CEO, entrepreneur, born in 1964, Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos, what do you have up your sleeve this time? 3-D printed bones? Mind-reading robots? Giving inanimate objects a chance to live? The answer is much more straightforward. Jeff is currently working on the elixir of life, of course!
All jokes aside, Jeff is actually on a mission to defeat death. He has recruited Hal Barron from GlaxoSmithKline to help lead Altos Labs besides him, investing a total of $3 billion into this project. Now, immediately two questions pop into mind: how is he planning on achieving such a hard task, and what lead him to do this in the first place?
As much as we don’t know what Jeff and Altos Labs are up to, we can still roughly estimate what they will take into consideration. Firstly, aging doesn’t only occur at a physical level. Many factors contribute to aging. The easiest to wrap our heads around is cell division. Let’s take skin cells as an example. A newborn’s skin cells divide 80–90 times before stopping. However, the cells of an elderly person only divide roughly 20 times. Likewise, aging is noticeable in our genes too. Our genes are altered over time by chemicals and many other factors. These epigenetic changes build up as we age.
Now that we have covered why we age, it is time to dive into why Jeff wants to stop aging. We are not exactly sure what his intentions are. He is one of the richest people in the world, maybe it was on his bucket list to live forever. Honestly, if I were him, I wouldn't want to let go of that much money forever either! As of now, there is nothing we can do but merely make theories on this subject.
However, everything aside, is immortality all rainbows and butterflies? Of course not. Even the thought of it makes some of us intimidated. Death has always been feared by many but disrupting the life cycle could have serious consequences, if Jeff ever decides to introduce his discovery to the world. It’s a yin yang situation. You live to die. What will interrupting this harmony cause?
