Immortality for Cryptocurrency
Cryptomillionaires Fund Research To Reverse The Aging Process
Ariel VA Feinerman, Geektimes, based on QUARTZ: Crypto millionaires are funding research to reverse the aging process
The elite of Silicon Valley is passionate about the possibility of radical life extension – if not immortality. Research (however, not very successful, – translator's note) attracted Google funding, and Unity Biotechnology, which develops drugs for the treatment of age-related diseases, also raised a lot of money. Now the concept has attracted a new group: cryptocurrency tycoons.
Millionaires, whose fortune is associated with the cryptocurrency boom, donate to research, which, according to Aubrey de Grey, can prolong human lives for thousands of years. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently donated $2.4 million to the non-profit SENS Research Foundation to help develop anti-aging biotechnology. The anonymous Pineapple Fund also contributed $2 million to SENS.
According to de Gray, who spoke in a podcast with Sunday Times reporter Danny Fortson, it is not surprising that the cryptocurrency community has shown interest in this study. The first participants "tend to be people who are very much interested in technological progress," says 54–year-old De Gray, who previously worked in the field of artificial intelligence and received a PhD from Cambridge. Young people are more open to the idea that aging is an "important, solvable problem."
For example, Buterin is 24 years old, and he co-founded the second most important cryptocurrency. In a statement announcing his donation, Buterin welcomes the SENS program, "aimed at solving the problem of aging, one of the biggest problems facing humanity."
According to de Gray, the nonprofit organization received approximately $6.5 million in bitcoin and ether. The Foundation immediately sells all cryptocurrency donations, as a rule, for dollars, because financial speculation is prohibited to it as a non-profit organization. SENS has an annual budget of $4 million.
According to de Gray, the goal is to develop technology fast enough to stay one step ahead of the aging problem, as he told the Sunday Times in an interview. He believes that there is a 50% chance that SENS will prove the viability of its efforts using laboratory mice in the next five years, and will start a "war on aging."
"It all depends on how soon we make key breakthroughs," he said, describing the all-or-nothing study. In the future, he added, a person's life expectancy will be measured either in two digits or four digits.
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