Tech Titans’ Latest Project: Defy Death
By Ariana Eunjung Cha,
Washington Post
| 04. 04. 2015
Untitled Document
Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city’s soaring skyline, Peter Thiel was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical.
It was 2004 and Thiel had recently made a tidy fortune selling PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay. He had spent what he wanted on himself — a posh penthouse suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and a silver Ferrari — and was now soliciting ideas to do good with his money.
Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist and biogerontologist who had garnered attention for doubling the life span of a roundworm by disabling a single gene. Aubrey de Grey, a British computer scientist turned theoretician who prophesied that medical advances would stop aging. And Larry Page, co-founder of an Internet search darling called Google that had big ideas to improve health through the terabytes of data it was collecting.
The chatter at the dinner party meandered from the value of chocolate in one’s diet to the toll of disease...
Related Articles
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.27.2024
Physician-scientist Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, has been a mainstay in the genome editing field for more than two decades. He trained at Stanford University Medical School before completing his residency and hematology/oncology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute...
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...
By Peter Aldhous, Scientific American | 07.02.2024
In June a notice posted on the website of the journal Nature set a new scientific record. It withdrew what is now the most highly cited research paper ever to be retracted.
The study, published in 2002 by Catherine Verfaillie...
By Gilma Avalos, NBC | 07.03.2024
Image by Josh Appel from Unsplash
The dream of becoming parents is turning into a nightmare for hundreds of people caught up in a surrogacy money scandal.
Some of the individuals are facing infertility or medical challenges, seeing surrogacy as...