Google has taken a swing at immortality
Google promised people a 500-year life
Vladimir Gelaev, "Newspaper.Ru»
The president of Google's venture division promised to extend a person's life to 500 years. Department of Science "Newspapers.Ru" tells whether it is possible and what is required for this.
The issue of life extension has been of concern to people throughout the existence of mankind, and in recent years it has become one of the scientific trends. Therefore, large corporations like Google have also joined it, which 15 years ago it was quite difficult to suspect of interest in such issues. And now they loudly declared that a person is able to live 500 years.
This is exactly what Bill Maris, president of Google Ventures (Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality), told Bloomberg in an interview. "I am sure that breakthroughs in medicine and the development of biomechanics will allow a person to live up to 500 years," he said.
These words of his were immediately replicated by journalists. Bloomberg itself even noted that Bill Maris, who recently turned 40, looks at most 19 years old. And she dresses appropriately. But many journalists have kept silent about the fact that Google believes that a person can live "only" up to 120 years without outside help. To do this, he must lead a proper lifestyle and avoid bad habits. And only then he will need help from biomechanics.
"There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley. But if you have a choice – to earn money or to work on prolonging human life – which would you prefer?" – Bill Maris summed up.
Meanwhile, Google Ventures has promised to invest $425 million in startups that are engaged in the fight against aging. This time, $125 million was specifically allocated to startups operating in Europe.
"In the USA, first of all in California, there are powerful scientific funds and investors ready to finance developments in the field of prolonging a healthy human life. In Europe, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis is organizing the second symposium on geroprotectors this year, and is also researching potential geroprotectors itself," he told the newspaper.En" Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Radiobiology and Gerontology of the Institute of Biology of the Komi National Research Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Genetics of Life Expectancy and Aging at MIPT, Leading Researcher at the V.A. Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Moskalev.
According to him, only in the last year and a half, three promising startups have appeared in the United States, whose mission is to combat aging – Calico with the support of Google, Human longevity, founded by the famous geneticist Craig Venter, and InSilico Medicine, a startup in Baltimore with Russian roots.
"This indicates an explosion of interest in the topic in the first world countries. However, it is too early to talk about a genuine revolution in the fight against aging. As you know, the investor expects returns "here and now", a maximum of five years. However, many developments are still at the stage of fundamental research, in which no one invests," Alexey Moskalev said.
He added that gene therapy and pharmacological interventions in aging are being tested on model animals, in a relatively small number of underfunded laboratories. Clinical trials and their release to the market are hindered by the imperfection of the legislative framework that does not recognize aging as a disease requiring treatment. The lack of a system of markers of a person's biological age, which would allow to say about the effectiveness of therapy in a real time, also makes it very difficult to implement, the expert concluded.
Recently, Alex Zhavoronkov, associate professor at MIPT and CEO of InSilico Medicine, which invents anti-aging drugs, argued with his colleague Dmitry Kaminsky, senior partner of the Hong Kong venture fund Deep Knowledge Ventures, for a million dollars, which of the two will live longer. The purpose of the bet is to prove that the researchers themselves believe in what they are doing.
Alex Zhavoronkov told the newspaper.Ru", that unlike the progress in information technology, where the transition time from a laboratory breakthrough to the user market can take less than a year, progress in biomedicine reaches the clinic much more slowly, since even small changes in existing methods must undergo expensive and long-term tests.
"More than 10 years ago, I decided to leave a very well–paid position as director of a leading company in the computer graphics market in Central and Eastern Europe, which was bought by AMD, in order to devote the rest of my life to studying methods of its extension. At that time, there were only a few books on the biology of aging. There are thousands of them now," he said.
Alex Zhavoronkov came to the conclusion that successful experiments on animals do not guarantee success in humans, and in order to get results as quickly as possible and with minimal risk, together with colleagues he created the company InSilico Medicine, which works with a large amount of biological data obtained from different human organs both in the aging process and in various diseases. "Our task is a computer search for drugs that minimize the difference between young and old tissues in various organs," he said.
Due to the fact that it will take years to confirm the effectiveness of such a method, InSilico Medicine has developed a business model that allows working with large pharmaceutical companies to reposition their drugs that have already passed clinical trials for more diseases. In the process, new algorithms for drug selection are being developed, young tissues are compared with old ones, and attempts are being made to identify the causes of age-dependent pathologies.
"We do many calculations on powerful NVIDIA GPUs. That is, it was possible not to leave the IT industry to study aging," Alex Zhavoronkov summed up.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru10.03.2015