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Want to lose weight? Get shredded? Stay mentally sharp? A wellness influencer might tell you to take peptides, the latest cure-all in the alternative medicine arsenal. People inject them. They snort them. They combine them into concoctions with superhero names, like the Wolverine stack.
Matt Kaeberlein, a longevity researcher, first started hearing about peptides a few years ago. “At that point it was mostly functional medicine doctors that were using peptides,” he says, referring to physicians who embrace alternative medicine and supplements. “In the last six months, it’s kind of gone crazy.”
Peptides have gone mainstream. At the health-technology startup Superpower in Los Angeles, employees can get free peptide shots on Fridays. At a health food store in Phoenix, a sidewalk sign reads, “We have peptides!” At a tae kwon do center in South Carolina, a peptide wholesaler hosts an informational evening. On social media, they’re everywhere. And that popularity seems poised to grow; Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides.
The benefits and risks of many of these compounds, however, are largely unknown. Some of the most popular peptides have never been tested in human trials. They are sold for research purposes, not human consumption. Some are illegal knockoffs of wildly successful weight-loss medicines. The vast majority come from China, a fact that has some legislators worried. Last week, Senator Tom Cotton urged the head of the FDA to crack down on illegal shipments of peptides from China. Inthe absence of regulatory oversight, some people are sending the compounds they purchase off for independent testing just to ensure that the product is legit.
What is a peptide?
A peptide is simply a short string of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. “Scientists generally think of peptides as very small protein fragments, but we don’t really have a precise cutoff between a peptide and a protein,” says Paul Knoepfler, a stem-cell researcher at the University of California, Davis. Insulin is a peptide, as is human growth hormone. So are some neurotransmitters, like oxytocin.
But when wellness influencers talk about peptides, they’re often referring to particular compounds—formulated as injections, pills, or nasal sprays—that have become trendy lately.
Some of these peptides are FDA-approved prescription medications. GLP-1 medicines, for example, are approved to treat diabetes and obesity but are also easily accessible online to almost anyone who wants to use them. Many sites sell microdoses of GLP-1s with claims that they can “support longevity,” reduce cognitive decline, or curb inflammation.
Many more peptides are experimental. “The majority fall into the unapproved bucket,” says Kaeberlein, who is chief executive officer of Optispan, a Seattle-based health-care technology company focused on longevity. That bucket includes drugs that promote the release of growth hormones, like TB-500, CJC-1295, and ipamorelin, and compounds said to promote tissue repair and wound healing, like BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. It’s primarily these unapproved compounds that have raised concerns. “Anybody can set up an online shop selling research-grade peptides,” says Tenille Davis, a pharmacist and chief advocacy officer at the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, a trade organization representing more than 600 pharmacies. “And nobody knows what’s even in the vials.”
It’s not just fitness gurus, biohackers, and longevity fanatics who are taking these experimental drugs. Kaeberlein recalls hearing about an acquaintance whose doctor prescribed her unapprovedpeptides. She was “just a typical upper-middle-class woman,” he says. “That’s when it really hit me that this has sort of gone relatively mainstream.”
What do peptides do?
All kinds of things, purportedly. GHK-Cu is supposed to help with wound healing and collagen production. BPC-157 is said to promote tissue repair and curb inflammation, TB-500 to foster blood vessel formation. Here’s the caveat: The evidence for these benefits comes largely from animal studies and online testimonials, not human trials. “There’s no human clinical evidence to show that they even do what people are claiming that they do,” says Stuart Phillips, a muscle physiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “So it could be just a giant rip-off.”
Some experimental peptides probably do have beneficial wound healing properties or regenerative effects, Kaeberlein says. For BPC-157, for example, “the animal data is compelling,” he says. But there are still plenty of unknowns: What is the right dosage? How long should you take it? What’s the best way to administer it? Those are questions that can be answered only through rigorous clinical trials. In the absence of those studies, doctors “just make up their own protocols,” he says.Some consumers go the DIY route, reconstituting powdered peptides and injecting their own concoctions at home.
So why am I seeing ads for these peptide therapies if they’re not approved?
Federal law prohibits companies from marketing medications that haven’t been approved. That includes most peptides, which are regulated as small molecules, not dietary supplements. (Two notable exceptions are collagen peptides and creatine peptides, often sold as powders.) The law is designed to protect consumers from drugs that haven’t been proved safe and effective.
But it doesn’t stop labs from making peptides for research purposes. “Most of the peptides being consumed in the marketplace now are being sold by these online companies that are selling them labeled for research use only,” Davis says. The vials often bear disclaimers that clearly say as much: “For research use only” or “Not for human consumption.” It’s illegal to market these products for human use, but “the websites make it pretty clear that the buyers are intended to be using these products themselves,” she says.
The practice isn’t legal, but enforcement has been sporadic. “FDA sends warning letters, shuts down companies. But because it’s all online, they have a really hard time keeping up with these entities,” Davis says. And companies have plenty of incentive to keep illegally marketing the products. “They can make millions of dollars without having to spend money and time doing research,” Knoepfler says. “It’s a cash grab.”
Compounding pharmacies, which are legally allowed to create bespoke medications by mixing bulk active ingredients, often get requests to dispense peptides, but most peptides don’t meet the eligibility criteria for compounding. This has always been the case, but in 2023 the FDA explicitly added several common experimental peptides to the list of bulk substances that cannot be compounded because of safety concerns. “It put an exclamation point on policy that was already in place,” Davis says.
Many GLP-1 medications are available from compounding pharmacies. That used to be accepted because the drugs were in short supply. Now, however, supplies of most of these medications are stable, and sellers are under increasing pressure from regulators to stop mass-marketing these drugs.
What’s the harm in trying them?
Peptides sold for research purposes come from labs with little regulatory oversight. “When you buy stuff online intended for research grade, you have no idea what’s in the vial that you’re getting. You have no idea the sterility practices that it was manufactured under, or what sort of impurities might be in the vial,” Davis says.
Phillips has heard some people say they send their peptides for third-party testing to ensure that they’re pure, “like it’s some kind of flex,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you just proved that this stuff lives in the shadows, for crying out loud.’”
Finnrick Analytics, a peptide-testing startup in Austin, Texas, has analyzed the purity and potency of more than 5,000 samples of 15 different peptides from 173 vendors. The results show that the quality varies substantially from vendor to vendor and even batch to batch. For example, the company tested nearly 450 samples of BPC-157 from 64 vendors. In some cases, the vials sold as BPC-157 didn’t contain the compound at all. In those that did, the purity varied from about 82% to 100%.
Perhaps more worrying, 8% of all the peptide samples Finnrick tested had measurable levels of endotoxins, bacterial fragments that can cause fever and chills or, in larger doses, septic shock.
The health risks aren’t just hypothetical. In 2025, two women had to be hospitalized and placed on ventilators after receiving peptide injections at a longevity conference in Las Vegas. Both recovered, and it’s still not clear whether they reacted to the peptides themselves or to some impurity in the vials.
“The idea that all peptides are safe and all peptides are natural is just nonsense,” Kaeberlein says. “I tend to consider myself fairly libertarian when it comes to what people want to do for their health,” he adds. “If you want to take an experimental drug, that’s up to you.” But the problem with unregulated experimental therapies is that it’s exceedingly difficult to assess benefit and harm. “The relatively small percentage of people that are bad actors will be bad actors, and they will dishonestly market this stuff to people who aren’t equipped to really understand the true risks and rewards,” he says.
And, like any drug, peptides come with a risk of side effects. For approved medications, these are detailed right on the package insert. But for many experimental peptides, there hasn’t been enough research to understand what those side effects might be. Some researchers have warned that peptides that promote growth or blood vessel formation might also foster the growth of cancers.
For competitive athletes who use peptides, meanwhile, the risks include not just possible health problems but suspension. Some peptides, like BPC-157, are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The FDA has undergone a pretty substantial overhaul under the Trump administration. Are the regulations around peptides likely to change?
I don’t have a crystal ball, but it seems likely. In May 2025, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the longevity enthusiast and biohacker Gary Brecka on his podcast The Ultimate Human and promised to “end the war at FDA against alternative medicine—the war on stem cells, the war on chelating drugs, the war on peptides.”
Knoepfler anticipates that Kennedy will force the FDA to allow compounding of some of the most popular peptides, like BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. “Such a step would put public health at great risk, while giving compounders and likely wellness influencers a lot more profit,” he says.
The FDA seems intent on cracking down on GLP-1 copycats, however. In early February, commissioner Marty Makary posted on X that the agency would take “swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”
There’s a measles outbreak happening close to where I live. Since the start of this year, 34 cases have been confirmed in Enfield, a northern borough of London. Most of those affected are children under the age of 11. One in five have needed hospital treatment.
It’s another worrying development for an incredibly contagious and potentially fatal disease. Since October last year, 962 cases of measles have been confirmed in South Carolina. Large outbreaks (with more than 50 confirmed cases) are underway in four US states. Smaller outbreaks are being reported in another 12 states.
The vast majority of these cases have been children who were not fully vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is thought to be a significant reason children are missing out on important vaccines—the World Health Organization described it as one of the 10 leading threats to global health in 2019. And if we’re seeing more measles cases now, we might expect to soon see more cases of other vaccine-preventable infections, including some that can cause liver cancer or meningitis.
Some people will always argue that measles is not a big deal—that infections used to be common, and most people survived them and did just fine. It is true that in most cases kids do recover well from the virus. But not always.
Measles symptoms tend to start with a fever and a runny nose. The telltale rash comes later. In some cases, severe complications develop. They can include pneumonia, blindness, and inflammation of the brain. Some people won’t develop complications until years later. In rare cases, the disease can be fatal.
Before the measles vaccine was introduced, in 1963, measles epidemics occurred every two to three years, according to the WHO. Back then, around 2.6 million people died from measles every year. Since it was introduced, the measles vaccine is thought to have prevented almost 59 million deaths.
But vaccination rates have been lagging, says Anne Zink, an emergency medicine physician and clinical fellow at the Yale School of Public Health. “We’ve seen a slow decline in people who are willing to get vaccinated against measles for some time,” she says. “As we get more and more people who are at risk because they’re unvaccinated, the higher the chances that the disease can then spread and take off.”
Vaccination rates need to be at 95% to prevent measles outbreaks. But rates are well below that level in some regions. Across South Carolina, the proportion of kindergartners who received both doses of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles as well as mumps and rubella, has dropped steadily over the last five years, from 94% in 2020-2021 to 91% in 2024-2025. Some schools in the state have coverage rates as low as 20%, state epidemiologist Linda Bell told reporters last month.
Vaccination rates are low in London, too. Fewer than 70% of children have received both doses of their MMR by the time they turn five, according to the UK Health Security Agency. In some boroughs, vaccination rates are as low as 58%. So perhaps it’s not surprising we’re seeing outbreaks.
The highly contagious measles could be a bellwether for other vaccine-preventable diseases. Zink is already seeing signs. She points to a case of polio that paralyzed a man in New York in 2022. That happened when rates of polio vaccination were low, she says. “Polio is a great example of … a disease that is primarily asymptomatic, and most people don’t have any symptoms whatsoever, but for the people who do get symptoms, it can be life-threatening.”
Then there’s mumps—another disease the MMR vaccine protects against. It’s another one of those infections that can be symptom-free and harmless in some, especially children, but nasty for others. It can cause a painful swelling of the testes, and other complications include brain swelling and deafness. (From my personal experience of being hospitalized with mumps, I can attest that even “mild” infections are pretty horrible.)
Mumps is less contagious than measles, so we might expect a delay between an uptick in measles cases and the spread of mumps, says Zink. But she says that she’s more concerned about hepatitis B.
“It lives on surfaces for a long period of time, and if you’re not vaccinated against it and you’re exposed to it as a kid, you’re at a really high risk of developing liver cancer and death,” she says.
Zink was formerly chief medical officer of Alaska, a state that in the 1970s had the world’s highest rate of childhood liver cancer caused by hepatitis B. Screening and universal newborn vaccination programs eliminated the virus’s spread.
Public health experts worry that the current US administration’s position on vaccines may contribute to the decline in vaccine uptake. Last month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved changes to childhood vaccination recommendations. The agency no longer recommends the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns. The chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel has also questioned broad vaccine recommendations for polio.
Even vitamin injections are being refused by parents, says Zink. A shot of vitamin K at birth can help prevent severe bleeding in some babies. But recent research suggests that parents of 5% of newborns are refusing it (up from 2.9% in 2017).
“I can’t tell you how many of my pediatric [doctor] friends have told me about having to care for a kiddo in the ICU with … bleeding into their brain because the kid didn’t get vitamin K at birth,” says Zink. “And that can kill kids, [or have] lifelong, devastating, stroke-like symptoms.”
All this paints a pretty bleak picture for children’s health. But things can change. Vaccination can still offer protection to plenty of people at risk of infection. South Carolina’s Department of Public Health is offering free MMR vaccinations to residents at mobile clinics.
“It’s easy to think ‘It’s not going to be me,’” says Zink. “Seeing kiddos who don’t have the agency to make decisions [about vaccination] being so sick from vaccine-preventable diseases, to me, is one of the most challenging things of practicing medicine.”
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world’s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list.
Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Infections caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses that have evolved ways to evade treatments are now associated with more than 4 million deaths per year, and a recent analysis, published in the Lancet, predicts that number could surge past 8 million by 2050. In a July 2025 essay in Physical Review Letters, de la Fuente, now a bioengineer and computational biologist, and synthetic biologist James Collins warned of a looming “postantibiotic” era in which infections from drug-resistant strains of common bacteria like Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus aureus, which can often still be treated by our current arsenal of medications, become fatal. “The antibiotic discovery pipeline remains perilously thin,” they wrote, “impeded by high development costs, lengthy timelines, and low returns on investment.”
But de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence to bring about a different future. His team at the University of Pennsylvania is training AI tools to search genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His vision is to assemble those peptides—molecules made of up to 50 amino acids linked together—into various configurations, including some never seen in nature. The results, he hopes, could defend the body against microbes that withstand traditional treatments.
His quest has unearthed promising candidates in unexpected places. In August 2025 his team, which includes 16 scientists in Penn’s Machine Biology Group, described peptides hiding in the genetic code of ancient single-celled organisms called archaea. Before that, they’d excavated a list of candidates from the venom of snakes, wasps, and spiders. And in an ongoing project de la Fuente calls “molecular de-extinction,” he and his collaborators have been scanning published genetic sequences of extinct species for potentially functional molecules. Those species include hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans and charismatic megafauna like woolly mammoths, as well as ancient zebras and penguins. In the history of life on Earth, de la Fuente reasons, maybe some organism evolved an antimicrobial defense that could be helpful today. Those long-gone codes have given rise to resurrected compounds with names like mammuthusin-2 (from woolly mammoth DNA), mylodonin-2 (from the giant sloth), and hydrodamin-1 (from the ancient sea cow). Over the last few years, this molecular binge has enabled de la Fuente to amass a library of more than a million genetic recipes.
At 40 years old, de la Fuente has also collected a trophy case of awards from the American Society for Microbiology, the American Chemical Society, and other organizations. (In 2019, this magazine named him one of “35 Innovators Under 35” for bringing computational approaches to antibiotic discovery.) He’s widely recognized as a leader in the effort to harness AI for real-world problems. “He’s really helped pioneer that space,” says Collins, who is at MIT. (The two have not collaborated in the laboratory, but Collins has long been at the forefront of using AI for drug discovery, including the search for antibiotics. In 2020, Collins’s team used an AI model to predict a broad-spectrum antibiotic, halicin, that is now in preclinical development.)
The world of antibiotic development needs as much creativity and innovation as researchers can muster, says Collins. And de la Fuente’s work on peptides has pushed the field forward: “César is marvelously talented, very innovative.”
A messy, noisy endeavor
De la Fuente describes antimicrobial resistance as an “almost impossible” problem, but he sees plenty of room for exploration in the word almost. “I like challenges,” he says, “and I think this is the ultimate challenge.”
The use, overuse, and misuse of antibiotics, he says, drives antimicrobial resistance. And the problem is growing unchecked because conventional ways to find, make, and test the drugs are prohibitively expensive and often lead to dead ends. “A lot of the companies that have attempted to do antibiotic development in the past have ended up folding because there’s no good return on investment at the end of the day,” he says.
Antibiotic discovery has always been a messy, noisy endeavor, driven by serendipity and fraught with uncertainty and misdirection. For decades, researchers have largely relied on brute-force mechanical methods. “Scientists dig into soil, they dig into water,” says de la Fuente. “And then from that complex organic matter they try to extract antimicrobial molecules.”
But molecules can be extraordinarily complex. Researchers have estimated the number of possible organic combinations that could be synthesized at somewhere around 1060. For reference, Earth contains an estimated 1018 grains of sand. “Drug discovery in any domain is a statistics game,” says Jonathan Stokes, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Canada, who has been using generative AI to design potential new antibiotics that can be synthesized in a lab, and who worked with Collins on halicin. “You need enough shots on goal to happen to get one.”
Those have to be good shots, though. And AI seems well suited to improving researchers’ aim. Biology is an information source, de la Fuente explains: “It’s like a bunch of code.” The code of DNA has four letters; proteins and peptides have 20, where each “letter” represents an amino acid. De la Fuente says his work amounts to training AI models to recognize sequences of letters that encode antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs. “If you think about it that way,” he says, “you can devise algorithms to mine the code and identify functional molecules, which can be antimicrobials. Or antimalarials. Or anticancer agents.”
Practically speaking, we’re still not there: These peptides haven’t yet been transformed into usable drugs that help people, and there are plenty of details—dosage, delivery, specific targets—that need to be sorted out, says de la Fuente. But AMPs are appealing because the body already uses them.They’re a critical part of the immune system and often the first line of defense against pathogenic infections. Unlike conventional antibiotics, which typically have one trick for killing bacteria, AMPs often exhibit a multimodal approach. They may disrupt the cell wall and the genetic material inside as well as a variety of cellular processes. A bacterial pathogen may evolve resistance to a conventional drug’s single mode of action, but maybe not to a multipronged AMP attack.
From discovery to delivery
De la Fuente’s group is one of many pushing the boundaries of using AI for antibiotics. Where he focuses primarily on peptides, Collins works on small-molecule discovery. So does Stokes, at McMaster, whose models identify promising new molecules and predict whether they can be synthesized. “It’s only been a few years since folks have been using AI meaningfully in drug discovery,” says Collins.
Even in that short time the tools have changed, says James Zou, a computer scientist at Stanford University, who has worked with Stokes and Collins. Researchers have moved from using predictive models to developing generative approaches. With a predictive approach, Zou says, researchers screen large libraries of candidates that are known to be promising. Generative approaches offer something else: the appeal of designing a new molecule from scratch. Last year, for example, de la Fuente’s team used one generative AI model to design a suite of synthetic peptides and another to assess them. The group tested two of the resulting compounds on mice infected with a drug-resistant strain of Acinetobacter baumannii, a germ that the World Health Organization has identified as a “critical priority” in research on antimicrobial resistance. Both successfully and safely treated the infection.
But the field is still in the discovery phase. In his current work, de la Fuente is trying to get candidates closer to clinical testing. To that end, his team is developing an ambitious multimodal model called ApexOracle that’s designed to analyze a new pathogen, pinpoint its genetic weaknesses, match it to antimicrobial peptides that might work against it, and then predict how an antibiotic, built from those peptides, would fare in lab tests. It “converges understanding in chemistry, genomics, and language,” he says. It’s preliminary, he adds, but even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it will help steer the next generation of AI models toward the ultimate goal of resisting resistance.
Using AI, he believes, human researchers now have a fighting chance at catching up to the giant threat before them. The technology has already saved decades of human research time. Now he wants it to save lives, too: “This is the world that we live in today, and it’s incredible.”
Stephen Ornes is a science writer in Nashville, Tennessee.
Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions.
Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again mates have long been extolling the virtues of meat and whole-fat dairy, so it wasn’t too surprising to see those foods recommended alongside vegetables and whole grains (despite the well-established fact that too much saturated fat can be extremely bad for you).
Some influencers have taken the meat trend to extremes, following a “carnivore diet.” “The best thing you could do is eliminate out everything except fatty meat and lard,” Anthony Chaffee, an MD with almost 400,000 followers, said in an Instagram post.
And I almost choked on my broccoliwhen, while scrolling LinkedIn, I came across an interview with another doctor declaring that “there is zero scientific evidence to say that vegetables are required in the human diet.” That doctor, who described himself as “90% carnivore,” went on to say that all he’d eaten the previous day was a kilo of beef, and that vegetables have “anti-nutrients,” whatever they might be.
You don’t have to spend much time on social media to come across claims like this. The “traditionalist” influencer, author, and psychologist Jordan Peterson was promoting a meat-only diet as far back as 2018. A recent review of research into nutrition misinformation on social media found that the most diet information is shared on Instagram and YouTube, and that a lot of it is nonsense. So much so that the authors describe it as a “growing public health concern.”
What’s new is that some of this misinformation comes from the people who now lead America’s federal health agencies. In January Kennedy, who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, told a USA Today reporter that he was on a carnivore diet. “I only eat meat or fermented foods,” he said. He went on to say that the diet had helped him lose “40% of [his] visceral fat within a month.”
“Government needs to stop spreading misinformation that natural and saturated fats are bad for you,” Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin Makary argued in a recent podcast interview. The principles of “whole foods and clean meats” are “biblical,” he said. The interviewer said that Makary’s warnings about pesticides made him want to “avoid all salads and completely miss the organic section in the grocery store.”
For the record: There’s plenty of evidence that a diet high in saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. That’s not government misinformation.
The carnivore doctors’ suggestion to avoid vegetables is wrong too, says Gabby Headrick, associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security. There’s no evidence to suggest that a meat-only diet is good for you. “All of the nutrition science to date strongly identifies a wide array of vegetables … as being very health-promoting,” she adds.
To be fair to the influencers out there, diet is a tricky thing to study. Much of the research into nutrition relies on volunteers to keep detailed and honest food diaries—something that people are generally quite bad at. And the way our bodies respond to foods might be influenced by our genetics, our microbiomes, the way we prepare or consume those foods, and who knows what else.
Still, it will come as a surprise to no one that there is plenty of what the above study calls “low-quality content” floating around on social media. So it’s worth arming ourselves with a good dose of skepticism, especially when we come across posts that mention “miracle foods” or extreme, limited diets.
The truth is that most food is neither good nor bad when eaten in moderation. Diet trends come and go, and for most people, the best reasonable advice is simply to eat a balanced diet low in sugar, salt, and saturated fat. You know—the basics. No matter what that weird upside-down food pyramid implies. To the carnivore influencers, I say: get your misinformation off my broccoli.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
Vaccine schedule may not be final O’Neill defended the CDC’s decision to cut recommended childhood vaccines but said the guidelines remain “subject to new data coming in, new ways of thinking about things,” with new safety studies underway.
A self-described Vitalist is running US health agencies O’Neill said he agrees with all five tenets of Vitalism—a movement that calls death “humanity’s core problem”—and wants to make reversing aging damage a federal health priority.
ARPA-H is betting big on organ replacement and brain repair The agency is directing $170 million toward growing new organs from patients’ own cells and exploring ways to replace aging brain tissue—a procedure O’Neill said he’d personally be “open to” trying.
Expect more dietary guidance—and more controversy O’Neill endorsed eating “plenty of protein and saturated fat,” echoing new federal dietary guidance that nutrition scientists have criticized for ignoring decades of research on saturated fat’s health risks.
Following publication of this story, Politico reported Jim O’Neill would be leaving his current roles within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country’s federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US’s deeply controversial new vaccine schedule.
He’s also a longevity enthusiast. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this month, O’Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. At the same time, he defended reducing the number of broadly recommended childhood vaccines, a move that has been widely criticized by experts in medicine and public health.
In MIT Technology Review’sprofile of O’Neill last year, people working in health policy and consumer advocacy said they found his libertarian views on drug regulation “worrisome” and “antithetical to basic public health.”
He was later named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, putting him in charge of the nation’s public health agency.
But fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope O’Neill will bring attention and funding to their cause: the search for treatments that might slow, prevent, or even reverse human aging. Here are some takeaways from the interview.
Vaccine recommendations could change further
Last month, the US cut the number of vaccines recommended for children. The CDC no longer recommends vaccinations against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, or meningococcal disease for all children. The move was widely panned by medicalgroups and public health experts. Many worry it will become more difficult for children to access those vaccines. The majority of states have rejected the recommendations.
In the confirmation hearing for his role as deputy secretary of health and human services, which took place in May last year, O’Neill said he supported the CDC’s vaccine schedule. MIT Technology Review asked him if that was the case and, if so, what made him change his mind. “Researching and examining and reviewing safety data and efficacy data about vaccines is one of CDC’s obligations,” he said. “CDC gives important advice about vaccines and should always be open to new data and new ways of looking at data.”
At the beginning of December, O’Neill said, President Donald Trump “asked me to look at what other countries were doing in terms of their vaccine schedules.” He said he spoke to health ministries of other countries and consulted with scientists at the CDC and FDA. “It was suggested to me by lots of the operating divisions that the US focus its recommendations on consensus vaccines of other developed nations—in other words, the most important vaccines that are most often part of the core recommendations of other countries,” he said.
“As a result of that, we did an update to the vaccine schedule to focus on a set of vaccines that are most important for all children.”
But some experts in public health have said that countries like Denmark and Japan, whose vaccine schedules the new US one was supposedly modeled on, are not really comparable to the US. When asked about these criticisms, O’Neill replied, “A lot of parents feel that … more than 70 vaccine doses given to young children sounds like a really high number, and some of them ask which ones are the most important. I think we helped answer that question in a way that didn’t remove anyone’s access.”
“CDC still recommends that all children are vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), Pneumococcal conjugate, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and human papillomavirus (HPV), for which there is international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox),” he said when asked for his thoughts on this comment.
He also said that current vaccine guidelines are “still subject to new data coming in, new ways of thinking about things.” “CDC, FDA, and NIH are initiating new studies of the safety of immunizations,” he added. “We will continue to ask the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review evidence and make updated recommendations with rigorous science and transparency.”
More support for longevity—but not all science
O’Neill said he wants longevity to become a priority for US health agencies. His ultimate goal, he said, is to “make the damage of aging something that’s under medical control.” It’s “the same way of thinking” as the broader Make America Healthy Again approach, he said: “‘Again’ implies restoration of health, which is what longevity research and therapy is all about.”
O’Neill said his interest in longevity was ignited by his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, around 2008 to 2009. It was right around the time O’Neill was finishing up a previous role in HHS, under the Bush administration. O’Neill said Thiel told him he “should really start looking into longevity and the idea that aging damage could be reversible.” “I just got more and more excited about that idea,” he said.
When asked if he’s heard of Vitalism, a philosophical movement for “hardcore” longevity enthusiasts who, broadly, believe that death is wrong, O’Neill replied: “Yes.”
The Vitalist declaration lists five core statements, including “Death is humanity’s core problem,” “Obviating aging is scientifically plausible,” and “I will carry the message against aging and death.” O’Neill said he agrees with all of them. “I suppose I am [a Vitalist],” he said with a smile, although he’s not a paying member of the foundation behind it.
As deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, O’Neill assumes a level of responsibility for huge and influential science and health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research) and the Food and Drug Administration (which oversees drug regulation and is globally influential) as well as the CDC.
Today, he said, he sees support for longevity science from his colleagues within HHS. “If I could describe one common theme to the senior leadership at HHS, obviously it’s to make America healthy again, and reversing aging damage is all about making people healthy again,” he said. “We are refocusing HHS on addressing and reversing chronic disease, and chronic diseases are what drive aging, broadly.”
Over the last year, thousands of NIH grants worth over $2 billion were frozen or terminated, including funds for research on cancer biology, health disparities, neuroscience, and much more. When asked whether any of that funding will be restored, he did not directly address the question, instead noting: “You’ll see a lot of funding more focused on important priorities that actually improve people’s health.”
Watch ARPA-H for news on organ replacements and more
O’Neill said that “ARPA-H exists to make the impossible possible in health and medicine.” The agency has a new director—Alicia Jackson, who formerly founded and led a company focused on women’s health and longevity, took on the role in October last year.
O’Neill said he helped recruit Jackson, and that she was hired in part because of her interest in longevity, which will now become a major focus of the agency. He said he meets with her regularly, as well as with Andrew Brack and Jean Hébert, two other longevity supporters who lead departments at ARPA-H. Brack’s program focuses on finding biological markers of aging. Hebert’s aim is to find a way to replace aging brain tissue, bit by bit.
O’Neill is especially excited by that one, he said. “I would try it … Not today, but … if progress goes in a broadly good direction, I would be open to it. We’re hoping to see significant results in the next few years.”
He’s also enthused by the idea of creating all-new organs for transplantation. “Someday we want to be able to grow new organs, ideally from the patients’ own cells,” O’Neill said. An ARPA-H program will receive $170 million over five years to that end, he adds. “I’m very excited about the potential of ARPA-H and Alicia and Jean and Andrew to really push things forward.”
Longevity lobbyists have a friendly ear
O’Neill said he also regularly talks to the team at the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives. The organization, led by Dylan Livingston, played an instrumental role in changing state law in Montana to make experimental therapies more accessible. O’Neill said he hasn’t formally worked with them but thinks that “they’re doing really good work on raising awareness, including on Capitol Hill.”
Livingston has told me that A4LI’s main goals center around increasing support for aging research (possibly via the creation of a new NIH institute entirely dedicated to the subject) and changing laws to make it easier and cheaper to develop and access potential anti-aging therapies.
O’Neill gave the impression that the first goal might be a little overambitious—the number of institutes is down to Congress, he said. “I would like to get really all of the institutes at NIH to think more carefully about how many chronic diseases are usefully thought of as pathologies of aging damage,” he said. There’ll be more federal funding for that research, he said, although he won’t say more for now.
Some members of the longevity community have more radical ideas when it comes to regulation: they want to create their own jurisdictions designed to fast-track the development of longevity drugs and potentially encourage biohacking and self-experimentation.
It’s a concept that O’Neill has expressed support for in the past. He has posted on X about his support for limiting the role of government, and in support of building “freedom cities”—a similar concept that involves creating new cities on federal land.
Another longevity enthusiast who supports the concept is Niklas Anzinger, a German tech entrepreneur who is now based in Próspera, a private city within a Honduran “special economic zone,” where residents can make their own suggestions for medical regulations. Anzinger also helped draft Montana’s state law on accessing experimental therapies. O’Neill knows Anzinger and said he talks to him “once or twice a year.”
O’Neill has also supported the idea of seasteading—building new “startup countries” at sea. He served on the board of directors of the Seasteading Institute until March 2024.
In 2009, O’Neill told an audience at a Seasteading Institute conference that “the healthiest societies in 2030 will most likely be on the sea.” When asked if he still thinks that’s the case, he said: “It’s not quite 2030, so I think it’s too soon to say … What I would say now is: the healthiest societies are likely to be the ones that encourage innovation the most.”
We might expect more nutrition advice
When it comes to his own personal ambitions for longevity, O’Neill said, he takes a simple approach that involves minimizing sugar and ultraprocessed food, exercising and sleeping well, and supplementing with vitamin D. He also said he tries to “eat a diet that has plenty of protein and saturated fat,” echoing the new dietary guidance issued by the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture. That guidance has been criticized by nutrition scientists, who point out that it ignores decades of research into the harms of a diet high in saturated fat.
We can expect to see more nutrition-related updates from HHS, said O’Neill: “We’re doing more research, more randomized controlled trials on nutrition. Nutrition is still not a scientifically solved problem.” Saturated fats are of particular interest, he said. He and his colleagues want to identify “the healthiest fats,” he said.
There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago.
The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old. Like other types of motor neuron disease (MND), it affects nerves that supply the body’s muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe.
Darling’s last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. Another AI tool has enabled him to use this “voice clone” to compose new songs. Darling is able to make music again.
“Sadly, I have lost the ability to sing and play my instruments,” Darling said on stage at the event, which took place in London on Wednesday, using his voice clone. “Despite this, most of my time these days is spent still continuing to compose and produce my music. Doing so feels more important than ever to me now.”
Losing a voice
Darling says he’s been a musician and a composer since he was around 14 years old. “I learned to play bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, melodica, mandolin, and tenor banjo,” he said at the event. “My biggest love, though, was singing.”
He met bandmate Nick Cocking over 10 years ago, while he was still a university student, says Cocking. Darling joined Cocking’s Irish folk outfit, the Ceili House Band, shortly afterwards, and their first gig together was in April 2014. Darling, who joined the band as a singer and guitarist, “elevated the musicianship of the band,” says Cocking.
Patrick Darling (second from left) with his former bandmates, including Nick Cocking (far right).
COURTESY OF NICK COCKING
But a few years ago, Cocking and his other bandmates started noticing changes in Darling. He became clumsy, says Cocking. He recalls one night when the band had to walk across the city of Cardiff in the rain: “He just kept slipping and falling, tripping on paving slabs and things like that.”
He didn’t think too much of it at the time, but Darling’s symptoms continued to worsen. The disease affected his legs first, and in August 2023, he started needing to sit during performances. Then he started to lose the use of his hands. “Eventually he couldn’t play the guitar or the banjo anymore,” says Cocking.
By April 2024, Darling was struggling to talk and breathe at the same time, says Cocking. For that performance, the band carried Darling on stage. “He called me the day after and said he couldn’t do it anymore,” Cocking says, his voice breaking. “By June 2024, it was done.” It was the last time the band played together.
Re-creating a voice
Darling was put in touch with a speech therapist, who raised the possibility of “banking” his voice. People who are losing the ability to speak can opt to record themselves speaking and use those recordings to create speech sounds that can then be activated with typed text, whether by hand or perhaps using a device controlled by eye movements.
Some users have found these tools to be robotic sounding. But Darling had another issue. “By that stage, my voice had already changed,” he said at the event. “It felt like we were saving the wrong voice.”
Then another speech therapist introduced him to a different technology. Richard Cave is a speech and language therapist and a researcher at University College London. He is also a consultant for ElevenLabs, an AI company that develops agents and audio, speech, video, and music tools. One of these tools can create “voice clones”—realistic mimics of real voices that can be generated from minutes, or even seconds, of a person’s recorded voice.
The tool is already helping some of those users. “We’re not really improving how quickly they’re able to communicate, or all of the difficulties that individuals with MND are going through physically, with eating and breathing,” says Gabi Leibowitz, a speech therapist who leads the program. “But what we are doing is giving them a way … to create again, to thrive.” Users are able to stay in their jobs longer and “continue to do the things that make them feel like human beings,” she says.
Cave worked with Darling to use the tool to re-create his lost speaking voice from older recordings.
“The first time I heard the voice, I thought it was amazing,” Darling said at the event, using the voice clone. “It sounded exactly like I had before, and you literally wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” he said. “I will not say what the first word I made my new voice say, but I can tell you that it began with ‘f’ and ended in ‘k.’”
COURTESY OF PATRICK DARLING
Re-creating his singing voice wasn’t as easy. The tool typically requires around 10 minutes of clear audio to generate a clone. “I had no high-quality recordings of myself singing,” Darling said. “We had to use audio from videos on people’s phones, shot in noisy pubs, and a couple of recordings of me singing in my kitchen.” Still, those snippets were enough to create a “synthetic version of [Darling’s] singing voice,” says Cave.
In the recordings, Darling sounded a little raspy and “was a bit off” on some of the notes, says Cave. The voice clone has the same qualities. It doesn’t sound perfect, Cave says—it sounds human.
“The ElevenLabs voice that we’ve created is wonderful,” Darling said at the event. “It definitely sounds like me—[it] just kind of feels like a different version of me.”
ElevenLabs has also developed an AI music generator called Eleven Music. The tool allows users to compose tracks, using text prompts to choose the musical style. Several well-known artists have also partnered with the company to license AI clones of their voices, including the actor Michael Caine, whose voice clone is being used to narrate an upcoming ElevenLabs documentary. Last month, the company released an album of 11 tracks created using the tool. “The Liza Minnelli track is really a banger,” says Cave.
Eleven Music can generate a song in a minute, but Darling and Cave spent around six weeks fine-tuning Darling’s song. Using text prompts, any user can “create music and add lyrics in any style [they like],” says Cave. Darling likes Irish folk, but Cave has also worked with a man in Colombia who is creating Colombian folk music. (The ElevenLabs tool is currently available in 74 languages.)
Back on stage
Last month, Cocking got a call from Cave, who sent him Darling’s completed track. “I heard the first two or three words he sang, and I had to turn it off,” he says. “I was just in bits, in tears. It took me a good half a dozen times to make it to the end of the track.”
Darling and Cave were making plans to perform the track live at the ElevenLabs summit in London on Wednesday, February 11. So Cocking and bandmate Hari Ma each arranged accompanying parts to play on the mandolin and fiddle. They had a couple of weeks to rehearse before they joined Darling on stage, two years after their last performance together.
“I wheeled him out on stage, and neither of us could believe it was happening,” says Cave. “He was thrilled.” The song was played as Darling remained on stage, and Cocking and Ma played their instruments live.
Cocking and Cave say Darling plans to continue to use the tools to make music. Cocking says he hopes to perform with Darling again but acknowledges that, given the nature of ALS, it is difficult to make long-term plans.
“It’s so bittersweet,” says Cocking. “But getting up on stage and seeing Patrick there filled me with absolute joy. I know Patrick really enjoyed it as well. We’ve been talking about it … He was really, really proud.”
This week I want to tell you about an experimental surgical procedure that’s helping people have babies. Specifically, it’s helping people who have had treatment for bowel or rectal cancer.
Radiation and chemo can have pretty damaging side effects that mess up the uterus and ovaries. Surgeons are pioneering a potential solution: simply stitch those organs out of the way during cancer treatment. Once the treatment has finished, they can put the uterus—along with the ovaries and fallopian tubes—back into place.
It seems to work! Last week, a team in Switzerland shared news that a baby boy had been born after his mother had the procedure. Baby Lucien was the fifth baby to be born after the surgery and the first in Europe, says Daniela Huber, the gyno-oncologist who performed the operation. Since then, at least three others have been born, adds Reitan Ribeiro, the surgeon who pioneered the procedure. They told me the details.
Huber’s patient was 28 years old when a four-centimeter tumor was discovered in her rectum. Doctors at Sion Hospital in Switzerland, where Huber works, recommended a course of treatment that included multiple medications and radiotherapy—the use of beams of energy to shrink a tumor—before surgery to remove the tumor itself.
This kind of radiation can kill tumor cells, but it can also damage other organs in the pelvis, says Huber. That includes the ovaries and uterus. People who undergo these treatments can opt to freeze their eggs beforehand, but the harm caused to the uterus will mean they’ll never be able to carry a pregnancy, she adds. Damage to the lining of the uterus could make it difficult for a fertilized egg to implant there, and the muscles of the uterus are left unable to stretch, she says.
In this case, the woman decided that she did want to freeze her eggs. But it would have been difficult to use them further down the line—surrogacy is illegal in Switzerland.
Huber offered her an alternative.
She had been following the work of Ribeiro, a gynecologist oncologist formerly at the Erasto Gaertner Hospital in Curitiba, Brazil. There, Ribeiro had pioneered a new type of surgery that involved moving the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries from their position in the pelvis and temporarily tucking them away in the upper abdomen, below the ribs.
Ribeiro and his colleagues published their first case report in 2017, describing a 26-year-old with a rectal tumor. (Ribeiro, who is now based at McGill University in Montreal, says the woman had been told by multiple doctors that her cancer treatment would destroy her fertility and had pleaded with him to find a way to preserve it.)
Huber remembers seeing Ribeiro present the case at a conference at the time. She immediately realized that her own patient was a candidate for the surgery, and that, as a surgeon who had performed many hysterectomies, she’d be able to do it herself. The patient agreed.
Huber’s colleagues at the hospital were nervous, she says. They’d never heard of the procedure before. “When I presented this idea to the general surgeon, he didn’t sleep for three days,” she tells me. After watching videos from Ribeiro’s team, however, he was convinced it was doable.
So before the patient’s cancer treatment was started, Huber and her colleagues performed the operation. The team literally stitched the organs to the abdominal wall. “It’s a delicate dissection,” says Huber, but she adds that “it’s not the most difficult procedure.” The surgery took two to three hours, she says. The stitches themselves were removed via small incisions around a week later. By that point, scar tissue had formed to create a lasting attachment.
The woman had two weeks to recover from the surgery before her cancer treatment began. That too was a success—within months, her tumor had shrunk so significantly that it couldn’t be seen on medical scans.
As a precaution, the medical team surgically removed the affected area of her colon. At the same time, they cut away the scar tissue holding the uterus, tubes, and ovaries in their new position and transferred the organs back into the pelvis.
Around eight months later, the woman stopped taking contraception. She got pregnant without IVF and had a mostly healthy pregnancy, says Huber. Around seven months into the pregnancy, there were signs that the fetus was not growing as expected. This might have been due to problems with the blood supply to the placenta, says Huber. Still, the baby was born healthy, she says.
Ribeiro says he has performed the surgery 16 times, and that teams in countries including the US, Peru, Israel, India, and Russia have performed it as well. Not every case has been published, but he thinks there may be around 40.
Since Baby Lucien was born last year, a sixth birth has been announced in Israel, says Huber. Ribeiro says he has heard of another two births since then, too. The most recent was to the first woman who had the procedure. She had a little girl a few months ago, he tells me.
No surgery is risk-free, and Huber points out there’s a chance that organs could be damaged during the procedure, or that a more developed cancer could spread. The uterus of one of Ribeiro’s patients failed following the surgery. Doctors are “still in the phase of collecting data to [create] a standardized procedure,” Huber says, but she hopes the surgery will offer more options to young people with some pelvic cancers. “I hope more young women could benefit from this procedure,” she says.
Ribeiro says the experience has taught him not to accept the status quo. “Everyone was saying … there was nothing to be done [about the loss of fertility in these cases],” he tells me. “We need to keep evolving and looking for different answers.”
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity’s “core problem.” Put simply, they say death is wrong—for everyone. They’ve even said it’s morally wrong.
Vitalism is more than a philosophy, though—it’s a movement for hardcore longevity enthusiasts who want to make real progress in finding treatments that slow or reverse aging. Not just through scientific advances, but by persuading influential people to support their movement, and by changing laws and policies to open up access to experimental drugs.
And they’re starting to make progress.
Vitalism was founded by Adam Gries and Nathan Cheng—two men who united over their shared desire to find ways to extend human lifespan. I first saw Cheng speak back in 2023, at Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro for people who were interested in life extension and some other technologies. (It was an interesting experience—you can read more about it here.)
Zuzalu was where Gries and Cheng officially launched Vitalism. But I’ve been closely following the longevity scene since 2022. That journey took me to Switzerland, Honduras, and a compound in Berkeley, California, where like-minded longevity enthusiasts shared their dreams of life extension.
It also took me to Washington, DC, where, last year, supporters of lifespan extension presented politicians including Mehmet Oz, who currently leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, with their case for changes to laws and policies.
The journey has been fascinating, and at times weird and even surreal. I’ve heard biohacking stories that ended with smoking legs. I’ve been told about a multi-partner relationship that might be made possible through the cryopreservation—and subsequent reanimation—of a man and the multiple wives he’s had throughout his life. I’ve had people tell me to my face that they consider themselves eugenicists, and that they believe that parents should select IVF embryos for their propensity for a long life.
I’ve been shouted at and threatened with legal action. I’ve received barefoot hugs. One interviewee told me I needed Botox. It’s been a ride.
My reporting has also made me realize that the current interest in longevity reaches beyond social media influencers and wellness centers. Longevity clinics are growing in number, and there’s been a glut of documentaries about living longer or even forever.
At the same time, powerful people who influence state laws, giant federal funding budgets, and even national health policy are prioritizing the search for treatments that slow or reverse aging. The longevity community was thrilled when longtime supporter Jim O’Neill was made deputy secretary of health and human services last year. Other members of Trump’s administration, including Oz, have spoken about longevity too. “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history,” Gries told me.
I recently spoke to Alicia Jackson, the new director of ARPA-H. The agency, established in 2022 under Joe Biden’s presidency, funds “breakthrough” biomedical research. And it appears to have a new focus on longevity. Jackson previously founded and led Evernow, a company focused on “health and longevity for every woman.”
“There’s a lot of interesting technologies, but they all kind of come back to the same thing: Could we extend life years?” she told me over a Zoom call a few weeks ago. She added that her agency had “incredible support” from “the very top of HHS.” I asked if she was referring to Jim O’Neill. “Yeah,” she said. She wouldn’t go into the specifics.
Gries is right: There is a lot of support for advances in longevity treatments, and some of it is coming from influential people in positions of power. Perhaps the field really is poised for a breakthrough.
And that’s what makes this field so fascinating to cover. Despite the occasional weirdness.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?”
Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should be humanity’s number one priority—quite literally, that it should come above all else in the social and political hierarchy.
“If you believe that life is good and there’s inherent moral value to life,” he told them, “it stands to reason that the ultimate logical conclusion here is that we should try to extend lifespan indefinitely.”
Solving aging, he added, is “a problem that has an incredible moral duty for all of us to get involved in.”
It was the end of April, and the crowd—with its whoops and yeahs—certainly seemed convinced. They’d gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency (simply called Vitalist Bay) that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago.
No relation to the lowercase vitalism of old, this Vitalism has a foundational philosophy that’s deceptively simple: to acknowledge that death is bad and life is good. The strategy for executing it, though, is far more obviously complicated: to launch a longevity revolution.
Interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, but as the Vitalists see it, it has a branding problem. The term “longevity” has been used to sell supplements with no evidence behind them, “anti-aging” has been used by clinics to sell treatments, and “transhumanism” relates to ideas that go well beyond the scope of defeating death. Not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. As Gries, a longtime longevity devotee who has largely become the enthusiastic public face of Vitalism, said in an online presentation about the movement in 2024, “We needed some new word.”
“Vitalism” became a clean slate: They would start a movement to defeat death, and make that goal the driving force behind the actions of individuals, societies, and nations. Longevity could no longer be a sideshow. For Vitalism to succeed, budgets would need to change. Policy would need to change. Culture would need to change. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.
“The idea is to change the systems and the priorities of society at the highest levels,” Gries said in the presentation.
To be clear, the effective anti-aging treatments the Vitalists are after don’t yet exist. But that’s sort of the point: They believe they could exist if Vitalists are able to spread their gospel, influence science, gain followers, get cash, and ultimately reshape government policies and priorities.
For the past few years, Gries and Cheng have been working to recruit lobbyists, academics, biotech CEOs, high-net-worth individuals, and even politicians into the movement, and they’ve formally established a nonprofit foundation “to accelerate Vitalism.” Today, there’s a growing number of Vitalists (some paying foundation members, others more informal followers, and still others who support the cause but won’t publicly admit as much), and the foundation has started “certifying” qualifying biotech companies as Vitalist organizations. Perhaps most consequentially, Gries, Cheng, and their peers are also getting involved in shaping US state laws that make unproven, experimental treatments more accessible. They hope to be able to do the same at the national level.
VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG
VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG
Vitalism cofounders Nathan Cheng and Adam Gries want to launch a longevity revolution.
All this is helping Vitalists grow in prominence, if not also power. In the past, people who have spoken of living forever or making death “optional” have been dismissed by their academic colleagues. I’ve been covering the broader field of aging science for a decade, and I’ve seen scientists roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and turn their backs on people who have talked this way. That’s not the case for the Vitalists.
Even the scientists who think that Vitalist ideas of defeating death are wacky, unattainable ones, with the potential to discredit their field, have shown up on stage with Vitalism’s founders, and these serious researchers provide a platform for them at more traditionally academic events.
I saw this collegiality firsthand at Vitalist Bay. Faculty members from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, all spoke at events. Eric Verdin, the prominent researcher who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, had also planned to speak, although a scheduling clash meant he couldn’t make it in the end. “I have very different ideas in terms of what’s doable,” he told me. “But that’s part of the [longevity] movement—there’s freedom for people to say whatever they want.”
Many other well-respected scientists attended, including representatives of ARPA-H, the US federal agency for health research and breakthrough technologies. And as I left for a different event on longevity in Washington, DC, just after the Vitalist Bay Summit, a sizable group of Vitalist Bay attendees headed that way too, to make the case for longevity to US lawmakers.
The Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern.
This, of course, sparks some pretty profound questions. What would a society without death look like—and would we even want it? After all, death has become an important part of human culture the world over. And even if Vitalists aren’t destined to realize their lofty goal, their growing influence could still have implications for us all. As they run more labs and companies, and insert themselves into the making of laws and policy, perhaps they will discover treatments that really do slow or even reverse aging. In the meantime, though, some ethicists are concerned that experimental and unproven medicines—including potentially dangerous ones—are becoming more accessible, in some cases with little to no oversight.
Gries, ultimately, has a different view of the ethics here. He thinks that being “okay with death” is what disqualifies a person from being considered ethical. “Death is just wrong,” he says. “It’s not just wrong for some people. It’s wrong for all people.”
The birth of a revolution
When I arrived at the Vitalist Bay Summit on April 25, I noticed that the venue was equipped with everything a longevity enthusiast might need: napping rooms, a DEXA body-composition scanner, a sauna in a bus, and, for those so inclined, 24-hour karaoke.
I was told that around 300 people had signed up for that day’s events, which was more than had attended the previous week. That might have been because arguably the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, Bryan Johnson, was about to make an appearance. (If you’re curious to know more about what Johnson was doing there, you can read about our conversation here.)
The key to Vitalism has always been that“death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” cofounder Adam Gries told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”
But Gries, another man in his 40s who doesn’t want to die, was the first to address the audience that day. Athletic and energetic, he bounded across a stage wearing bright yellow shorts and a long-sleeved shirt imploring people to “Choose Life: VITALISM.”
Gries is a tech entrepreneur who describes himself as a self-taught software engineer who’s “good at virality.” He’s been building companies since he was in college in the 2000s, and grew his personal wealth by selling them.
As with many other devotees to the cause, his deep interest in life extension was sparked by Aubrey de Grey, a controversial researcher with an iconic long beard and matching ponytail. He’s known widely both for his optimistic views about “defeating aging” and for having reportedly made sexual comments to two longevity entrepreneurs. (In an email, de Grey said he’s “never disputed” one of these remarks but denied having made the other. “My continued standing within the longevity community speaks for itself,” he added.)
In an influential 2005 TED Talk (which has over 4.8 million views), de Grey predicted that people would live to 1,000 and spoke of the possibility of new technologies that would continue to stave off death, allowing some to avoid it indefinitely. (In a podcast recorded last year, Cheng described a recording of this talk as “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”)
Many Vitalists have been influenced by controversial longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey. Cheng called his 2005 TED Talk “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”
PETER SEARLE/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX
“It was kind of evident to me that life is great,” says Gries. “So I’m kind of like, why would I not want to live?”
A second turning point for Gries came during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when he essentially bet against companies that he thought would collapse. “I made this 50 [fold] return,” he says. “It was kind of like living through The Big Short.”
Gries and his wife fled from San Francisco to Israel, where he grew up, and later traveled to Taiwan, where he’d obtained a “golden visa” and which was, at the time, one of only two countries that had not reported a single case of covid. His growing wealth afforded him the opportunity to take time from work and think about the purpose of life. “My answer was: Life is the purpose of life,” he says. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to experience the “journey of decrepitude” that aging often involves.
So he decided to dedicate himself to the longevity cause. He went about looking up others who seemed as invested as he was. In 2021 his search led him to Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur based in Toronto. He had dropped out of a physics PhD a few years earlier after experiencing what he describes on his website as “a massive existential crisis” and shifted his focus to “radical longevity.” (Cheng did not respond to email requests for an interview.)
The pair “hit it off immediately,” says Gries, and they spent the following two years trying to figure out what they could do. The solution they finally settled on: revolution.
After all, Gries reasons, that’s how significant religious and social movements have happened in the past. He says they sought inspiration from the French and American Revolutions, among others. The idea was to start with some kind of “enlightenment,” and with a “hardcore group,” to pursue significant social change with global ramifications.
“We were convinced that without a revolution,” Gries says, “we were as good as dead.”
A home for believers
Early on, they wrote a Vitalist declaration, a white paper that lists five core statements for believers:
Life and health are good. Death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent.
Aging causes immense suffering, and obviating aging is scientifically plausible.
Humanity should apply the necessary resources to reach freedom from aging as soon as possible.
I will work on or support others to work on reaching unlimited healthy human lifespan.
I will carry the message against aging and death.
While it’s not an explicit part of the manifesto, it was important to them to think about it as a moral philosophy as well as a movement. As Cheng said at the time, morality “guides most of the actions of our lives.” The same should be true of Vitalism, he suggested.
Gries has echoed this idea. The belief that “death is morally bad” is necessary to encourage behavior change, he told me in 2024. It is a moral drive, or moral purpose, that pushes people to do difficult things, he added.
Revolution, after all, is difficult. And to succeed—to “get unlimited great health to the top of the priority list,” as Gries says—the movement would need to infiltrate the government and shape policy decisions and national budgets. The Apollo program got people to the moon with less than 1% of US GDP; imagine, Gries asks, what we could do to human longevity with a mere 1% of GDP?
It makes sense, then, that Gries and Cheng launched Vitalism in 2023 at Zuzalu, a “pop-up city” in Montenegro that provided a two-month home for like-minded longevity enthusiasts. The gathering was in some ways a loose prototype for what they wanted to accomplish. Cheng spoke there of how they wanted to persuade 10,000 or so Vitalists to move to Rhode Island. Not only was it close to the biotech hub of Boston, but they believed it had a small enough population for an influx of new voters sharing their philosophy to influence local and state elections. “Five to ten thousand people—that’s all we need,” he said. Or if not Rhode Island, another small-ish US state, where they could still change state policy from the inside.
The ultimate goal was to recruit Vitalists to help them establish a “longevity state”—a recognized jurisdiction that “prioritizes doing something about aging,” Cheng said, perhaps by loosening regulations on clinical trials or supporting biohacking.
Bryan Johnson, who is perhaps the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, spoke at Vitalist Bay and is trying to start a Don’t Die religion.
AGATON STROM/REDUX PICTURES
This idea is popular among many vocal members of the Vitalism community. It borrows from the concept of the “network state” developed by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, defined as a new city or country that runs on cryptocurrency; focuses on a goal, in this case extending human lifespan; and “eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.”
Some people not interested in dying have made progress toward realizing such a domain. Following the success of Zuzalu, one of the event’s organizers, Laurence Ion, a young cryptocurrency investor and self-proclaimed Vitalist, joined a fellow longevity enthusiast named Niklas Anzinger to organize a sequel in Próspera, the private “special economic zone” on the Honduran island of Roatán. They called their “pop-up city” Vitalia.
I visited shortly after it launched in January 2024. The goal was to create a low-regulation biotech hub to fast-track the development of anti-aging drugs, though the “city” was more like a gated resort that hosted talks from a mix of respected academics, biohackers, biotech CEOs, and straight-up eugenicists. There was a strong sense of community—many attendees were living with or near each other, after all. A huge canvas where attendees could leave notes included missives like “Don’t die,” “I love you,” and “Meet technoradicals building the future!”
But Vitalia was short-lived, with events ending by the start of March 2024. And while many of the vibes were similar to what I’d later see at Vitalist Bay, the temporary nature of Vitalia didn’t quite match the ambition of Gries and Cheng.
Patri Friedman, a 49-year-old libertarian and grandson of the economist Milton Friedman who says he attended Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Vitalist Bay, envisions something potentially even bolder. He’s the founder of the Seasteading Institute, which has the goal of “building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy” and has received funding and support from the billionaire Peter Thiel. Friedman also founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in projects focused on “building the cities of tomorrow.”
His company is exploring various types of potential network states, but he says he’s found that medical tourism—and, specifically, a hunger for life extension—dominates the field. “People do not want this ‘10 years and a billion dollars to pass a drug’ thing with the FDA,” says Friedman. (While he doesn’t call himself a Vitalist, partly because he’s “almost never going to agree with” any kind of decree, Friedman holds what you might consider similarly staunch sentiments about death, which he referred to as “murder by omission.” When I asked him if he has a target age he’d like to reach, he told me he found the question “mind-bogglingly strange” and “insane.” “How could you possibly be like: Yes, please murder me at this time?” he replied. “I can always fucking shoot myself in the head—I don’t need anybody’s help.”)
But even as Vitalists and those aligned with their beliefs embrace longevity states, Gries and Cheng are reassessing their former ambitions. The network-state approach has limits, Gries tells me. And encouraging thousands of people to move to Rhode Island wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped it might be.
Not because he can’t find tens of thousands of Vitalists, Gries stresses—but most of them are unwilling to move their lives for the sake of influencing the policy of another state. He compares Vitalism to a startup, with a longevity state as its product. For the time being, at least, there isn’t enough consumer appetite for that product, he says.
The past year shows that it may in fact be easier to lobby legislators in states that are already friendly to deregulation. Anzinger and a lobbying group called the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) were integral to making Montana the first US hub for experimental medical treatments, with a new law to allow clinics to sell experimental therapies once they have been through preliminary safety tests (which don’t reveal whether a drug actually works). But Gries and his Vitalist colleagues also played a role—“providing feedback, talking to lawmakers … brainstorming [and] suggesting ideas,” Gries says.
The Vitalist crew has been in conversation with lawmakers in New Hampshire, too. In an email in December, Gries and Cheng claimed they’d “helped to get right-to-try laws passed” in the state—an apparent reference to the recent expansion of a law to make more unapproved treatments accessible to people with terminal illnesses. Meanwhile, three other bills that expand access even further are under consideration.
Ultimately, Gries stresses, Vitalism is “agnostic to the fixing strategies” that will help them meet their goals. There is, though, at least one strategy he’s steadfast about: building influence.
Only the hardcore
To trigger a revolution, the Vitalists may need to recruit only around 3% or 4% of “society” to their movement, Gries believes. (Granted, that does still mean hundreds of millions of people.) “If you want people to take action, you need to focus on a small number of very high-leverage people,” he tells me.
That, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes wealthy individuals with “a net worth of $10 million or above,” he says. He wants to understand why (with some high-profile exceptions, including Thiel, who has been investing in longevity-related companies and foundations for decades) most uber-wealthy people don’t invest in the field—and how he might persuade them to do so. He won’t reveal the names of anyone he’s having conversations with.
These “high-leverage” people might also include, Gries says, well-respected academics, leaders of influential think tanks, politicians and policymakers, and others who work in government agencies.
A revolution needs to find its foot soldiers. And at the most basic level, that will mean boosting the visibility of the Vitalism brand—partly through events like Vitalist Bay, but also by encouraging others, particularly in the biotech space, to sign on. Cheng talks of putting out a “bat signal” for like-minded people, and he and Gries say that Vitalism has brought together people who have gone on to collaborate or form companies.
There’s also their nonprofit Vitalism International Foundation, whose supporters can opt to become “mobilized Vitalists” with monthly payments of $29 or more, depending on their level of commitment. In addition, the foundation works with longevity biotech companies to recognize those that are “aligned” with its goals as officially certified Vitalist organizations. “Designation may be revoked if an organization adopts apologetic narratives that accept aging or death,” according to the website. At the time of writing, that site lists 16 certified Vitalist organizations, including cryopreservation companies, a longevity clinic, and several research companies.
One of them is Shift Bioscience, a company using CRISPR and aging clocks—which attempt to measure biological age—to identify genes that might play a significant role in the aging process and potentially reverse it. It says it has found a single gene that can rejuvenate multiple types of cells.
Shift cofounder Daniel Ives, who holds degrees in mitochondrial and computational biology, tells me he was also won over to the longevity cause by de Grey’s 2005 TED Talk. He now has a countdown on his computer: “It’s my days till death,” he says—around 22,000 days left. “I’m using that to keep myself focused.”
Ives calls himself the “Vitalist CEO” of Shift Bioscience. He thinks the label is important first as a way for like-minded people to find and support each other, grow their movement, and make the quest for longevity mainstream. Second, he says, it provides a way to appeal to “hardcore” lifespan extensionists, given that others in the wellness and cosmetics industry have adopted the term “longevity” without truly applying themselves to finding rejuvenation therapies. He refers to unnamed companies and individuals who claim that drinking juices, for example, can reverse aging by five years or so.
“You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” says ARPA-H science and engineering advisor Mark Hamalainen. Though “kind of a terrible example,”he notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”
“Somebody will make these claims and basically throw legitimate science under the bus,” he says. He doesn’t want spurious claims made on social media to get lumped in with the company’s serious molecular biology. Shift’s head of machine learning, Lucas Paulo de Lima Camillo, was recently awarded a $10,000 prize by the well-respected Biomarkers of Aging Consortium for an aging clock he developed.
Another out-and-proud Vitalist CEO is Anar Isman, the cofounder of AgelessRx, a telehealth provider that offers prescriptions for purported longevity drugs—and a certified Vitalist organization. (Isman, who is in his early 40s, used to work at a hedge fund but was inspired to join the longevity field by—you guessed it—de Grey.)
During a panel session at Vitalist Bay, he stressed that he too saw longevity as a movement—and a revolution—rather than an industry. But he also claimed his company wasn’t doing too badly commercially. “We’ve had a lot of demand,” he said. “We’ve got $60 million plus in annual revenue.”
Many of his customers come to the site looking for treatments for specific ailments, he tells me. He views each as an opportunity to “evangelize” his views on “radical life extension.” “I don’t see a difference between … dying tomorrow or dying in 30 years,” he says. He wants to live “at least 100 more” years.
CHRIS LABROOY
Vitalism, though, isn’t just appealing to commercial researchers. Mark Hamalainen, a 41-year-old science and engineering advisor at ARPA-H, describes himself as a Vitalist. He says he “kind of got roped into” Vitalism because he also works with Cheng—they founded the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which supports new entrants to the field through mentoring programs. “I kind of view it as a more appealing rebranding of some of the less radical aspects of transhumanism,” he says. Transhumanism—the position that we can use technologies to enhance humans beyond the current limits of biology—covers a broad terrain, but “Vitalism is like: Can we just solve this death thing first? It’s a philosophy that’s easy to get behind.”
In government, he works with individuals like Jean Hébert, a former professor of genetics and neuroscience who has investigated the possibility of rejuvenating the brain by gradually replacing parts of it; Hébert has said that “[his] mission is to beat aging.” He spoke at Zuzalu and Vitalist Bay.
Andrew Brack, who serves as the program manager for proactive health at ARPA-H, was at Vitalist Bay, too. Both Brack and Hébert oversee healthy federal budgets—Hébert’s brain replacement project was granted $110 million in 2024, for example.
Neither Hébert nor Brack has publicly described himself as a Vitalist, and Hébert wouldn’t agree to speak to me without the approval of ARPA-H’s press office, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview with him or Brack. Brack did not respond to direct requests for an interview.
Gries says he thinks that “many people at [the US Department of Health and Human Services], including all agencies, have a longevity-positive view and probably agree with a lot of the ideas Vitalism stands for.” And he is hoping to help secure federal positions for others who are similarly aligned with his philosophy. On both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve last year, Gries and Cheng sent fundraising emails describing an “outreach effort” to find applicants for six open government positions that, together, would control billions of dollars in federal funding. “Qualified, mission-aligned candidates we’d love to support do exist, but they need to be found and encouraged to apply,” the pair wrote in the second email. “We’re starting a systematic search to reach, screen, and support the best candidates.”
Hamalainen supports Gries’s plan to target high-leverage individuals. “You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” he says. Though “kind of a terrible example,” Hamalainen notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”
One of the “right” people may be the man who inspired Gries, Hamalainen, Ives, Isman, and so many others to pursue longevity in the first place: de Grey. He’s now a paid-up Vitalist and even spoke at Vitalist Bay. Having been in the field for over 20 years, de Grey tells me, he’s seen various terms fall in and out of favor. Those terms now have “baggage that gets in the way,” he says. “Sometimes it’s useful to have a new term.”
The sometimes quiet (sometimes powerful, sometimes influential) Vitalists
Though one of the five principles of Vitalism is a promise to “carry the message,” some people who agree with its ideas are reluctant to go public, including some signed-up Vitalists. I’ve asked Gries multiple times over several years, but he won’t reveal how many Vitalists there are, let alone who makes up the membership.
Even some of the founders of Vitalism don’t want to be public about it. Around 30 people were involved in developing the movement, Gries says—but only 22 are named as contributors to the Vitalism white paper (with Gries as its author), including Cheng, Vitalia’s Ion, and ARPA-H’s Hamalainen. Gries won’t reveal the names of the others. He acknowledges that some people just don’t like to publicly affiliate with any organization. That’s certainly what I’ve found when I’ve asked members of the longevity community if they’re Vitalists. Many said they agreed with the Vitalist declaration, and that they liked and supported what Gries was doing. But they didn’t want the label.
Some people worry that associating with a belief system that sounds a bit religious—even cult-like, some say—won’t do the cause any favors. Others have a problem with the specific wording of the declaration.
For instance, Anzinger—the other Vitalia founder—won’t call himself a Vitalist. He says he respects the mission, but that the declaration is “a bit poetic” for his liking.
And Dylan Livingston, CEO of A4LI and arguably one of the most influential longevity enthusiasts out there, won’t describe himself as a Vitalist either.
Many other longevity biotech CEOs also shy away from the label—including Emil Kendziorra, who runs the human cryopreservation company Tomorrow Bio, even though that’s a certified Vitalist organization. Kendziorra says he agrees with most of the Vitalist declaration but thinks it is too “absolutist.” He also doesn’t want to imply that the pursuit of longevity should be positioned above war, hunger, and other humanitarian issues. (Gries has heard this argument before, and counters that both the vast spending on health care for people in the last years of their life and the use of lockdown strategies during the covid pandemic suggest that, deep down, lifespan extension is “society’s revealed preference.”)
Still, because Kendziorra agrees with almost everything in the declaration, he believes that “pushing it forward” and bringing more attention to the field by labeling his company a Vitalist organization is a good thing. “It’s to support other people who want to move the world in that direction,” he says. (He also offered Vitalist Bay attendees a discount on his cryopreservation services.)
“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” explains Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.” He claims that people who represent biotech companies tell him “all the time” that they are secretly longevity companies but avoid using the term because they don’t want funders or collaborators to be “put off.”
Ultimately, it may not really matter how much people adopt the Vitalist label as long as the ideas break through. “It’s pretty simple. [The Vitalist declaration] has five points—if you agree with the five points, you are a Vitalist,” says Hamalainen. “You don’t have to be public about it.” He says he’s spoken to others about “coming out of the closet” and that it’s been going pretty well.
Gries puts it more bluntly: “If you agree with the Vitalist declaration, you are a Vitalist.”
And he hints that there are now many people in powerful positions—including in the Trump administration—who share his views, even if they don’t openly identify as Vitalists.
Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, is one of the highest-profile longevity enthusiasts serving in government. Gries says, “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”
AMY ROSSETTI/DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES VIA AP
O’Neill has long been interested in both longevity and the idea of creating new jurisdictions. Until March 2024, he served on the board of directors of Friedman’s Seasteading Institute. He also served as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, a longevity organization founded by de Grey, between 2019 and 2021, and he represented Thiel as a board member there for many years. Many people in the longevity community say they know him personally, or have at least met him. (Tristan Roberts, a biohacker who used to work with a biotech company operating in Próspera, tells me he served O’Neill gin when he visited his Burning Man camp, which he describes as a “technology gay camp from San Francisco and New York.” Hamalainen also recalls meeting O’Neill at Burning Man, at a “techy, futurist” camp.) (Neither O’Neill nor representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request to comment about this.)
O’Neill’s views are arguably becoming less fringe in DC these days. The day after the Vitalist Bay Summit, A4LI was hosting its own summit in the capital with the goal of “bringing together leaders, advocates, and innovators from around the globe to advance legislative initiatives that promote a healthier human lifespan.” I recognized lots of Vitalist Bay attendees there, albeit in more formal attire.
The DC event took place over three days in late April. The first two involved talks by longevity enthusiasts across the spectrum, including scientists, lawyers, and biotech CEOs. Vitalia’s Anzinger spoke about the success he’d had in Próspera, and ARPA-H’s Brack talked about work his agency was doing. (Hamalainen was also there, although he said he was not representing ARPA-H.)
But the third day was different and made me think Gries may be right about Vitalism’s growing reach. It began with a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, during which Representative Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida, asked, “Who doesn’t want to live longer, right?” As he explained, “Longevity science … directly aligns with the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement.”
“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” says Daniel Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.”
Bilirakis and Representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, were followed by Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor who now leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; he opened with typical MAHA talking points about chronic disease and said US citizens have a “patriotic duty” to stay healthy to keep medical costs down. The audience was enthralled as Oz talked about senescent cells, the zombie-like aged cells that are thought to be responsible for some age-related damage to organs and tissues. (The offices of Bilirakis and Tonko did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)
And while none of the speakers went anywhere near the concept of radical life extension, the Vitalists in the audience were suitably encouraged.
Gries is too: “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”
The fate of “immortality quests”
Whether or not Vitalism starts a revolution, it will almost always be controversial in some quarters. While believers see an auspicious future, others are far less certain of the benefits of a world designed to defeat death.
Gries and Cheng often make the case for deregulation in their presentations. But ethicists—and even some members of the longevity community—point out that this comes with risks. Some question whether it is ever ethical to sell a “treatment” without some idea of how likely it is to benefit the person buying and taking it. Enthusiasts counter with arguments about bodily autonomy. And they hope Montana is just the start.
Then there’s the bigger picture. Is it really that great not to die … ever? Some ethicists argue that for many cultures, death is what gives meaning to life.
Sergio Imparato, a moral philosopher and medical ethicist at Harvard University, believes that death itself has important moral meaning. We know our lives will end, and our actions have value precisely because our time is limited, he says. Imparato is concerned that Vitalists are ultimately seeking to change what it means to be human—a decision that should involve all members of society.
Alberto Giubilini, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, agrees. “Death is a defining feature of humanity,” he says. “Our psychology, our cultures, our rituals, our societies, are built around the idea of coping with death … it’s part of human nature.”
CHRIS LABROOY
Imparato’s family is from Naples, Italy, where poor residents were once laid to rest in shared burial sites, with no headstones to identify them. He tells me how the locals came to visit, clean, and even “adopt” the skulls as family members. It became a weekly ritual for members of the community, including his grandmother, who was a young girl at the time. “It speaks to what I consider the cultural relevance of death,” he says. “It’s the perfect counterpoint to … the Vitalist conception of life.”
Gries seems aware of the stigma around such “immortality quests,” as Imparato calls them. In his presentations, Gries shares lists of words that Vitalists should try to avoid—like “eternity,” “radical,” and “forever,” as well as any religious terms.
He also appears to be dropping, at least publicly, the idea that Vitalism is a “moral” movement. Morality was “never part of the Vitalist declaration,” Gries told me in September. When I asked him why he had changed his position on this, he dismissed the question. “Our point … was always that death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” he told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”
But despite these attempts to tweak and control the narrative, Vitalism appears to be opening the door to an incredibly wide range of sentiments in longevity science. A decade ago, I don’t think there would have been any way that the views espoused by Gries, Anzinger, and others who support Vitalist sentiments would have been accepted by the scientific establishment. After all, these are people who publicly state they hope to live indefinitely and who have no training in the science of aging, and who are open about their aims to find ways to evade the restrictions set forth by regulatory agencies like the FDA—all factors that might have rendered them outcasts not that long ago.
But Gries and peers had success in Montana. Influential scientists and policymakers attend Vitalism events, and Vitalists are featured regularly at more mainstream longevity events. Last year’s Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Copenhagen—widely recognized as the most important meeting in aging science—was sponsored in part by Anzinger’s new Próspera venture, Infinita City, as well as by several organizations that are either certified Vitalist or led by Vitalists.
“I was thinking that maybe what I was doing was very fringe or out there,” Anzinger, the non-Vitalist supporter of Vitalism, admits. “But no—I feel … loads of support.”
There was certainly an air of optimism at the Vitalist Bay Summit in Berkeley. Gries’s positivity is infectious. “All the people who want a fun and awesome surprise gift, come on over!” he called out early on the first day. “Raise your voice if you’re excited!” The audience whooped in response. He then proceeded to tell everyone, Oprah Winfrey–style, that they were all getting a free continuous glucose monitor. “You get a CGM! You get a CGM!” Plenty of attendees actually attached them to their arms on the spot.
Every revolution has to start somewhere, right?
This piece has been updated to clarify a quote from Mark Hamalainen.
When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn’t put much time into the problem but suspects it is “very solvable” and that when scientists discover why we age, it’s going to be something “obvious.”
Not long after, the Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair jumped into the conversation on X to strongly agree with the world’s richest man. “Aging has a relatively simple explanation and is apparently reversible,” wrote Sinclair. “Clinical Trials begin shortly.”
“ER-100?” Musk asked.
“Yes” replied Sinclair.
ER-100 turns out to be the code name of a treatment created by Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup that Sinclair cofounded and which he confirmed today has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers.
The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming” that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech.
The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off.
“Reprogramming is like the AI of the bio world. It’s the thing everyone is funding,” says Karl Pfleger, an investor who backs a smaller UK startup, Shift Bioscience. He says Sinclair’s company has recently been seeking additional funds to keep advancing its treatment.
Reprogramming is so powerful that it sometimes creates risks, even causing cancer in lab animals, but the version of the technique being advanced by Life Biosciences passed initial safety tests in animals.
But it’s still very complex. The trial will initially test the treatment on about a dozen patients with glaucoma, a condition where high pressure inside the eye damages the optic nerve. In the tests, viruses carrying three powerful reprogramming genes will be injected into one eye of each patient, according to a description of the study first posted in December.
To help make sure the process doesn’t go too far, the reprogramming genes will be under the control of a special genetic switch that turns them on only while the patients take a low dose of the antibiotic doxycycline. Initially, they will take the antibiotic for about two months while the effects are monitored.
Executives at the company have said for months that a trial could begin this year, sometimes characterizing it as a starting bell for a new era of age reversal. “It’s an incredibly big deal for us as an industry,” Michael Ringel, chief operating officer at Life Biosciences, said at an event this fall. “It’ll be the first time in human history, in the millennia of human history, of looking for something that rejuvenates … So watch this space.”
The technology is based on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery, 20 years ago, that introducing a few potent genes into a cell will cause it to turn back into a stem cell, just like those found in an early embryo that develop into the different specialized cell types. These genes, known as Yamanaka factors, have been likened to a “factory reset” button for cells.
But they’re dangerous, too. When turned on in a living animal, they can cause an eruption of tumors.
That is what led scientists to a new idea, termed “partial” or “transient” reprogramming. The idea is to limit exposure to the potent genes—or use only a subset of them—in the hope of making cells act younger without giving them complete amnesia about what their role in the body is.
In 2020, Sinclair claimed that such partial reprogramming could restore vision to mice after their optic nerves were smashed, saying there was even evidence that the nerves regrew. His report appeared on the cover of the influential journal Nature alongside the headline “Turning Back Time.”
Not all scientists agree that reprogramming really counts as age reversal. But Sinclair has doubled down. He’s been advancing the theory that the gradual loss of correct epigenetic information in our cells is, in fact, the ultimate cause of aging—just the kind of root cause that Musk was alluding to.
“Elon does seem to be paying attention to the field and [is] seemingly in sync with [my theory],” Sinclair said in an email.
Reprogramming isn’t the first longevity fix championed by Sinclair, who’s written best-selling books and commands stratospheric fees on the longevity lecture circuit. Previously, he touted the longevity benefits of molecules called sirtuins as well as resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine. But some critics say he greatly exaggerates scientific progress, pushback that culminated in a 2024 Wall Street Journal story that dubbed him a “reverse-aging guru” whose companies “have not panned out.”
Life Biosciences has been among those struggling companies. Initially formed in 2017, it at first had a strategy of launching subsidiaries, each intended to pursue one aspect of the aging problem. But after these made limited progress, in 2021 it hired a new CEO, Jerry McLaughlin, who has refocused its efforts on Sinclair’s mouse vision results and the push toward a human trial.
The company has discussed the possibility of reprogramming other organs, including the brain. And Ringel, like Sinclair, entertains the idea that someday even whole-body rejuvenation might be feasible. But for now, it’s better to think of the study as a proof of concept that’s still far from a fountain of youth. “The optimistic case is this solves some blindness for certain people and catalyzes work in other indications,” says Pfleger, the investor. “It’s not like your doctor will be writing a prescription for a pill that will rejuvenate you.”
Life’s treatment also relies on an antibiotic switching mechanism that, while often used in lab animals, hasn’t been tried in humans before. Since the switch is built from gene components taken from E. coli and the herpes virus, it’s possible that it could cause an immune reaction in humans, scientists say.
“I was always thinking that for widespread use you might need a different system,” says Noah Davidsohn, who helped Sinclair implement the technique and is now chief scientist at a different company, Rejuvenate Bio. And Life’s choice of reprogramming factors—it’s picked three, which go by the acronym OSK—may also be risky. They are expected to turn on hundreds of other genes, and in some circumstances the combination can cause cells to revert to a very primitive, stem-cell-like state.
Other companies studying reprogramming say their focus is on researching which genes to use, in order to achieve time reversal without unwanted side effects. New Limit, which has been carrying out an extensive search for such genes, says it won’t be ready for a human study for two years. At Shift, experiments on animals are only beginning now.
“Are their factors the best version of rejuvenation? We don’t think they are. I think they are working with what they’ve got,” Daniel Ives, the CEO of Shift, says of Life Biosciences. “But I think they’re way ahead of anybody else in terms of getting into humans. They have found a route forward in the eye, which is a nice self-contained system. If it goes wrong, you’ve still got one left.”
