My name is Mark Hamalainen, and I am the co-founder and co-executive director of the Longevity Biotech Fellowship. It’s an organization whose mission is to grow the number of people working on deep tech for radically extending human lifespan—not just incrementally. There are only a few thousand people at most in the world doing this, and our goal has been to multiply that number and do so exponentially over time. Our chances of succeeding at extending lifespan would be greater in proportion to the number of people working on it.
Why should organizations become Vitalist?
Pretty much every movement in history that changed social priorities had some kind of organizing principle or philosophy. I like Vitalism as a potential organizing philosophy for a movement to extend lifespan because it’s very simple and straightforward. It just states that aging and death are undesirable, clearly bad things, and that it’s a moral imperative to extend lifespan and reduce the suffering of aging. It’s a straightforward, simple philosophy that’s hard to argue against, and I think it’s something we could get a lot of people to agree on. Once people agree to it, that agreement could potentially translate into action. Even before Vitalism existed, the LBF (Longevity Biotech Fellowship) was already aligned with these values, so it makes sense for us to say that we’re Vitalists.
Do you think we are on track to solve aging in your lifetime?
One of the reasons I started the LBF is because, at the current rate of progress, we’re not on track to solve aging in my lifetime—potentially not in the lifetime of anyone alive today. I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years, and we’ve gone from having zero aging interventions to still having zero aging interventions. If you draw the line, it’s not a very promising curve. At the same time, we’ve had a lot of improvement in technological capabilities when it comes to engineering biology, modifying biology, and potentially repairing biology, but it’s still very much in the lab. It hasn’t translated to actual practice with humans. Science often moves in step changes, not in straight or smooth curves, so it’s very hard to predict. Given the slow progress so far, I think it would be unreasonable to assume that we’re going to magically hit some inflection point. We should be pushing as hard as we can to increase the rate of progress because of how slow it currently is.
What are some key achievements and future plans of the Longevity Biotech Fellowship?
The LBF has been around for about two years, and we’re about to run our sixth cohort. It had a predecessor program called ODlB, and between all of these, I think we’ve had many dozens of people hired into really cool labs, projects, and companies. We’ve seen more than two dozen new startups formed in the space. We’ve also seen that certain concepts, like growing spare parts and replacing them, have become a lot more popular—an idea that we’ve worked hard to popularize and educate people on. It’s always hard to quantify these things, but it feels like we’ve helped shift the conversation toward more ambitious approaches to tackling lifespan. We’ve always been about getting more people to work on the stuff that could radically extend human lifespan. If you look at the overall umbrella of aging and longevity research and projects, most of them are focused on things that, even in the best-case scenario, will have a very low impact. Things like diet, lifestyle, drugs, and supplements—we know that those won’t actually have a big effect on maximum lifespan. They probably, at best, would improve median lifespan, and maybe not even by very much. So we’ve tried to shift the conversation to get more people to focus on ambitious approaches like replacement, gene delivery, and cryopreservation for people who want to live long enough to see the benefits of these other technology paths. I think the conversation has changed, and we have some level of responsibility for that.
If you had unlimited resources, what dream project would you embark on?
It’s always fun to think about what you would do with unlimited resources. I find it funny how some people don’t seem to be able to answer this question, because I wouldn’t have any trouble. For some of the projects I just mentioned, like cloning non-sentient bodies, solving the gene delivery problem, and solving nerve reconnection, I could make a list of a couple of dozen major outstanding scientific or technological problems and projects that I think deserve a SpaceX-level venture to push them forward at the fastest possible speed. I would get a group of my friends that I thought were the most intelligent on this, and we would hash out all the projects we would want to fund. Then we would build up an apparatus to find people who could staff them. We would just try to fire on all cylinders—collecting data, building technology, solving outstanding scientific problems—and we would just keep going until we solved aging.
How long do you want to live?
Forever, I guess, is the automatic answer to that. You never know what future you will want, but I can’t imagine ever not wanting to be alive. It’s just pretty fun to be alive, and being dead means you don’t get a chance to even have fun. Life isn’t always good, but even when it’s not, you can always hope for it to improve in the future, and you can work towards improving it. So I don’t really see why one would want to die, although of course, the option is always there. But yes, I would say forever is the simple answer to that.
