Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old

A baby boy born over the weekend holds the new record for the “oldest baby.” Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived on July 26, developed from an embryo that had been in storage for 30 and a half years.

“We had a rough birth but we are both doing well now,” says Lindsey Pierce, his mother. “He is so chill. We are in awe that we have this precious baby!”

Lindsey and her husband, Tim Pierce, who live in London, Ohio, “adopted” the embryo from a woman who had it created in 1994. She says her family and church family think “it’s like something from a sci-fi movie.” 

“The baby has a 30-year-old sister,” she adds. Tim was a toddler when the embryos were first created.

“It’s been pretty surreal,” says Linda Archerd, 62, who donated the embryo. “It’s hard to even believe.”

Three little hopes

The story starts back in the early 1990s. Archerd had been trying—and failing—to get pregnant for six years. She and her husband decided to try IVF, a fairly new technology at the time. “People were [unfamiliar] with it,” says Archerd. “A lot of people were like, what are you doing?”

They did it anyway, and in May 1994, they managed to create four embryos. One of them was transferred to Linda’s uterus. It resulted in a healthy baby girl. “I was so blessed to have a baby,” Archerd says. The remaining three embryos were cryopreserved and kept in a storage tank.

That was 31 years ago. The healthy baby girl is now a 30-year-old woman who has her own 10-year-old daughter. But the other three embryos remained frozen in time.

Archerd originally planned to use the embryos herself. “I always wanted another baby desperately,” she says. “I called them my three little hopes.” Her then husband felt differently, she says. Archerd went on to divorce him, but she won custody of the embryos and kept them in storage, still hopeful she might use them one day, perhaps with another partner.

That meant paying annual storage fees, which increased over time and ended up costing Archerd around a thousand dollars a year, she says. To her, it was worth it. “I always thought it was the right thing to do,” she says. 

Things changed when she started going through menopause, she says. She considered her options. She didn’t want to discard the embryos or donate them for research. And she didn’t want to donate them to another family anonymously—she wanted to meet the parents and any resulting babies. “It’s my DNA; it came from me … and [it’s] my daughter’s sibling,” she says.

Then she found out about embryo “adoption.” This is a type of embryo donation in which both donors and recipients have a say in whom they “place” their embryos with or “adopt” them from. It is overseen by agencies—usually explicitly religious ones—that believe an embryo is morally equivalent to a born human. Archerd is Christian.

There are several agencies that offer these adoption services in the US, but not all of them accept embryos that have been stored for a very long time. That’s partly because those embryos will have been frozen and stored in unfamiliar, old-fashioned ways, and partly because old embryos are thought to be less likely to survive thawing and transfer to successfully develop into a baby.

“So many places wouldn’t even take my information,” says Archerd. Then she came across the Snowflakes program run by the Nightlight Christian Adoptions agency. The agency was willing to accept her embryos, but it needed Archerd’s medical records from the time the embryos had been created, as well as the embryos’ lab records.

So Archerd called the fertility doctor who had treated her decades before. “I still remembered his phone number by heart,” she says. That doctor, now in his 70s, is still practicing at a clinic in Oregon. He dug Archerd’s records out from his basement, she says. “Some of [them] were handwritten,” she adds. Her embryos entered Nightlight’s “matching pool” in 2022.

Making a match

“Our matching process is really driven by the preferences of the placing family,” says Beth Button, executive director of the Snowflakes program. Archerd’s preference was for a married Caucasian, Christian couple living in the US. “I didn’t want them to go out of the country,” says Archerd. “And being Christian is very important to me, because I am.”

It took a while to find a match. Most of the “adopting parents” signed up for the Snowflakes program were already registered at fertility clinics that wouldn’t have accepted the embryos, says Button. “I would say that over 90% of clinics in the US would not have accepted these embryos,” she says.

COURTESY LINDSEY PIERCE

Archerd’s embryos were assigned to the agency’s Open Hearts program for embryos that are “hard to place,” along with others that have been in storage for a long time or are otherwise thought to be less likely to result in a healthy birth.

Lindsey and Tim Pierce had also signed up for the Open Hearts program. The couple, aged 35 and 34, respectively, had been trying for a baby for seven years and had seen multiple doctors.

Lindsey was researching child adoption when she came across the Snowflakes program. 

When the couple were considering their criteria for embryos they might receive, they decided that they’d be open to any. “We checkmarked anything and everything,” says Tim. That’s how they ended up being matched with Archerd’s embryos. “We thought it was wild,” says Lindsey. “We didn’t know they froze embryos that long ago.”

Lindsey and Tim had registered with Rejoice Fertility, an IVF clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee, run by John Gordon, a reproductive endocrinologist who prides himself on his efforts to reduce the number of embryos in storage. The huge numbers of embryos left in storage tanks was weighing on his conscience, he says, so around six years ago, he set up Rejoice Fertility with the aim of doing things differently.  

“Now we’re here in the belt buckle of the Bible Belt,” says Gordon, who is Reformed Presbyterian. “I’ve changed my mode of practice.” IVF treatments performed at the clinic are designed to create as few excess embryos as possible. The clinic works with multiple embryo adoption agencies and will accept any embryo, no matter how long it has been in storage.

COURTESY LINDA ARCHERD

It was his clinic that treated the parents who previously held the record for the longest-stored embryo—in 2022, Rachel and Philip Ridgeway had twins from embryos created more than 30 years earlier. “They’re such a lovely couple,” says Gordon. When we spoke, he was making plans to meet the family for breakfast. The twins are “growing like weeds,” he says with a laugh.

“We have certain guiding principles, and they’re coming from our faith,” says Gordon, although he adds that he sees patients who hold alternative views. One of those principles is that “every embryo deserves a chance at life and that the only embryo that cannot result in a healthy baby is the embryo not given the opportunity to be transferred into a patient.”

That’s why his team will endeavor to transfer any embryo they receive, no matter the age or conditions. That can be challenging, especially when the embryos have been frozen or stored in unusual or outdated ways. “It’s scary for people who don’t know how to do it,” says Sarah Atkinson, lab supervisor and head embryologist at Rejoice Fertility. “You don’t want to kill someone’s embryos if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Cumbersome and explosive

In the early days of IVF, embryos earmarked for storage were slow-frozen. This technique involves gradually lowering the temperature of the embryos. But because slow freezing can cause harmful ice crystals to form, clinics switched in the 2000s to a technique called vitrification, in which the embryos are placed in thin plastic tubes called straws and lowered into tanks of liquid nitrogen. This rapidly freezes the embryos and converts them into a glass-like state. 

The embryos can later be thawed by removing them from the tanks and rapidly—within two seconds—plunging them into warm “thaw media,” says Atkinson. Thawing slow-frozen embryos is more complicated. And the exact thawing method required varies, depending on how the embryos were preserved and what they were stored in. Some of the devices need to be opened while they are inside the storage tank, which can involve using forceps, diamond-bladed knives, and other tools in the liquid nitrogen, says Atkinson.

Recently, she was tasked with retrieving embryos that had been stored inside a glass vial. The vial was made from blown glass and had been heat-sealed with the embryo inside. Atkinson had to use her diamond-bladed knife to snap open the seal inside the nitrogen tank. It was fiddly work, and when the device snapped, a small shard of glass flew out and hit Atkinson’s face. “Hit me on the cheek, cut my cheek, blood running down my face, and I’m like, Oh shit,” she says. Luckily, she had her safety goggles on. And the embryos survived, she adds.

Atkinson has a folder in her office with notes she’s collected on various devices over the years. She flicks through it over a video call and points to the notes she made about the glass vial. “Might explode; wear face shield and eye protection,” she reads. A few pages later, she points to another embryo-storage device. “You have to thaw this one in your fingers,” she tells me. “I don’t like it.”

The record-breaking embryos had been slow-frozen and stored in a plastic vial, says Atkinson. Thawing them was a cumbersome process. But all three embryos survived it.

The Pierces had to travel from their home in Ohio to the clinic in Tennessee five times over a two-week period. “It was like a five-hour drive,” says Lindsey. One of the three embryos stopped growing. The other two were transferred to Lindsey’s uterus on November 14, she says. And one developed into a fetus.

Now that the baby has arrived, Archerd is keen to meet him. “The first thing that I noticed when Lindsey sent me his pictures is how much he looks like my daughter when she was a baby,” she says. “I pulled out my baby book and compared them side by side, and there is no doubt that they are siblings.”

She doesn’t yet have plans to meet the baby, but doing so would be “a dream come true,” she says. “I wish that they didn’t live so far away from me … He is perfect!”

“We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” says Lindsey. “We just wanted to have a baby.”

Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders. The eight babies are healthy, say the researchers behind the trial.

“Mitochondrial disease can have a devastating impact on families,” Doug Turnbull of Newcastle University, one of the researchers behind the study, said in a statement. “Today’s news offers fresh hope to many more women at risk of passing on this condition, who now have the chance to have children growing up without this terrible disease.”

The study, which makes use of a technology called mitochondrial donation, has been described as a “tour de force” and “a remarkable accomplishment” by others in the field. In the team’s approach, patients’ eggs are fertilized with sperm, and the DNA-containing nuclei of those cells are transferred into donated fertilized eggs that have had their own nuclei removed. The new embryos contain the DNA of the intended parents along with a tiny fraction of mitochondrial DNA from the donor, floating in the embryos’ cytoplasm. 

“The concept of [mitochondrial donation] has attracted much commentary and occasionally concern and anxiety,” Stuart Lavery, a consultant in reproductive medicine at University College Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said in a statement. “The Newcastle team have demonstrated that it can be used in a clinically effective and ethically acceptable way to prevent disease and suffering.”

Not everyone sees the trial as a resounding success. While five of the children were born “with no health problems,” one developed a fever and a urinary tract infection, and another had muscle jerks. A third was treated for an abnormal heart rhythm. Three of the babies were born with a low level of the very mitochondrial-DNA mutations the treatment was designed to prevent.

Heidi Mertes, a medical ethicist at Ghent University, says she is “moderately optimistic.” “I’m happy that it worked,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s concerning … it’s a call for caution and treading carefully.”

Pavlo Mazur, a former embryologist who has used a similar approach in the conception of 15 babies in Ukraine, believes that trials like this one should be paused until researchers figure out what’s going on. Others believe that researchers should study the technique in people who don’t have mitochondrial mutations, to lower the risk of passing any disease-causing mutations to children.

Long time coming

The news of the births has been long awaited by researchers in the field. Mitochondrial donation was first made legal in the UK in 2015. Two years later, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates fertility treatment and research in the UK, granted a fertility clinic in Newcastle the sole license to perform the procedure. Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life launched a trial of mitochondrial donation in 2017 with the aim of treating 25 women a year.

That was eight years ago. Since then, the Newcastle team have been extremely tight-lipped about the trial. That’s despite the fact that other teams elsewhere have used mitochondrial donation to help people achieve pregnancy. A New York–based doctor used a type of mitochondrial donation to help a Jordanian couple conceive in Mexico in 2016. Mitochondrial donation has also been trialed by teams in Ukraine and Greece.

But as the only trial overseen by the HFEA, the Newcastle team’s study was viewed by many as the most “official.” Researchers have been itching to hear how the work has been going, given the potential implications for researchers elsewhere (mitochondrial donation was officially made legal in Australia in 2022). “I’m very glad to see [the results] come out at last,” says Dagan Wells, a reproductive biologist at the University of Oxford who worked on the Greece trial. “It would have been nice to have some information out along the way.”

At the Newcastle clinic, each patient must receive approval from the HFEA to be eligible for mitochondrial donation. Since the trial launched in 2017, 39 patients have won this approval. Twenty-five of them underwent hormonal stimulation to release multiple eggs that could be frozen in storage.

Nineteen of those women went on to have mitochondrial donation. So far, seven of the women have given birth (one had twins), and an eighth is still pregnant. The oldest baby is two years old. The results were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“As parents, all we ever wanted was to give our child a healthy start in life,” one of the mothers, who is remaining anonymous, said in a statement. “Mitochondrial donation IVF made that possible. After years of uncertainty this treatment gave us hope—and then it gave us our baby … Science gave us a chance.”

When each baby was born, the team collected a blood and urine sample to look at the child’s mitochondrial DNA. They found that the levels of mutated DNA were far lower than they would have expected without mitochondrial donation. Three of the mothers were “homoplasmic”—100% of their mitochondrial DNA carried the mutation. But blood tests showed that in the women’s four babies (including the twins), 5% or less of the mitochondrial DNA had the mutation, suggesting they won’t develop disease.

A mixed result

The researchers see this as a positive result. “Children who would otherwise have inherited very high levels are now inheriting levels that are reduced by 77% to 100%,” coauthor Mary Herbert, a professor of reproductive biology at Newcastle University and Monash University, told me during a press briefing.

But three of the eight babies had health symptoms. At seven months, one was diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy, which seemed to resolve within the following three months. Another baby developed a urinary tract infection.

A third baby developed “prolonged” jaundice, high levels of fat in the blood, and a disturbed heart rhythm that required treatment. The baby seemed to have recovered by 18 months, and doctors believe that the symptoms were not related to the mitochondrial mutations, but the team members admit that they can’t be sure. Given the small sample size, it’s hard to make comparisons with babies conceived in other ways. 

And they acknowledge that a phenomenon called “reversal” is happening in some of the babies. In theory, the children shouldn’t inherit any “bad” mitochondrial DNA from their mothers. But three of them did. The levels of “bad” mitochondrial DNA in the babies’ blood ranged between 5% and 16%. And they were higher in the babies’ urine—the highest figure being 20%.

The researchers don’t know why this is happening. When an embryologist pulls out the nucleus of a fertilized egg, a bit of mitochondria-containing cytoplasm will inevitably be dragged along with it. But the team didn’t see any link between the amount of carried-over cytoplasm and the level of “bad” mitochondria. “We continue to investigate this issue,” Herbert said.

“As long as they don’t understand what’s happening, I would still be worried,” says Mertes.

Such low levels aren’t likely to cause mitochondrial diseases, according to experts contacted by MIT Technology Review. But some are concerned that the percentage of mutated DNA could be higher in different tissues, such as the brain or muscle, or that the levels might change with age. “You never know which tissues [reversal] will show up in,” says Mazur, who has seen the phenomenon in babies born through mitochondrial donation to parents who didn’t have mitochondrial mutations. “It’s chaotic.”

The Newcastle team says it hasn’t looked at other tissues, because it designed the study to be noninvasive.

There has been at least one case in which similar levels of “bad” mitochondria have caused symptoms, says Joanna Poulton, a mitochondrial geneticist at the University of Oxford. She thinks it’s unlikely that the children in the trial will develop any symptoms but adds that “it’s a bit of a worry.”

The age of reversal

No one knows exactly when this reversal happens. But Wells and his colleagues have some idea. In their study in Greece, they looked at the mitochondrial DNA of embryos and checked them again during pregnancy and after birth. The trial was designed to study the impact of mitochondrial donation for infertility—none of the parents involved had genes for mitochondrial disease.

The team has seen mitochondrial reversal in two of the seven babies born in the trial, says Wells. If you put the two sets of results together, mitochondrial donation “seems to have this possibility of reversal occurring in maybe about a third of children,” he says.

In his study, the reversal seemed to occur early on in the embryos’ development, Wells says. Five-day-old embryos “look perfect,” but mitochondrial mutations start showing up in tests taken at around 15 weeks of pregnancy, he says. After that point, the levels appear to be relatively stable. The Newcastle researchers say they will monitor the children until they are five years old.

People enrolling in future trials might opt for amniocentesis, which involves sampling blood from the fetus’s amniotic sac at around 15 to 18 weeks, suggests Mertes. That test might reveal the likely level of mitochondrial mutations in the resulting child. “Then the parents could decide what to do,” says Mertes. “If you could see there was a 90% mutation load [for a] very serious mitochondrial disease, they would still have an option to cancel the pregnancy,” she says.

Wells thinks the Newcastle team’s results are “generally reassuring.” He doesn’t think the trials should be paused. But he wants people to understand that mitochondrial donation is not without risk. “This can only be viewed as a risk reduction strategy, and not a guarantee of having an unaffected child,” he says.

And, as Mertes points out, there’s another option for women who carry mitochondrial DNA mutations: egg donation. Donor eggs fertilized with a partner’s sperm and transferred to a woman’s uterus won’t have her disease-causing mitochondria. 

That option won’t appeal to people who feel strongly about having a genetic link to their children. But Poulton asks: “If you know whose uterus you came out of, does it matter that the [egg] came from somewhere else?”

Meet Jim O’Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.’s right-hand man

When Jim O’Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Dylan Livingston was excited. As founder and CEO of the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), Livingston is a member of a community that seeks to extend human lifespan. O’Neill is “kind of one of us,” he told me shortly before O’Neill was sworn in as deputy secretary on June 9. “And now [he’s] in a position of great influence.”

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new right-hand man, O’Neill is expected to wield authority at health agencies that fund biomedical research and oversee the regulation of new drugs. And while O’Neill doesn’t subscribe to Kennedy’s most contentious beliefs—and supports existing vaccine schedules—he may still steer the agencies in controversial new directions. 

Although much less of a public figure than his new boss, O’Neill is quite well-known in the increasingly well-funded and tight-knit longevity community. His acquaintances include the prominent longevity influencer Bryan Johnson, who describes him as “a soft-spoken, thoughtful, methodical guy,” and the billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. 

In speaking with more than 20 people who work in the longevity field and are familiar with O’Neill, it’s clear that they share a genuine optimism about his leadership. And while no one can predict exactly what O’Neill will do, many in the community believe that he could help bring attention and resources to their cause and make it easier for them to experiment with potential anti-aging drugs. 

This idea is bolstered not just by his personal and professional relationships but also by his past statements and history working at aging-focused organizations—all of which suggest he indeed believes scientists should be working on ways to extend human lifespan beyond its current limits and thinks unproven therapies should be easier to access. He has also supported the libertarian idea of creating new geographic zones, possibly at sea, in which residents can live by their own rules (including, notably, permissive regulatory regimes for new drugs and therapies). 

“In [the last three administrations] there weren’t really people like that from our field taking these positions of power,” says Livingston, adding that O’Neill’s elevation is “definitely something to be excited about.”

Not everyone working in health is as enthusiastic. If O’Neill still holds the views he has espoused over the years, that’s “worrisome,” says Diana Zuckerman, a health policy analyst and president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC. 

“There’s nothing worse than getting a bunch of [early-stage unproven therapies] on the market,” she says. Those products might be dangerous and could make people sick while enriching those who develop or sell them. 

“Getting things on the market quickly means that everybody becomes a guinea pig,” Zuckerman says. “That’s not the way those of us who care about health care think.” 

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen puts it far more bluntly, describing O’Neill as “one of Trump’s worst picks” and saying that he is “unfit to be the #2 US health-care leader.” His libertarian views are “antithetical to basic public health,” the organization’s co-president said in a statement. Neither O’Neill nor HHS responded to requests for comment. 

“One of us”

As deputy secretary of HHS, O’Neill will oversee a number of agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s public health agency; and the Food and Drug Administration, which was created to ensure that drugs and medical devices are safe and effective. 

“It can be a quite powerful position,” says Patricia Zettler, a legal scholar at Ohio State University who specializes in drug regulation and the FDA.

It is the most senior role O’Neill has held at HHS, though it’s not the first. He occupied various positions in the department over five years during the early 2000s, according to his LinkedIn profile. But it is what he did after that has helped him cultivate a reputation as an ally for longevity enthusiasts. 

O’Neill appears to have had a close relationship with Thiel since at least the late 2000s. Thiel has heavily invested in longevity research and has said he does not believe that death is inevitable. In 2011 O’Neill referred to Thiel as his “friend and patron.” (A representative for Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.) 

O’Neill also served as CEO of the Thiel Foundation between 2009 and 2012 and cofounded the Thiel Fellowship, which offers $200,000 to promising young people if they drop out of college and do other work. And he spent seven years as managing director of Mithril Capital Management, a “family of long-term venture capital funds” founded by Thiel, according to O’Neill’s LinkedIn profile. 

O’Neill got further stitched into the longevity field when he spent more than a decade representing Thiel’s interests as a board member of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF), an organization dedicated to finding treatments for aging, to which Thiel was a significant donor. 

O’Neill even spent a couple of years as CEO of SRF, from 2019 to 2021, when its founder Aubrey de Grey, a prominent figure in the longevity field, was removed following accusations of sexual harassment. As CEO, O’Neill oversaw a student education program and multiple scientific research projects that focused on various aspects of aging, according to the organization’s annual reports. And in a 2020 SRF annual report, O’Neill wrote that Eric Hargan, then the deputy secretary of HHS, had attended an SRF conference to discuss “regulatory reform.” 

“More and more influential people consider aging an absurdity,” he wrote in the report. “Now we need to make it one.” 

While de Grey calls him “the devil incarnate”—probably because he believes O’Neill “incited” two women to make sexual harassment allegations against him—the many other scientists, biotech CEOs, and other figures in the longevity field contacted by MIT Technology Review had more positive opinions of O’Neill, with many claiming they were longtime friends or acquaintances of the new deputy secretary (though, at the same time, many were reluctant to share specific views about his past work). 

Longevity science is a field that’s long courted controversy, owing largely to far-fetched promises of immortality and the ongoing marketing of creams, pills, intravenous infusions, and other so-called anti-aging treatments that are not supported by evidence. But the community includes people along a spectrum of beliefs (with the goals of adding a few years of healthy lifespan to the population at one end and immortality at the other), and serious doctors and scientists are working to bring legitimacy to the field. 

Pretty much everyone in the field that I spoke with appears to be hopeful about what O’Neill will do now that he’s been confirmed. Namely, they hope he will use his new position to direct attention and funds to legitimate longevity research and the development of new drugs that might slow or reverse human aging. 

Johnson, whose extreme and expensive approaches to extending his own lifespan have made him something of a celebrity, calls O’Neill a friend and says they’ve “known each other for a little over 15 years.” He says he can imagine O’Neill setting a goal to extend the lifespans of Americans.

Eric Verdin, president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, says O’Neill has “been at the Buck several times” and calls him “a good guy”—someone who is “serious” and who understands the science of aging. He says, “He’s certainly someone who is going to help us to really bring the longevity field to the front of the priorities of this administration.”

Celine Halioua, CEO of the biotech company Loyal, which is developing drugs to extend the lifespan of dogs, echoes these sentiments, saying she has “always liked and respected” O’Neill. “It’ll definitely be nice to have somebody who’s bought into the thesis [of longevity science] at the FDA,” she says. 

And Joe Betts-LaCroix, CEO of the longevity biotech company Retro Biosciences, says he’s known O’Neill for something like 10 years and describes him as “smart and clear thinking.” “We’ve mutually been part of poetry readings,” he says. “He’s been definitely interested in wanting us as a society to make progress on age-related disease.”

After his confirmation, the A4LI LinkedIn account posted a photo of Livingston, its CEO, with O’Neill, writing that “we look forward to working with him to elevate aging research as a national priority and to modernize regulatory pathways that support the development of longevity medicines.”

“His work at SENS Research Foundation [suggests] to me and to others that [longevity] is going to be something that he prioritizes,” Livingston says. “I think he’s a supporter of this field, and that’s really all that matters right now to us.”

Changing the rules

While plenty of treatments have been shown to slow aging in lab animals, none of them have been found to successfully slow or reverse human aging. And many longevity enthusiasts believe drug regulations are to blame. 

O’Neill is one of them. He has long supported deregulation of new drugs and medical devices. During his first tour at HHS, for instance, he pushed back against regulations on the use of algorithms in medical devices. “FDA had to argue that an algorithm … is a medical device,” he said in a 2014 presentation at a meeting on “rejuvenation biotechnology.” “I managed to put a stop to that, at least while I was there.”

During the same presentation, O’Neill advocated lowering the bar for drug approvals in the US. “We should reform [the] FDA so that it is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety and let people start using them at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

This sentiment appears to be shared by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a recent podcast interview with Gary Brecka, who describes himself as a “longevity expert,” Kennedy said that he wanted to expand access to experimental therapies. “If you want to take an experimental drug … you ought to be able to do that,” he said in the episode, which was published online in May.

But the idea is divisive. O’Neill was essentially suggesting that drugs be made available after the very first stage of clinical testing, which is designed to test whether a new treatment is safe. These tests are typically small and don’t reveal whether the drug actually works.

That’s an idea that concerns ethicists. “It’s just absurd to think that the regulatory agency that’s responsible for making sure that products are safe and effective before they’re made available to patients couldn’t protect patients from charlatans,” says Holly Fernandez Lynch, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who is currently on sabbatical. “It’s just like a complete dereliction of duty.”

Robert Steinbrook, director of the health research group at Public Citizen, largely agrees that this kind of change to the drug approval process is a bad idea, though notes that he and his colleagues are generally more concerned about O’Neill’s views on the regulation of technologies like AI in health care, given his previous efforts on algorithms. 

“He has deregulatory views and would not be an advocate for an appropriate amount of regulation when regulation was needed,” Steinbrook says.

Ultimately, though, even if O’Neill does try to change things, Zettler points out that there is currently no lawful way for the FDA to approve drugs that aren’t shown to be effective. That requirement won’t change unless Congress acts on the matter, she says: “It remains to be seen how big of a role HHS leadership will have in FDA policy on that front.” 

A longevity state

A major goal for a subset of longevity enthusiasts relates to another controversial idea: creating new geographic zones in which people can live by their own rules. The goal has taken various forms, including “network states” (which could start out as online social networks and evolve into territories that make use of cryptocurrency), “special economic zones,” and more recently “freedom cities.” 

While specific details vary, the fundamental concept is creating a new society, beyond the limits of nations and governments, as a place to experiment with new approaches to rules and regulations. 

In 2023, for instance, a group of longevity enthusiasts met at a temporary “pop-up city” in Montenegro to discuss plans to establish a “longevity state”—a geographic zone with a focus on extending human lifespan. Such a zone might encourage healthy behaviors and longevity research, as well as a fast-tracked system to approve promising-looking longevity drugs. They considered Rhode Island as the site but later changed their minds.

Some of those same longevity enthusiasts have set up shop in Próspera, Honduras—a “special economic zone” on the island of Roatán with a libertarian approach to governance, where residents are able to make their own suggestions for medical regulations. Another pop-up city, Vitalia, was set up there for two months in 2024, complete with its own biohacking lab; it also happened to be in close proximity to an established clinic selling an unproven longevity “gene therapy” for around $20,000. The people behind Vitalia referred to it as “a Los Alamos for longevity.” Another new project, Infinita City, is now underway in the former Vitalia location.

O’Neill has voiced support for this broad concept, too. He’s posted on X about his support for limiting the role of government, writing “Get government out of the way” and, in reference to bills to shrink what some politicians see as government overreach, “No reason to wait.” And more to the point, he wrote on X last November, “Build freedom cities,” reposting another message that said: “I love the idea and think we should put the first one on the former Alameda Naval Air Station on the San Francisco Bay.” 

And up until March of last year, according to his financial disclosures, he served on the board of directors of the Seasteading Institute, an organization with the goal of creating “startup countries” at sea. “We are also negotiating with countries to establish a SeaZone (a specially designed economic zone where seasteading companies could build their platforms),” the organization explains on its website.

“The healthiest societies in 2030 will most likely be on the sea,” O’Neill told an audience at a Seasteading Institute conference in 2009. In that presentation, he talked up the benefits of a free market for health care, saying that seasteads could offer improved health care and serve as medical tourism hubs: “The last best hope for freedom is on the sea.”

Some in the longevity community see the ultimate goal as establishing a network state within the US. “That’s essentially what we’re doing in Montana,” says A4LI’s Livingston, referring to his successful lobbying efforts to create a hub for experimental medicine there. Over the last couple of years, the state has expanded Right to Try laws, which were originally designed to allow terminally ill individuals to access unproven treatments. Under new state laws, anyone can access such treatments, providing they have been through an initial phase I trial as a preliminary safety test.

“We’re doing a freedom city in Montana without calling it a freedom city,” says Livingston.

Patri Friedman, the libertarian founder of the Seasteading Institute, who calls O’Neill “a close friend,” explains that part of the idea of freedom cities is to create “specific industry clusters” on federal land in the US and win “regulatory carve-outs” that benefit those industries. 

A freedom city for longevity biotech is “being discussed,” says Friedman, although he adds that those discussions are still in the very early stages. He says he’d possibly work with O’Neill on “changing regulations that are under HHS” but isn’t yet certain what that might involve: “We’re still trying to research and define the whole program and gather support for it.”

Will he deliver?

Some libertarians, including longevity enthusiasts, believe this is their moment to build a new experimental home. 

Not only do they expect backing from O’Neill, but they believe President Trump has advocated for new economic zones, perhaps dedicated to the support of specific industries, that can set their own rules for governance. 

While campaigning for the presidency in 2023, Trump floated what seemed like a similar idea: “We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development,” he said in a recorded campaign speech. (The purpose of these new cities was somewhat vague. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people—all hardworking families—a new shot at homeownership and in fact the American dream,” he said.)

But given how frequently Trump changes his mind, it’s hard to tell what the president, and others in the administration, will now support on this front. 

And even if HHS does try to create new geographic zones in some form, legal and regulatory experts say this approach won’t necessarily speed up drug development the way some longevity enthusiasts hope. 

“The notion around so-called freedom cities, with respect to biomedical innovation, just reflects deep misunderstandings of what drug development entails,” says Ohio State’s Zettler. “It’s not regulatory requirements that [slow down] drug development—it’s the scientific difficulty of assessing safety and effectiveness and of finding true therapies.”

Making matters even murkier, a lot of the research geared toward finding those therapies has been subject to drastic cuts.The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world and has supported major scientific discoveries, including those that benefit longevity research. But in late March, HHS announced a “dramatic restructuring” that would involve laying off 10,000 full-time employees. Since Trump took office, over a thousand NIH research grants have been ended and the administration has announced plans to slash funding for “indirect” research costs—a move that would cost individual research institutions millions of dollars. Research universities (notably Harvard) have been the target of policies to limit or revoke visas for international students, demands to change curricula, and threats to their funding and tax-exempt status.

The NIH also directly supports aging research. Notably, the Interventions Testing Program is a program run by the National Institutes of Aging (a branch of the NIH) to find drugs that make mice live longer. The idea is to understand the biology of aging and find candidates for human longevity drugs.

The ITP has tested around five to seven drugs a year for over 20 years, says Richard Miller, a professor of pathology at the University of Michigan, one of three institutes involved in the program. “We’ve published eight winners so far,” he adds.

The future of the ITP is uncertain, given recent actions of the Trump administration, he says. The cap on indirect costs alone would cost the University of Michigan around $181 million, the university’s interim vice president for research and innovation said in February. The proposals are subject to ongoing legal battles. But in the meantime, morale is low, says Miller. “In the worst-case scenario, all aging research [would be stopped],” he says.

The A4LI has also had to tailor its lobbying strategy given the current administration’s position on government-funded research. Alongside its efforts to change Montana state law to allow clinics to sell unproven treatments, the organization had been planning to push for an all-new NIH institute dedicated to aging and longevity research—an idea that O’Neill voiced support for last year. But current funding cuts under the new administration suggest that it’s “not the ideal political climate for this,” says Livingston.

Despite their enthusiasm for O’Neill’s confirmation, this has all left many members of the longevity community, particularly those with research backgrounds, concerned about what the cuts mean for the future of longevity science.

“Someone like [O’Neill], who’s an advocate for aging and longevity, would be fantastic to have at HHS,” says Matthew O’Connor, who spent over a decade at SRF and says he knows O’Neill “pretty well.” But he adds that “we shouldn’t be cutting the NIH.” Instead, he argues, the agency’s funding should be multiplied by 10.

“The solution to curing diseases isn’t to get rid of the organizations that are there to help us cure diseases,” adds O’Connor, who is currently co-CEO at Cyclarity Therapeutics, a company developing drugs for atherosclerosis and other age-related diseases. 

But it’s still just too soon to confidently predict how, if at all, O’Neill will shape the government health agencies he will oversee. 

“We don’t know exactly what he’s going to be doing as the deputy secretary of HHS,” says Public Citizen’s Steinbrook. “Like everybody who’s sworn into a government job, whether we disagree or agree with their views or actions … we still wish them well. And we hope that they do a good job.”

Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work

When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But we still didn’t know what all those 3 billion genetic letters actually do. 

Now Google’s DeepMind division says it’s made a leap in trying to understand the code with AlphaGenome, an AI model that predicts what effects small changes in DNA will have on an array of molecular processes, such as whether a gene’s activity will go up or down. It’s just the sort of question biologists regularly assess in lab experiments.

“We have, for the first time, created a single model that unifies many different challenges that come with understanding the genome,” says Pushmeet Kohli, a vice president for research at DeepMind.

Five years ago, the Google AI division released AlphaFold, a technology for predicting the 3D shape of proteins. That work was honored with a Nobel Prize last year and spawned a drug-discovery spinout, Isomorphic Labs, and a boom of companies that hope AI will be able to propose new drugs.

AlphaGenome is an attempt to further smooth biologists’ work by answering basic questions about how changing DNA letters alters gene activity and, eventually, how genetic mutations affect our health. 

“We have these 3 billion letters of DNA that make up a human genome, but every person is slightly different, and we don’t fully understand what those differences do,” says Caleb Lareau, a computational biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who has had early access to AlphaGenome. “This is the most powerful tool to date to model that.”

Google says AlphaGenome will be free for noncommercial users and plans to release full details of the model in the future. According to Kohli, the company is exploring ways to “enable use of this model by commercial entities” such as biotech companies. 

Lareau says AlphaGenome will allow certain types of experiments now done in the lab to be carried out virtually, on a computer. For instance, studies of people who’ve donated their DNA for research often turn up thousands of genetic differences, each slightly raising or lowering the chance a person gets a disease such as Alzheimer’s.

Lareau says DeepMind’s software could be used to quickly make predictions about how each of those variants works at a molecular level, something that would otherwise require time-consuming lab experiments. “You’ll get this list of gene variants, but then I want to understand which of those are actually doing something, and where can I intervene,” he says. “This system pushes us closer to a good first guess about what any variant will be doing when we observe it in a human.”

Don’t expect AlphaGenome to predict very much about individual people, however. It offers clues to nitty-gritty molecular details of gene activity, not 23andMe-type revelations of a person’s traits or ancestry. 

“We haven’t designed or validated AlphaGenome for personal genome prediction, a known challenge for AI models,” Google said in a statement.

Underlying the AI system is the so-called transformer architecture invented at Google that also powers large language models like GPT-4. This one was trained on troves of experimental data produced by public scientific projects.

Lareau says the system will not broadly change how his lab works day to day but could permit new types of research. For instance, sometimes doctors encounter patients with ultra-rare cancers, bristling with unfamiliar mutations. AlphaGenome could suggest which of those mutations are really causing the root problem, possibly pointing to a treatment.

“A hallmark of cancer is that specific mutations in DNA make the wrong genes express in the wrong context,” says Julien Gagneur, a professor of computational medicine at the Technical University of Munich. “This type of tool is instrumental in narrowing down which ones mess up proper gene expression.” 

The same approach could apply to patients with rare genetic disease, many of whom never learn the source of their condition, even if their DNA has been decoded. “We can obtain their genomes, but we are clueless as to which genetic alterations cause the disease,” says Gagneur. He thinks AlphaGenome could give medical scientists a new way to diagnose such cases. 

Eventually, some researchers aspire to use AI to design entire genomes from the ground up and create new life forms. Others think the models will be used to create a fully virtual laboratory for drug studies. “My dream would be to simulate a virtual cell,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said this year. 

Kohli calls AlphaGenome a “milestone” on the road to that kind of system. “AlphaGenome may not model the whole cell in its entirety … but it’s starting to sort of shed light on the broader semantics of DNA,” he says.