Human beings have always been interested in two things: flying and finding the formula for eternal life ... Well, some also aspire to be multimillionaires and thus give themselves the life they have always dreamed of and have enough resources to achieve the other two dreams. Jeff Bezos is already among the richest on the planet, he already built his own ship and flew into space, but now he is in search of immortality.
Along with other wealthy people, Bezos is investing in Altos Labs, a company focused on biomolecular technology, whose mission is to find a way to delay aging, so much so that human beings can avoid death, at least due to natural deterioration or some disease. The dream of humanity for millennia.
Besides Bezos, one of the main investors is Yuri Milner, a Russian businessman who has been working with biomolecular technology for years. Milner has been assembling a team of physicists, biologists, and biochemists who have already performed some experiments to achieve rejuvenation in animals. Now with the millions of the Amazon founder, the team and the possibilities have expanded.
According to the MIT Technology Review magazine, the company of these millionaires hired Manuel Serrano, an aging expert at the Biomedical Research Institute of Barcelona, Juan Carlos Ispizua, another famous Spanish scientist, and Shinya Yamanaka, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, who will preside over the company's Medical Advisory Council. They seem to be serious.
Wolf Reik, a German biologist, will also be part of this team to establish laboratories in Silicon Valley, the UK, and Japan. In addition, according to Manuel Serrano, they have been offered a very good salary and all the necessary resources for their investigations. With the fortune of investors, we know that money will not be a problem.
In October of last year, Milner organized a meeting of scientists at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, where theories and methods on rejuvenation were presented, and this was the beginning of the company. Yamanaka spoke about cell reprogramming, a technique that Manuel Serrano applied since 2013 in mice. However, although reprogramming was achieved, tumors also formed.
Ispizua applied it to mice with progeria, a disease that causes premature aging, and managed to live up to 30 percent longer, which was enough to say: "Aging could be reversed," and that is exactly what investors are looking for. After the meeting, the company began to be shaped, which would be led by Richard Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute in the United States.
There are still other names of respected scientists who will be participating, but much information remains under wraps as of yet. Without a doubt, it is a project that could be the most important in the history of mankind, one that would change the foundations of everything we know so far. Can you imagine what a world would be like with beings that live hundreds or thousands of years?
