
Jim Mellon and high-profile partners roll the dice on an anti-aging upstart - discombobulate
https://endpts.com/british-billionaire-jim-mellon-and-high-profile-partners-roll-the-dice-on-an-anti-aging-upstart/
======
easytiger
An interesting area investment wise. Really don't know what to make of it as I
do see a great deal of risk in these companies personally, that somehow others
are happy with.

No real products, no real roadmap. Jim has also made some very bad pharma
calls in the past and had some very clueless people running his pharma
companies. That said he looks to have done some real research.

> The primary game plan at Juvenescence, explains Bailey, is to come up with
> various operations engaged in developing new anti-aging drugs

> Juvenescence Bio will be charged with building the pipeline, says Bailey, in
> part with the molecules that will be identified through the AI venture.

To me that's a warning sign. I like the ambition. This is Elon Musk level
stuff. But he isn't crazy enough to deal in unproven potential outcomes. He
knew rockets can go to space, he knew electric cars can drive, he knew
batteries can store energy/money. He knew what he could sell when he solved
the issues

Here i'm not sure they know what they will have in the end and that would
scare me off.

~~~
colbyh
this is the difference between basic and applied research - Musk is doing
great work in the applied research space. taking proven models and bringing
them to market, bringing down costs, etc.

anti-aging research is still in the basic phase - it might be decades before
techniques can be applied with any sort of scale. in that sense you really do
need huge institutions (or in this case, billionaires) to fund it all. retail
investors like you (assuming) and I really can't get involved at the scale or
timelines these sorts of ventures require.

~~~
easytiger
Indeed. Very pleased of course someone is willing to take risks.

This is how we ended up with railways, undersea telegraph, commercial
commodotised flight and so on.

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idlewords
This is an interesting case where it's hard to separate rationality from human
nature. On the one hand, people don't want to lose their investment. On the
other hand, people really, really don't want to die. So as billionaires get
older, they are going to feel a lot of psychological pressure to believe life-
extension startup stories they might not find as credible in another context.

I think one nice way to solve this is to require a small, objective proof of
concept for startups claiming to have a rejuvenating technology.

I propose they solve baldness. It will not only demonstrate the technology,
but remove the funding problem entirely.

~~~
jacquesm
> This is an interesting case where it's hard to separate rationality from
> human nature.

The Roman Catholic Church has had this thing sewn up for at least a
millennium. Giving large amounts of money to the church on your deathbed is a
surefire way to open the gates of heaven, or so I'm told.

~~~
tptacek
Maybe in the time of the Medicis. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't give much
of a fuck whether you give them a dime today. It's not that kind of
organization.

~~~
jacquesm
Haha. That's so funny. You should have been around when my grandmother died.
They took her for a pretty penny. Not that I care because I didn't want any
money from her anyway but they sure know who their marks are.

In Poland just about every interaction with the church has a price tag
attached to it, ditto in Spain. There's a reason the Vatican is lined with
gold and it has precious little to do with the Medicis and everything to do
with tithe, real estate, compound interest and outright scams.

~~~
idlewords
jacquesm is right, the Polish church is a complete racket. A small example—my
father wanted to be buried in the family crypt in Warsaw. This meant having to
pay off his parish (he was not a churchgoer, but everyone is assigned a
parish), and then pay off the parish the cemetery was in to allow the transfer
(in addition to all the regular burial fees).

The most popular conservative priest in Poland drives a Maybach.

Priests in Poland will go door to door once or twice a year basically
collecting envelopes. Not paying them complicates your life.

~~~
tptacek
That is deeply fucked up.

~~~
jacquesm
Not as bad as in Romania, but there it is the Orthodox church rather than the
Roman Catholic one. They're spending 100 million euros fleeced from some of
the poorest people in the EU on a new church right now just to it will be the
biggest in a country that could _really_ use that money in better ways.

[https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-peoples-salvation-
ca...](https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-peoples-salvation-cathedral/)

Not bad, money straight from the Romanian government to the Church to build
more churches.

[http://www.ibtimes.com/why-poverty-stricken-romania-
building...](http://www.ibtimes.com/why-poverty-stricken-romania-building-so-
many-churches-1375913)

------
reasonattlm
If Juvenescence puts serious effort into senolytics, then this will be useful.
The more the merrier in that field to join Unity Biotechnology, Oisin
Biotechnologies, SIWA Therapeutics, etc.

Everything else outside the SENS portfolio that can be accomplished via drug
discovery to alter the operation of metabolism, focusing on known targets such
as mTOR, is most likely a pointless waste of time and energy. It has been a
pointless waste of time and energy for the past two decades, and I don't see
that changing any time soon. The approach of trying to mimic calorie
restriction or upregulate autophagy or mess with growth hormone/insulin
metabolism or mimic exercise has very definite upper bounds on effectiveness.

The longevity dividend promise of "spend billions to add a couple of years of
life expectancy by 2040" is underwhelming, and anyone out there talking about
drug discovery to alter metabolism to slow aging is in that camp.

If billions are to be spent, then use them to follow the SENS approach of
damage repair, not tinkering the system to slightly slow down the pace of
damage accumulation. Only damage repair, such as via senolytics to clear
senescent cell accumulation, can in principle produce rejuvenation of the old
and greatly extended healthy life spans, more than just a few years.

It is not a coincidence that senescent cell clearance has in a few short
years, just as soon as people started to try it in earnest, proven itself far
more effective and reliable and useful than the past 20 years of people trying
to mimic calorie restriction or boost autophagy.

~~~
kanzure
I think most of this money would be better spent focused on reducing the cost
of life extension research, like essential tooling, not spelunking through
combinatorial search space for drugs. Granted, this is more of an engineering
approach, so I could see why biologists might prefer tinkering with oxidation
pathways. If a synthetic genome costs $40 million then how are you going to
try out 1,000 low-aging variants of the genome without spending an impossibly
large amount of money? The cost centers need to be ruthlessly attacked--
sequencing, synthesis, combinatorial array testing, scale-up of arbitrary
biomolecule production, debugging methodologies (optogenetics has been a
tremendous success), etc.

~~~
true_religion
$40 million times 1000, is forty billion dollars. This is less than half the
networth of Bill Gates.

If a single-mans fortune could potentially fund the entire thing, then for
sure a coalition of wealth could easily fund it if there was even a mild
guarantee for success.

~~~
kanzure
Well, low-aging phenotypes (and genotypes) have already been discovered in the
population. Doesn't make you invincible, of course. How mild of a guarantee
are you looking for, again?

------
narrator
It's great how trying to live forever went from being considered impossible to
something that Google and many billionaires are investing a lot of money into.
I think Aubrey de Grey had a lot to do with this by making the SENS approach
which has helped properly characterize the types of cellular damage
attributable to aging.

~~~
idlewords
There is nothing new about rich people pouring massive resources into promises
of immortality.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_life)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids)

~~~
narrator
Don't forget Gilgamesh, possibly the oldest work of fiction in existence, has
a living forever theme.

------
distantsounds
I've had my immortality rings from Alex Chiu for years now. They should just
talk to him.

[http://alexchiu.com/](http://alexchiu.com/)

~~~
desireco42
:) I forgot about that. Yeah, he needs some serious backing.

------
cupcakestand
tl;dr

British billionaire Jim Mellon wants to launch a company named Juvenescence
with plans to make a big splash in anti-aging research.

------
RichardHeart
Tier 1 entrepreneur gives the masses what they want. Tier 2 gives the masses
what they should want, and makes them want it. Tier 3 saves their lives so
they have time to learn to want better things. Med tech is best tech. It also
relies on much of the fun tech.

------
dghughes
I'm worried about my brain more than the other parts of my body. I can do
something to stay relatively health but my brain will shrink into a raisin no
matter what I do.

------
matt_wulfeck
Nothing new here. The rich always fund the search for the fountain of youth,
and yet they always die.

Thank goodness.

------
mark024
I would spend half a billion and for myself first and foremost, why would I
save money for, to be the richest guy in the graveyard.

------
victor106
Death will become optional at some point. But it will be only for the rich.
Death was always this great equalizer. With that not being the case there will
be a revolt on the size and proportion humanity would not have seen. how do we
deal with that?

~~~
ImSkeptical
Technology is going to force us to deal with some age old questions. There is
a line I remember from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" that
goes something like "There is neither art nor skill at arms which will protect
one man from one hundred of his fellows." In context, it's referring to the
fact that even Roman emperors could be murdered by a relatively small
coalition of men. No matter how rich and powerful a person is, a few people
working together and willing to sacrifice can kill that rich and powerful
person.

Technology seems to imperil this age old truth. What about an immortal
billionaire with drones, AI, and a robot army?

The coming elite will have power that no human individual, or even
organization, has ever had. We should figure out how to deal with that - but I
don't really expect the common folk will. Instead, we may just have to hope
that our future billionaire deities are benevolent.

~~~
true_religion
Could the rich raise armies and hold off the rest of the world? Yes... but
only if the rest of the world has no technology or monies of its own, and
additionally none of the 'rich' are in opposition that that single renegades
plan.

------
fithisux
Anti-aging is for future. For now

ban smokes/alcohol tax fat/sugar

for those causing accidents, make them pay the hospital bills and eliminate
unemployment. Law cannot stop injustice, which reduces quality of life, but
can make people feel that someone is by their side, which increases quality of
life.

~~~
aggie
> ban smokes/alcohol

That didn't even work with a Constitutional amendment. If culture doesn't
change, you'll have to live with it - there's no legal remedy.

> tax fat/sugar

Risky, given the track record of nutrition science, but better than outright
bans. Why don't we start by not subsidizing sugar.

