Yuri Milner is a Russian entrepreneur and physicist, born in Moscow but with Israeli citizenship, who became a billionaire for having invested, many years ago, in Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and other successful startups. In 2011 there was a lot of talk about him because he had bought a kind of palace in Los Altos Hills, near Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, paying something like 100 million dollars. If we talk about it, it is because the authoritative MIT magazine revealed that last October Milner invited a group of scientists to Los Altos for a summit, at the time secret, which had the aim of truly changing the world: finding the formula for rejuvenate. We were still in the midst of the pandemic and those present all had masks and anti-covid tests, but there were not a few connected by videoconference. After all, Milner is no stranger to such sorties: he is the patron of an annual three million dollar award dedicated to those who achieve a great scientific step forward.
But finding the formula to rejuvenate is not just a step forward: it is an absolute revolution, a distortion of the direction of life. It would respond to the need not to become immortal but to have a kind of eternal youth as long as we are alive. Eliminate old age while becoming old by birth. A wonderful madness, but Milner is convinced that through biotechnology it is possible. The summit must have gone pretty well because in the meantime a startup, Altos Labs, has been born, with offices in the United States and the United Kingdom, which aims to create a global network of scientists – super paid, they say – with the aim of finding a way to reverse the biological clock of life. Among the financiers of Altos Labs there would also be Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, through his financial vehicle Bezos Expeditions (who did not comment).
This is not surprising at all because already in 2013 one of the founders of Google, Larry Page, founded Calico Labs with more or less the same goal. Since then Calico has disappeared from the radar until last spring when a first scientific paper appeared on the web awaiting review for official publication, entitled “Partial reprogramming restores youthful gene expression through transient suppression of cell identity”. I mean, that stuff there. As the MIT magazine that told the story notes “young people want to get rich, and the rich want to become young”. We saw it a few days ago when the great return to the scene of a legendary pop group, Abba, was announced: a new record has been released and soon a digital tour will start where Abba will sing on stage today but with the appearance they had forty Years ago. Hundreds of cameras connected to thousands of sensors are at work to create these special effects, said the BBC, which film their every move to recreate perfect but young digital avatars. How will it be? Hard to say: when Martin Scorsese tried a similar technology to rejuvenate Robert De Niro in “The Irishman” the result was a De Niro with a very young face that moved like a big bear: not convincing in short. But let’s talk about special effects: Altos Labs, Calico and the other startups that focus on cellular reprogramming want to turn back the clock of life seriously. Like Benjamin Button, the protagonist of another film, beautiful this time, who is born old and dies young, but does not become happy for this reason.
Youth is indeed a physical, biological fact linked to the efficiency of our organs, to the elasticity of muscles and joints, but it is also a mental, psychological issue. An attitude towards life. You are young, in my opinion, as long as dreams are more important than memories. When this scale reverses, a new phase begins. And even if you look young, you are no longer young.
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