medical advancements Archives

‘We’ll be living and working to 120 – and it will start within a decade’ says doctor to the stars

It is a traditional Jewish birthday greeting: “May you live to be 120.” And so far, only one person in all of history is officially recorded as having made it that far.

But now a doctor tells The Post that living a full, healthy life to 120 will be attainable — starting this decade.

Dr. Ernst von Schwarz believes that rapid advances in stem cells mean living and even working far beyond current expectations is entirely within humanity’s grasp and that 150 will be normal by the end of the century.

The only downside: stem cells will not work alone. If you want to benefit, now is the time to start eating healthily and exercising regularly.

And, he warns, it might be too late for some — 30 is when you really need to change your life.

“I believe that we can create prolongation of life,” von Schwarz tells The Post. “Probably within a couple of years people can live to 120, 150 years if not longer than that.

“And not just as bed-bound non-communicating individuals, but really as active individuals who can participate in social life, professional life and have a quality of life. Because that’s the goal.”

Dr. Ernst von Schwarz is a triple board-certified internist, cardiologist, and heart transplant cardiologist. Margot Judge for NY Post

The provocative claim may seem to stretch credulity.

The only person acknowledged officially as living past 120 was France’s Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days — and even that record has been questioned, with theories circulating that Calment’s daughter was actually posing as her.

But von Schwarz is throwing his full weight — as a triple board-certified internist, cardiologist, and heart transplant cardiologist at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the Heart Institute of the Southern California Hospital — behind the idea that a healthy 120 years can be our allotted span.

Human stem cells are the next frontier of medicine, says von Schwarz, with the potential to make a life expectancy of 120 healthy years normal, starting this decade.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

There is, he says, a quiet revolution going on inside medicine.

“In the last few years, we have shifted from what we call reactive medicine to what we now call regenerative medicine using mainly stem cell therapies,” von Schwarz explains.

“Even though stem cells are not FDA-approved, that’s the future of medicine where we are able to repair damage. And by repairing damage we can prolong life, or even reduce certain processes of aging.”

Von Schwarz makes the claim in a new book, “Secrets of Immortality,” which picks up where his previous one, “The Secret World of Stem Cell Therapy,” leaves off.

Jeanne Calment, of Arles, Frances, is the only human being recorded as having lived past 120. She died in 1997, aged 122. Some claims of exceptional longevity have been made but without enough documentation to satisfy scientists or the Guinness Book of Records.
AFP via Getty Images

He is also prescribing stem cells himself. Celebrities clamor for Dr. von Schwarz’s anti-aging facials before the Oscars and Emmys.

While he wouldn’t disclose his patients’ names, his book publicist touts his supporters as including Frank Stallone, Jeff Fahey, Lisa Gastineau, Josie Davis, Drea De Matteo, and Fabio.

“We inject stem cells into their face, and they glow,” he says. “The process repairs superficial skin damage and regenerates collagen in the face. After a few days, they look 5 to 10 years younger.”

Von Schwarz is no stranger to the celebrity scene: his wife is actress Angela Oakenfold, the ex-wife of DJ Paul Oakenfold.

Source: https://nypost.com/2023/09/23/doctor-stem-cells-will-extend-life-to-120-from-this-decade/

The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever

Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur and Founder of Blueprint, poses for a portrait at his home. Johnson follows a strict diet and lifestyle routine in an attempt to reduce his biological age. Philip Cheung for TIME

In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, similar homes, filled with mortals spending their finite days on the planet eating pizza with friends, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, and binging late-night television. Halfway down the street, there’s a cavernous black modern box. This is where Bryan Johnson is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”

Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it.

Outsourcing the management of his body means defeating what Johnson calls his “rascal mind”—the part of us that wants to eat ice cream after dinner, or have sex at 1 a.m., or drink beer with friends. The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs. Johnson says the data compiled by his doctors suggests that Blueprint has so far given him the bones of a 30-year-old, and the heart of a 37-year-old. The experiment has “proven a competent system is better at managing me than a human can,” Johnson says, a breakthrough that he says is “reframing what it means to be human.” He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice.

But when I showed up at Johnson’s house one Monday in August, I wasn’t really there to figure out if his elaborate age-defying strategies actually worked. I assumed that given my family history of cancer and personal fondness for pepperoni pizza, I probably won’t live long enough to find out. Instead, I spent three days observing Johnson to learn what a life run by an algorithm would look like, and whether the “next evolution of being human” would have any real humanity at all. If living like Johnson meant you could live forever—a big if!—would it even be worth it?

Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson follows a strict diet and lifestyle routine in an attempt to reduce his biological age.

Kate Tolo opens the door to Johnson’s house and welcomes me inside. Tolo, a 27-year-old former fashion strategist who is originally from Australia, is Johnson’s chief marketing officer and most loyal disciple. Two months ago, she became the first person aside from Johnson to commit to Blueprint, making her the first test of how Blueprint works on a female body. Tolo is known as “Blueprint XX.”

Source : https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality

The Immortals: meet the billionaires forking out for eternal life

‘I’ve never paid more attention to what he’s eating’ … Bryan Johnson and his son Talmage, whose blood plasma was infused into his own. Photograph: Magda Wosinska/Magdalena Wosinska

A fascinating and often terrifying new podcast delves into the lengths ‘longevity superstars’ will go to make 90 the new 50, from swapping blood with the young to designing the first ‘post-humans’

Hollie Richardson
Hollie Richardson
Tue 5 Sep 2023 15.29 BST
450
Until recently, Bryan Johnson was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to infuse one litre of his teenage son’s youthful plasma into his own ageing blood stream every month. “I’ve never paid more attention to what he’s eating … because that was going into my body,” the 46-year-old American tech entrepreneur says on new podcast The Immortals. He also pumped his own plasma into his 70-year-old father’s body to help improve his declining physical and cognitive health: “It was one of the most meaningful moments in his entire life. And it was the same for me.” Johnson continues to pay $2m a year for a research team to investigate how we can live longer – and he is certainly not the only rich guy in Silicon Valley dedicated to the search for eternal life.

“It took us ages to find somebody to talk to us,” says technology reporter and psychologist Aleks Krotoski, who hosts the BBC Radio 4 series. “Strangely, people who take the blood of the young are a bit reserved … ” But Johnson had just begun using an algorithm to prevent biological ageing, which sifts through all research on longevity to create the best treatment plan and he was using his own body as a petri dish for it. Doctors have told Johnson he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of an 18-year-old and he was up for talking about this. “He was very reserved at the beginning but then there was a moment,” says Krotoski. “Suddenly I saw the geek in him: the delightfully obsessive, very clever [man]. He no longer felt ‘other’; this was just his jam. If you follow him on Twitter, he’s hilarious.”

Johnson is just one of the extraordinary people Krotoski speaks to who are trying to defy death. It is a ludicrous, fascinating and at times terrifying investigation – one she started as part of her PhD in 2003. The dawn of the internet meant “it felt like all these sci-fi dreams could be made possible”, including technological singularity – technology merging with humanity to create a “post-human existence”. Ultimately, she says, this means “we shall be immortal beings”. At the time, like everybody else, Krotoski wrote this off as “mad”. Two decades later, though, the fringe idea is entering the mainstream: “It has become entrenched in Silicon Valley, particularly because technology has become so advanced in the last five years.”

Plasma transfusions to prevent ageing became a reality in 2017 with Jesse Karmazin’s vampiric startup, Ambrosia. Hundreds of clients, with a median age of 60, would pay $8,000 (£6,200) to take part in what was essentially still a trial. However, it fell out of vogue a couple of years later when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a statement: “We’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.” It damaged the reputation of longevity research – but the people behind its Frankenstein origins are still known as “longevity superstars”.

Using his body as a petri dish … Bryan Johnson. Photograph: Magdalena Wosinska

Michael and Irina Conboy are professors at the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In groundbreaking research in 2005, they stitched together the bodies of old mice and young mice, like conjoined twins, and found that their combined blood “had a younger profile”. This, says Michael over Zoom, presents an opportunity in age-related illness research. “Is it like an oil change for a car – will it run a lot better?” he asks. “If you can get rid of the garbage that is floating around in the blood, does the old body restore itself to health?”

The pair are quick to add that this isn’t going to have a Benjamin Button effect, and the research “wasn’t geared to make old people young” – even if this idea is being bio-hacked around the world. “It was clear that there were improvements after a couple of procedures,” says Irina. “[But] it’s not really healthy or rejuvenating to drain somebody of 70% of their blood and replace it with something.” She warns people to wait until more research is done.

Still, they believe that in the next five years we will see huge advancements in prolonging life treatments – including taking a pill instead of getting blood, and a “fountain of middle age”. “People will be able to have this high quality, productive life where they are healthy for many more decades,” says Irina. “If people choose to, they could be in their late 30s [for much longer].”

The quest for immortality doesn’t stop there. The podcast becomes even more mind-blowing as it digs deeper, from the cryptocurrency founder who created a “longevity city” in Montenegro because he believes we have a moral responsibility to stop ageing, to AI that is already being engineered to create a “post-human being” merged with machines. Last year, Amazon founder and third richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, reportedly invested in Altos Labs, a startup working on “cellular rejuvenation programming”. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has invested millions in the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit that aims to make “90 the new 50 by 2030”.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/05/the-immortals-meet-the-billionaires-forking-out-for-eternal-life