Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Lab to Extend His Life

The secretive company is hiring academics who will be investigating how cells age and what can be done to slow down the aging process so that our tissues age more slowly. Offering scientists $1 million annual salaries, Altos will fund researchers with no imminent expectation of goods or earnings, at least at first, with the sole goal of doing "great science," and plans to open several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Japan. Any anti-aging treatment the scientists might discover would be worth billions.  

The goal of Altos Labs is to use biological reprogramming, which is the process of 'instructing cells' or introducing elements that allow cells to revert to a younger embryonic stage, effectively reversing their entire aging process. Calico, which draws comparisons to Altos, also has a lab that focuses on reprogramming and has published its first preprint on the topic earlier this year.

Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2021 for the discovery of reprogramming, will serve on the company's scientific advisory board as an unpaid senior scientist, and Spanish biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who became known for leading a team that implanted human cells into monkey embryos and predicted that humans could live for another 50 years, has also reportedly joined the company.

The pursuit of achieving immortality and reversing aging is an area of science that has attracted many of the world's wealthiest tech entrepreneurs, including Google co-founder Larry Page who helped to found Calico Labs, a longevity company aiming for immortality, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who also invested Unity Biotechnology. Scientists are actively looking at ways to turn back the clock on aging, and we might be closer to reverse aging than you think and the idea of death may become obsolete in the next 40-100 years.