Jeff Bezos seems really serious about fighting aging with science and with the greatest ambition of living as long as possible. The startup Altos Labs, which he supports, has just recruited another top scientist to smooth out the plan.
It is Hal Barron, a top scientist from the British pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline, who recently joined Altos Labs. He will help the startup's mission to fight aging.
Altos Labs itself is fully supported by Jeff Bezos and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. So far, they have secured USD 3 billion in funding.
"I am truly honored to be offered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead this unique company with a transformative mission to fight disease," said Barron.
Barron will join other top scientists already working there. There is Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine for stem cell research.
Then there's Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her role in the development of the gene editing tool, CRISPR. Barron will be the Chief Executive and Co-Chairman of Altos Labs.
Another well-known scientist involved was Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a Spanish biologist. "Aging is not an irreversible process," he said in 2018. In other words, he believes human aging can be prevented with the help of technology.
Altos Labs, which currently operates in Silicon Valley, San Diego and Cambridge in the UK, has a mission to develop technology to refresh the cells of the human body and ultimately prolong life. Maybe it will be applied first to Jeff Bezos.
The focus is on cell programming so that it can still repair the body despite aging, and even cure old age-related diseases such as dementia.
"We're building a company where many of the world's top scientists can collaborate and develop their research rapidly," said Altos Labs founder Richard Klausner, former chairman of the National Cancer Institute.
Jeff Bezos himself seems to want to live long. Previously, he invested in Unity Biotechnology, a company that is looking for drugs to fight aging. Some time ago in a farewell letter from Amazon, Bezos offered a sentence that was said by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
"Stopping death is something you have to work on. If living things don't actively work to prevent it, they will eventually fuse with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous things. This is what happens when they die," Bezos said at the time.
Indeed, the context is more so that Amazon as an online store giant can live a long time, not sink with the times. But according to Bezos, it is relevant for many things including individuals. Maybe also as a signal that he wants to live long.
"That message is fantastic and relevant for Amazon. I would argue that it is relevant for all companies and all institutions and for each of our individual lives," said Jeff Bezos.
