The Longevity Skeptic
At the Longevity Investors Conference last October in Switzerland, speakers described breakthrough therapies being developed to manipulate genes for longer lifespans. Swag bags bestowed pill bottles promising super longevity, stirring hopes for centuries of youth.
Then Charles Brenner took the stage. The biochemist from City of Hope National Medical Center, in Los Angeles, addressed these ideas and treatments one by one, picking them apart, explaining that they’re based on faulty research. We can’t stop aging, he told the crowd. We can’t use longevity genes to stay young because getting older is a fundamental property of life.
Scanning their faces, he saw puzzled expressions. Mission accomplished.
Believing we can rewrite the manual for human lifespan is like believing in the tooth fairy.
Over the past year, Brenner has been challenging life-extension theories on Twitter, YouTube, and the conference circuit, where he’s been introduced as the “longevity skeptic.” He resembles an eagle—he’s hairless on top with an aquiline nose and penetrating gaze—an appearance that goes well with his astute intellect, tenacity, and willingness to fly solo as one of the most boisterous critics of anti-aging science.
Brenner tells people the reasons for suspicion date back to Herodotus’ made-up account of the Fountain of Youth in 425 B.C. Some things never change, he says, even as the field of aging research has picked up scientific momentum in recent years. Investments in longevity startups are predicted to jump from $40 billion to $600 billion in the next three years. Lured by funding from digital age tycoons such as Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, top scientists are aligning with companies to advance their work.
Brenner is critical of several big promises emanating from these companies and researchers, such as claims that cellular reprogramming could halt aging. He dismisses from gerontologist Aubrey de Grey that anti-aging therapies will keep us above ground for multiple centuries. But perhaps no scientist in the field of aging has attracted Brenner’s criticisms more than David Sinclair, the. Sinclair is working on therapies that he says could slow human aging to a crawl, allowing us to live decades longer.
