Inside the billion-dollar meeting for the mega-rich who want to live forever
By Jessica Hamzelou,
MIT Technology Review
| 11. 16. 2022
“Who wants to live forever?” The immortal words of Freddie Mercury blast from the speakers as blue lights swivel around the room and a smoky mist floats up from the stage in front of me. If the audience is anything to go by, the answer to his question is: the mega rich.
I’d come to Gstaad, a swanky ski-resort town in the Swiss Alps, to attend the first in-person Longevity Investors Conference. Over the two-day event, scientists and biotech founders made the case for various approaches to prolonging the number of years we might spend in good health. And the majority of them were trying to win over deep-pocketed investors.
There were 150 people at this meeting, and its organizers told me that 120 of them were investors with millions or even billions of dollars at their disposal—and at least a million dollars ready to pump into a longevity project. Plenty of would-be attendees were denied a $4,500 ticket because they didn’t meet this criterion, an event co-organizer tells me.
The conference was unlike any academic meeting I’ve ever attended...
Related Articles
By Jonathan D. Grinstein, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.26.2024
Partial screenshot from The Bridge Recombination Mechanism
video by The Arc Institute on YouTube (CC)
Buried in a family of mobile genetic elements, Arc Institute researchers led by Patrick Hsu, PhD, have discovered an RNA-guided system that enables modular...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 05.31.2024
Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not...
By Liz Szabo, The New York Times | 05.29.2024
By the time Rena Barrow-Wells gave birth to her fourth baby in 2020, she was well-versed in caring for a child with cystic fibrosis. She was also experienced in fighting for a diagnosis of the disease, which runs in families...
By Alison Snyder, Axios | 06.06.2024
Gene editing's next chapter will be focused on tackling cancers and more common diseases, uncovering new details about aging and other fundamental aspects of biology and editing RNA, top scientists in the field said this week.
The big picture: ...