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Altos Labs' Bezos Wants An Anti-Agathic (To Live Forever)
Altos Labs has received $270 million in funding; it's a biological reprogramming tech company currently looking to reverse the ageing process.
Also joining Altos Labs’ team is Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, who won notoriety for research into mixing human and monkey embryos and who has also predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years...
Rich people and billion dollar corporations are looking for the same thing in James Blish' famed Fifties tetrology Cities in Flight. A new technology called a spindizzy permitted people to explore the solar system and the stars, and a new drug made possible the long, long lives that were needed for the journey:
"So what we're looking for now is not an antibiotic - an anti-life drug - but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug..."
So, Jeff Bezos is working on the spacecraft part, and now he's working on the immortality part...
Just for fun, I wanted to throw in another reference to an original approach to living longer, from A Race Through Time by Donald Wandrei, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1933.
One method being studied by Altos Labs is whether this reprogramming could teach cells to revert back to their ‘stem cell’ origins, make them readapt to the skin and give it a more youthful appearance...
"...What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it's a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn't develop a single degenerative disease - but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they'd been set, like a clock, at birth...
(Read more about anti-agathics)
('A Race Through Time' by Donald Wandrei)
He describes conscious retarded animation
"...It means that the rate, the tempo of his existence will be slowed down to almost zero. But from his own standpoint, he'll be living a normal life. People outside will see him as a dead man, never moving, while he, inside, will see the whole world speed up and the Sun rush across the sky, and the seasons fly past in minutes. He'll be traveling in time, in a real sense..."
I suppose it's probably not active enough for billionaires...
Via ScreenshotMedia.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/1/2021)
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