one of the objectives of these procedures is to reverse our biological age—that is, to stop human aging.

How could such a thing be achieved? It happens that the DNA packed in chromosomes is protected by molecular structures called telomeres. As time passes and the cells continue to multiply, the telomeres shorten and thus leave the DNA more vulnerable to damage. As a result of telomere shortening, cells can only divide so many times and will ultimately die, which, in simple words, causes our aging. This process also increases the risk of suffering from multiple diseases, including cancer. So during a secret procedure in 2015, Parrish decided to inject a dose of enzymes that lengthen the telomeres in multiple areas of her body. She was the first person to try such treatment.

Before the procedure, it was estimated that Parrish, 44 at the time of the experiment, had a higher biological age of 65 years. Six months after the gene therapy, her biological age was incredibly lowered to 45 years. And in 2018, without having gone through any other similar intervention after that, Parrish had rejuvenated on a cellular level to an age of about 30 years. Several experts have raised doubts about the risks of this procedure, but the results of the treatment at the very least seem to have been scientifically proven. So Elizabeth Parrish is probably. 

The list of people who tried to conquer death happens to be inexhaustible even the Egyptians invented embalming which is the treatment of a dead body so as to sterilize it or to protect it from decay, also cryonics defined as the practice or technique of deep-freezing the bodies of people who have just died, in the hope that scientific advances may allow them to be revived in the future.

As unfortunate as it is, so far none of these men and women were able to achieve the task of immortality in the past. This adventure we thought have died in the centuries have been revived again, but this time by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The battle in the Silicon valley is getting tougher, the introduction of Metaverse and Ray-Ban stories by facebook, The giant himself Eleon Musk wondering the world with electric cars, space gadgets and space travels but you can agree with me that none of these is more interesting than a technology that can conquer morality; this is beyond Artificial intelligence, far much above Internet, it is altogether a very new dimension.

Jeff Bezos; who recently turned 58 years on the twelfth of January. Perhaps is tired of seeing wrinkles in his body hence he had taken a very strange step to rid his life of those wrinkles and diseases that accompany aging. 

The Amazon founder Who happens to be among the leading name in the silicon valley is upping his game in a desire to achieve the unachievable, he is currently gathering a squad of sort after scientist in a run to achieve his long term desire which is the technology of immortality.

Of recent the Amazon Billionaire has decided to assign large portion of his wealth in an anti-aging startup dubbed Alto Labs. 

MEET THE BIG NAMES IN THE IMMORTALITY DEVELOPMENT TEAM

This program has recently hired the services of 

1. Hal V Barron: Hal Baron born in 1962 is an American clinical-Scientist and drug developer who has previously served as chief scientific officer at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Before then, he was the president of research and development at Calico. He has also served as executive vice president, head of global productive development and chief medical officer of Hoffman-La Roche. Hal V Barron will be heading the Alto Lab.

2. Dr. Shinya Yamanaka: The Doctor born in September 4, 1962 is a Japanese stem cell researcher and winner of 2021 Nobel prize in medicine in his work on stem cell research. He serves as the director of Center for IPS Cell (Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and application and a professor in the institute of Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone institutes in San Francisco, California. He is also a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell research ( ISSCR)

3. Jennifer Doudna: Born in February 19, 1964 is an American Biochemist who has done pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. she received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, “for the development of a method for gnome editing”

Just the dream of this has attracted funding, so it I s crystal clear that many people are not yet ready to leave this world as dead men. Recently the Jeff Bezos startup has announced that it has secured more than $3 billion in funding at launch.

MEET ANOTHER INVESTOR

The whole thing gets more fascinating knowing that the Boss Billionaire Bezos is not the only one investing in this anti-aging technology. The chase to bring this dream to reality is also assisted by

Yuri Borisovich Milner: Born eleventh of November 1961 is an Entrepreneur with Russian-Israeli origin, venture capitalist and a physicist. Milner is often referred to Russia’s most influential information technology investor. He is venture capitalist founder of Digital Sky Technologies and DST Global. He’s also an investor in Facebook, Stripe, Twitter, Flipkart, Spotify, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Whatsapp, Wish and many others. This wealthy investor currently is also pitching in to help develop anti-aging technology.

At the startup’s core is their mission of achieving biological reprogramming. This is a method of essentially rejuvenating cells after they’ve matured. it functions through “adding proteins to a cell which essentially instruct it to revert to a stem-like state” this explanation was given by MIT tech Review. Shinya Yamanaka earned a Nobel Prize in 2012 for demonstrating this technique in mice. In theory, the cells could then do things like repair your body as it ages and even cure age-related diseases like dementia. The Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka luckily happens to be a part of Altos Labs and the chairperson in its scientific advisory board. 

Many do consider this as another mythical adventure, some say it’s unreasonable, while a group of religious people will call it an act of challenging God. But to be sincere, these things and worse must have been said when the idea of inventing an airplane, electricity and spaceship came in view. Nobody should count out the possibility of achieving the impossible in this age when we wake up each day to see a new wonder.

But it is difficult to answer the question of the achievability of immortality but one very thing is certain; Just the passage of time will announce if this venture backed by the world richest billionaires can actually help us stay young forever. Nonetheless, if they don’t succeed then we can all agree that even the whole money in the world has nothing to offer when it comes to aging and death. We have no option but to leave it solely in the hands of nature.

It will be quite irresponsible if I don’t ask for your opinion, what is your take in the matter, do you think that this is a progress in technology or are these Billionaires trying to achieve something that is far from the grain of human nature, something very bizarre and in the process might awake a daemon which will come back to haunt the human race. Please do well to leave your comment in the comment box below; it will be duly appreciated.