Since ancient times, people have dreamed of learning to fly through the air, see distant objects, get medicines for all diseases, penetrate the secrets of the universe and defeat death. Science and technology at the present stage have provided humanity with most of what it so enthusiastically dreamed of. However, death has not been defeated, except that the life expectancy of a person today is significantly higher than a thousand years ago.
Desperate people, however, do not stop their claims and continue to experiment. And the richest people in the world willingly spend incredible funds to fund research related to achieving immortality.
The research involves biologists, geneticists, programmers and many other specialists. And their activities are financed by the world's largest corporations. Among them is the famous Google, one of the founders of which is the former Russian Sergey Brin. In 2013, he and his partner Larry Page invested a billion dollars in a project called Calico. The full name of this organization is California Life Company. Google executives said that the project they launched will soon be able to extend human life by at least 500 years. The Calico's discovery caused a stir among the public, but it quickly died down. The reason for this was that all research of the new company is highly classified. Journalists are not allowed into the laboratory, its employees do not publish any scientific works, and those who are lucky enough to visit it,you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Google executives also do not comment.
Therefore, almost nothing is known about what research is carried out in the laboratory. The only thing that became known was experiments with naked mole rats. This is the name of the small African rodents leading an underground lifestyle. They almost never get cancer, do not feel pain, and can live ten times more than many other rodents. Naked mole rats are not only studied by Calico specialists, they have been of interest to many scientists around the world almost from the moment they were discovered.
Experiments with naked mole rats.
Despite the fact that the project is positioned as a large-scale scientific research (and perhaps it actually is), at the same time it represents one of those oddities that are found in the behavior of most of the richest people in the world. It is known that these people are very eccentric, especially when it comes to death and everything connected with it. Wealthy people often practice strange habits that they believe will help them live longer. Painfully they experience the death of loved ones.
One of the key "Google" engineers, Ray Kurzweil, in his almost 70 years, keeps everything that remains of his father - photographs, documents, bills, receipts, etc.; he hopes that in the future, science will be able to create virtual copies of people, and then the objects stored by him will be useful to restore the identity of his father in a computer format. Kurzweil bequeathed himself to be buried in liquid nitrogen: if the technologies mentioned appear only in the distant future, then it will be possible to extract the remaining brain from Kurzweil's body and connect it to a computer.
Ray Kurzweil.
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In fact, science has now only revealed the secret of how the human brain works. Scientists already understand something, but this is just a drop in the ocean. Therefore, the technologies that Kurzweil (and not only him) dreams of so much will appear very soon, if at all.
Bill Maris.
Bill Maris, one of the founders of Google Ventures, is terrified of the brain tumor from which his father died, or of some other incurable disease. Therefore, he leads a healthy lifestyle, visits the gym and doctors, even gave up meat. When he is left alone, he, by his own admission, is visited by obsessive fears associated with illness and death.
Larry Alison.
Larry Alison, the founder of Oracle, fears aging and cancer as he was impressed by the death of his adoptive mother. Becoming a billionaire, he began to donate huge funds to research on the problems of cancer treatment and overcoming aging.
Sergey Brin.
The same Sergei Brin learned that he has a gene in his body that is responsible for a predisposition to Parkinson's disease. This was one of the impetus for the creation of the mentioned Calico project.
So, the richest people in the world are afraid of aging and death and are ready to sacrifice any means to overcome these two "misfortunes". This is used not only by conscientious scientists, but also by various scammers and charlatans looking for easy ways to make money. There are usually much more fraudsters than real researchers. The secrecy of research and the non-interference of both the press and the wealthy customers themselves plays into their hands. They, like real scientists, declare that laboratories will not be able to produce any result earlier than in ten, twenty or more years. The well-known naivete of the rich of this world also does its job.
Aspiring science entrepreneurs and outright charlatans alike are fueled by the fears of wealthy people. The founder of Unitu Biotechnology, Nathaniel David, received a huge amount from Peter Thiel, a famous gay billionaire. He admired the fact that David in his 50 years looks at the age of no more than thirty. Because of this, Thiel is sure that David will certainly be able to find a recipe for fighting aging for absolutely all people (first of all for himself). On the contrary, Thiel, like other billionaires, is annoyed by people with an old appearance, including those who look older than their passport age.
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, has invested huge sums of money in experiments with immortality.
Thiel was soon joined by another wealthy man - Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon. From them and from several other entrepreneurs, David collected a fairly decent amount of money.
David's company does not feed its sponsors with completely sterile promises. She is experimenting with drugs that cure cancer in mice and prolong their life by 35 percent. This is encouraging for billionaires who do not notice the fact that David's drugs have not yet been tested on humans, and this is unlikely to happen in the near future.
While these developments are in the experimental stage, the rich are trying to rejuvenate themselves in other ways. These methods are sometimes quite extravagant. Blood transfusion from young donors, for example, enjoys a certain popularity: elderly billionaires claim that it significantly improves their well-being. Especially for them in Silicon Valley, there is a project called Ambrosia, which deals with such transfusions. At the same time, the medical effect of blood transfusions has not been proven, but the rich believe that it works.
The Ambrosia project is a blood transfusion from young donors to elderly billionaires.
In addition to biologists, physicians and programmers, various philosophers successfully “spud” rich people. They argue in their books that in the near future rich people will be able to ensure for themselves complete immortality, as well as give birth to a new race of people, more perfect than the current one. These thoughts are promoted by the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, whose books are popular with billionaires. Just think - he promises rich people not only immortality and deliverance from diseases, but also the opportunity to become gods! Is this not the ultimate dream of those who today, thanks to their capital, have risen above the rest of the world!
The investment activity of billionaires significantly changes the course of medical science, and science in general. In the recent past, the goal of science was to improve the life of humanity as a whole; the developed drugs quickly entered the market and became generally available. Now the most promising (and seemingly such) research is privatized, kept secret from the public eye and serves only its investors. Science is gradually turning away from the common man, becoming "elitist".
In fairness, it should be noted that so far this whole "battle for immortality" has not been crowned with success. Not a single drug has yet been launched into mass production (even on an elite scale), because research has not yet been completed. The release of the "death pill", most likely, humanity will have to wait for a long time. Therefore, secret scientific developments should not intimidate "ordinary" researchers working in government laboratories and publishing the results of their work in well-known scientific journals. This is where envy is most common: government spending on "open source" science has been steadily declining, while "closed" researchers and charlatans easily "bred" billionaires into fortunes.