July 15, 2026 • 60 mins
Did you love TechStuff’s last episode, 'The Tech That Helps You Live Forever', and want to hear more from Mangesh Hattikudur? Check out Episode 5 of the podcast Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever.
In this season of Skyline Drive, Mangesh Hattikudur (Part-Time Genius, Mental_Floss) dives into the booming business of living forever—meeting the scientists, biopunks, and entrepreneurs trying to turn immortality into reality, and framing death as a choice. But the more he learns about an immortal future, the more he finds himself drawn to the people he loves…and wondering if an endless life can be a meaningful one. Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever is the follow up to the beloved Skyline Drive (season 1), named a “Series Essential” — an Apple Podcasts honor for top-tier narrative podcasts — and highlighted on several Best of Year lists including NYMag, Guardian, and others.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
When I was in second and third grade, I was
obsessed with mysteries Carmen San Diego, Encyclopedia Brown, Agatha Christie,
and especially Sherlock Holmes. On Thursday nights, I would stay
up late and snuggled under a blanket with my mom
watching mystery on PBS. But as much as I wanted
to solve all the neighborhood mysteries, I only ever cracked
(00:34):
two of them. First, the case of the nine year
old boxing champ. When a new kid moved to the
cul de Sac and claimed he was a world boxing
champ elementary school division, words spread fast across my neighborhood.
The kid was tough, He talked back to his mom,
he cursed, he spit, and he let it be known
(00:56):
he could beat up anyone who wanted to fight. My
neighbor dragged me along to see if it was true.
But a few questions about where he trained, what international
cities he traveled to, He had a hard time naming
any and also just pointing out the fact that he
had very soft hands quickly took the air out of
the myth. Second, the case of the Secret Admirer. Some
(01:24):
creep had signed all the Valentines to every girl in
our third grade class from your secret Admirer. My friends
Kristen and Sarah brought me the case. Our homeroom teacher,
Missus DeLong, had even received a secret Admirer card, which
was a total scandal. But after a little slew thing,
I realized that the night before, when I was out
(01:45):
playing basketball, my parents had called me in to sign Valentines,
and then after a while it got sick of calling
for me. My dad thought it would be funny to
sign all the cards anonymously, like I was some love
sick Casanova. It didn't take that long to solve the case,
but I didn't let on. I pretended it was unsolvable,
(02:07):
a mystery for the ages, and quickly shifted the conversation.
Sometimes solving a case is worse than not solving it.
Sometimes the answer feels wrong, even when it's right. All
(02:30):
that's to say, I think my work is often about
solving mysteries. I like patching the hole in the story.
I love hearing a curious fact or reading a line
that doesn't sound right, and then poking around to get
the full story. So in October of last year, as
I was starting to gather leads for this show. I
hopped on the phone with an investor to hear about
(02:50):
what they'd been pitched in the longevity space, and as
they walked me through new ideas for drugs and procedures,
suddenly I heard a cloud of phrases that made me
lean in.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
We didn't invest because it makes us too uncomfortable. It's
pulled straight out of sci fi. They're brilliant, but their
reputations are controversial.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
They want to remain anonymous, so I've had their tape
replaced with an actor, by which I mean my cousin. Anyway,
the investor tells me that in the.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Pitch there's a line item that stands out. It's for
buying property in South America.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So then they asked why is real estate part of
this pitch, and the answer it's.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Because they're going to buy property to catch monkeys they
can test on what.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
My mind is spinning trying to understand what they're talking about.
And then I hear.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
This The goal is to clone humans and use them
for human organ farms.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
And that's the moment I knew the game is afoot.
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, I'm Monga's heat there. This
is Skyline Drive How to Live Forever, Chapter one. Dear Leaders,
(04:44):
as the present.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Dish state, you.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Americans do not eat what grows for free, like amazing,
very tasty fruit lying on the end. In Russia, people
gather things from the treats. I think Americans want to pay, definitely,
this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I'm walking with Mikyle Rubin over to this little patch
of grass on the Stanford campus, and he's right. We
spot orange trees everywhere, and despite my love of citrus,
it hadn't occurred to me to pick up any fruit
off the ground. In spite of his scolding slash teasing me,
I feel lucky to be here with Mikyle. He made
(05:32):
his name at a publication called Prey Act, breaking stories
about Russia's political corruption and the oligarchy.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
There.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
The guy is fearless.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
We specialize on prohibited topics in Russia. So our goal
is to tell the stories that no one else would
ever tell, which is mostly everything about lighting me Puicha actually.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
But Mikile is an exile here because us. In twenty
twenty one.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
We got, let's say, a signal that we need to
leave the country, which was very direct searchers by the police,
questions by the police. Then we got this title of
undesirable organization, which means prison, so very pretty direct signal
that we need to leave the country. Since my exile
(06:26):
started four years now, five years ago now, we changed
places very often, countries places.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
So I really do feel like I'm in a mystery
or maybe a paranoid conspiracy thriller. I'm chasing this rumor
of human cloning, human organ farms. I'm meeting with an
exile journalist under an orange tree at Stanford, and right
now we're talking about a strange bit of tape that
emerged on the internet last year. That's Chinese President Hi
(06:57):
Jinping walking with Vladimir Putin during a military parade in Beijing.
An essays stroll through the help of their translators, the
two seventy two year olds are saying that seventy used
to be considered ancient, but these days being seventy is
like being a child. Then Putin suggests that maybe people
will age backwards by replacing their organs and so essentially
(07:20):
becoming immortal. She chuckles and ads it could be in
this century humans might be able to live to one
hundred and fifty years old. That exchange went viral, because
of course it did. It's terrifying, But to Mikail.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
It wasn't surprised for me at all, as an investigative
journalist who covers lead in the Putin for most part
of his career, that he is definitely obsessed. I am
using this word intentionally. He's obsessed with his health.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
All knows a lot about that. Among other things. He
was the one who broke the story about Putin adding
a bath bomb of antler blood extract to his top,
a Siberian folk treatment for virility, which only amplified Putin's
myth internationally.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Like back at like fifteen years ago, they were published
his photos half naked you riding a horse and swimming.
It was important part of his image. What we understand
now is that he wants to live for a very
very long time, and we found some proofs for that.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Mckail and his team also broke a story about contracts
between the Russian President's office and hotels near his various
homes and who was traveling with Putin along with when.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
So we find that every time Putin travels some way
out of Moscow, there is a bunch of doctors traveling
with him and who have to leave very close to
his residences. Usually it is from four up to seven
doctors traveling with him, but there were two times when
(09:12):
Putin was visited by twelve doctors simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The reporters determined that Putin was likely treated for thyroid
cancer in secret, and that he'd had hernia surgery too.
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing the Kremlin confirms.
If Putin disappeared for a few days, Mikael says, they'll
release pre recorded tapes of meetings to make it seem
like he's on the job as normal. How do you
(09:38):
figure out someone like Putin's health.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It is a prohibited topic in Russia, totally prohibited. This
is a part of Putin's image. He's always healthy. They
never tell that he's ill. Never.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
In late May of twenty twenty six, the Wall Street
Journal released a story clarifying that Putin had earmarked twenty
six billion dollars for a longevity initiative. Pudin's daughter, a
pediatric endocrinologist who advises her father on genetics, and a
physicist who led the USSR's nuclear research project were put
In charge, and along with delivering new gene therapies for
(10:16):
slowing cellular aging. The scientists have two key tasks, both
dealing with organ transplants. The first to figure out how
to three D print organs in a lab, the second
using mini pigs as living incubators to grow and harvest organs.
(10:37):
If everything goes to plan, Russia will basically have generated
a body farm where fields of hearts and lungs and
kidneys will either be printed on demand or plucked from
a pig host to be implanted into a human. According
to the journal, the hope is that between these two initiatives,
people will be able to switch out body parts indefinitely.
(10:58):
Putin has invested billions in the idea and is targeting
a deadline that isn't as far off as you think,
just four years, which happens to be before the country's
next presidential election. Of course, all of this is being
pitched as a state priority, a way to make Russians healthier.
Right now, the life expectancy for the average Russian is
(11:20):
seventy three, putting Russia at a dismal one hundred and
nineteen out of two hundred and nine countries studied and
for a new recruit to its military from the moment
training starts to death in battle, their life expectancy averages
only up to three weeks. But when this organ replacement
(11:41):
therapy is ready, which Russian will be first in line.
I'm sure you can guess.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
What I'm trying to say is that definitely this conversation
with presidentcy wasn't something newte and unfortunately for Russia that
his plan is also too for a very very long time.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Chapter two, Library Science. I can't stop thinking about this
dystopic vision for the future where if you have a
good mechanic and a warehouse full of parts, you can
(12:35):
keep a body running endlessly. I mean, I get the
idea you might need a pacemaker or to replace a
bum heart, but to just keep replacing parts forever. And
it makes me wonder about the urban myths I heard
in middle and high school of people going to a party,
getting drugged and then waking up in bathtubs of ice
without a kidney, which is why Lizzie and I ended
(12:58):
up in a local public library on a chilly January day,
sitting with a white hat hacker named Searchlight.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
Going on to Darknet used to be a lot easier
because you could just go to a website and be like, look,
this is who's advertising organs.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Just so you know, that's not Searchlight's actual voice. Searchlight
works as an elite cybersecurity consultant and studies at one
of the country's most prestigious universities, and they only agreed
to talk to me if we kept their voice and
identity out of the show. It's near closing time, and
while it's not exactly busy, I'm nervous about who might
catch wind of what we're doing. The Searchlight tells us
(13:38):
that the library is a convenient way to access the
web without using your own IP address. They boot up
the computer, clear it of the existing searches and credentials.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
If you ever want to take a photo of like this,
just don't take a photo of me.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They reassure us we won't actually be doing anything illegal,
which is a welcome reminder. A Searchlight begins typing, I'm
giddy to tour the dark web. I'm still thinking about
Silk Road, the so called black market Amazon where organ
trafficking was rumored to take place, but Searchlight says that
(14:15):
that part of the net is filled with government agents
running honeypot schemes on unsuspecting nubes and anyway, it's not
where the action is these days. So we're going regular
old surface web and searchlight starts by demonstrating how embarrassingly
easy it is to find longevity drugs here on the internet.
(14:36):
We all use how.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Long to take? And did it seem surprising?
Speaker 1 (14:39):
How long a tike?
Speaker 6 (14:40):
It took? Under a minute, which is wow, this is
so easy that why would you ever go through the
effort of going through the dark web for any of
these things?
Speaker 1 (14:53):
By current estimates, the shadow markets are a six trillion
dollars a year economy. That includes money launcher and other
illicit activity too, but it also includes what we're looking
at right now, purchasing cancer drugs and anti virals for
HIV and anabolic androgenic steroids.
Speaker 6 (15:12):
I'm assuming there's a lot of business incentives for why
this is happening, and a lot of incentive for illicit
pharmacies in other countries to be targeting the US market.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
I angle my body boxing out any nosy neighbors from
being able to see the screen. I can't believe how
brazen this marketplace is. And while we're not talking about
purchasing organs. These are serious pharmaceuticals, things with real side effects,
which are being recommended on dodgy sites as off label
longevity meds search sites. Starts pecking at the keys again
(15:45):
and we're transported to the world of longevity chatboards, the
so called community helping a new class of initiates navigate
their hunt for drugs. The boards point new longevionauts to
which sites are most reliable, which services to use to
drop ship the drugs, which banks are better for discrete
international transfers.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
Yeah, this is super detailed. This person decided to say
which regional facility their package arrived that and also when
they paid for it, and also when it arrived to them,
which is extremely detailed amount of information to put on
the public Internet about your crimes. Whether this is a
real name or not doesn't really matter. Essentially, if these
(16:27):
people are not having some dark web conversation or secret telegrams,
it's just on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
One post we look at about how to order rapamycin
has over fifty thousand views and hundreds of comments. Rapamycin
is an immunosuppressant, especially helpful in preventing rejection after say
a kidney transplant. While the drug has been much hyped
in longevity circles, it has plenty of documented side effects,
(16:53):
including mouth ulcers, wound healing issues, and disabling your immune system.
Anti aging potential for humans, if any is still unclear,
but at Searchlight points out, we don't really know anything
about who has set up this forum and what their
(17:15):
motives could be.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
Who is this person? No idea. If this person's a
broker or supplier, then there's an incentive for them to
lie right and tell the people that it's safe when
it's not, and that's predatory.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
A long time ago, a writer friend of mine told
me the story about getting in a minivan with a
formulae one driver on some blocked off roads in New Jersey,
a new supposed test track. The driver guns it, hurling
the minivan around corners, and as the writer sweats and
white knuckles the grab handles, the driver looks over and smirks,
(17:54):
showing just how much control over this soccer mom vehicle
he has. I'm reminded of that scene. A surflight whips
the browser across the web. Click, click, click, A few
keystrokes and something we're looking at discount injectables that stimulate
bone marrow to make more red blood cells. A few
more and we're racing to a site that claims to
(18:15):
be quote the best Indian pharmaceutical supplier in the Philippines
that also ships to the US. This is f one handling,
not some web tourists working the wheel, and we skid
past disclosures or lack of them on so many sites.
(18:35):
When we tap the brakes, Searflight points out the market
here is wider than just longebonouts. It's also filled with
people with serious health conditions who've been abandoned by a
broken healthcare system. People left scouring the internet for cheaper
versions of the drugs they can't afford, for.
Speaker 6 (18:53):
People who actually need these medications and are going on
these websites because they just can't afford them, because they're
like five thousand dollars injection in the US. They're like,
they're like really expensive. You can't blame them for going
on these websites.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
And Searchlight tells me these chemicals are not made for
people to take, They're for research only.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
It's still unsafe and it should be shut down.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I'm thinking of my dad, how at the end of
his life when he knew things weren't going right. He'd
ordered these ira Vedic tinctures that he thought could maybe
heal him. It was this act of desperation, and I
had no idea what he'd bought, or from where, or
how he'd even research these supposed cures. But as much
(19:42):
as I didn't want it to be true, I knew
they weren't going to work.
Speaker 6 (19:48):
I think what it really says about the longevity situation
is like this is being discussed openly. There is the
opportunity to know, hey, these drugs are dangerous, Like there's
guidance that can be and hasn't been put up by
FDA saying these longevity drugs are off label and are
dangerous to be using.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
My mind is reeling. For the same price as a
dinner out, I can buy research grade drugs that cure
major diseases on essentially an open market. It's barely harder
than ordering sneakers off of eBay. But what about the
people who aren't desperate? What about the prudence of the
world who talk of switching out a bad heart or kidney,
(20:42):
treating the human body like a Lego kit where you
can just snap in new parts, or the whispers. I
keep hearing of ultra elite longevity mansions, residences where New
Zealand oil airs and their friends. The actual phrase one
source used gream up longevity experiments they can fund without
worry of ethics. So I go back to my original
(21:04):
question and ask Searchlight, are people buying new livers and
spare kidneys online?
Speaker 6 (21:10):
Well, there's a lot of conversation about replacing kidneys and
things like that in the longevity community, but actually acting
on that is extremely fringe. And not only do I
not know anyone who's done that, I've never heard of
anybody who's heard of anybody who's done that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
For a minute, I feel relief, like an anxious parent
looking out onto an ocean and not seeing any fins
taking that is proof that the water is safe. Searchlight
says that if we want to go hunting for organ sales,
they could reboot the system and find a burner phone
for us to use, but the various security measures would
(21:49):
take more time than we have. The library is about
to close. Besides, they explained to me, organ trafficking isn't
just illegal, it also requires an incredible amount of coordination.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
For extreme cases. Let's do an organ transplant illegally. It
requires a donor who's forced into donating organs, be trafficked
to a safe house and then have organs removed, and
then have a surgeon and a surgical feed are nearby
implant them into the recipient, and all of that has
to be coordinated by a broker.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
A searchlight walks me through this. I'm realizing how hard
the recovery is, how easy it is for the body
to reject a foreign organ. The medicines you need to
override it. Even in the best circumstances. It is far
from smooth.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
People who are primarily trying to get transplants on. Here
are people who actually need them but are just going
about it in extremely unethical ways that they just don't
care about the people who they're trying to get things
transplanted from.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
And it feels like there's desperation on both sides, from
the person in dire need of a failing organ, but
also from the person for whom their own internal organs
maybe the most valuable things they have in or on.
In twenty twenty three, when inflation had gotten so bad
that poverty was rampant, people were posting on telegram offering
(23:11):
their livers, their bone marrow. According to Business Insider, someone
even posted an offer to sell their testicles quote twenty
five years old. Oh positive, I know searchlight can illuminate
the darkest corridors of the Internet, places I'd never be
(23:34):
able to find. Were all those rumors I'd heard from
vcs about organ replacement just another kind of urban myth.
Had we hit a dead end? I can't believe it.
There has to be.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
A way Chapter three, Cracking the Faberge Egg.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
In any detective story, there are moments when the trail
goes cold, when the pieces don't seem to fit, and
there are always options. You can play a violin and
hope for an inspired connection, or you can keep working
the neighborhood, tracing acquaintances, looking for one name to daisy
chain into the next. And in a community this small,
(24:37):
there's a sense that the young scientists with the boldest,
wildest ideas have all met each other, which is how
three days into my trip to San Francisco, I find
myself talking to Nicoa Poe.
Speaker 7 (24:49):
The people I valued the most actually weren't encouraging at all.
They were just like, that's stupid entire thing, scrap.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
That's what helped me, oh a lot of things. A vegan,
a former research assistant at Stanford an Army, National Guard Reserve,
and a startup founder running his trials at the Buck Institute,
a prestigious research institute devoted to longevity, where he's worked
on a way to replace his brain. But as we
(25:18):
sit in his office in Marin overlooking sweeping hills thick
with fog, he tells me he doesn't want to replace
his organs by transplant putin style. Instead, he's taking his
inspiration from an old philosophical thought experiment. The Ship of Theseus.
Speaker 7 (25:35):
Theseus was this Greek explorer, right, and he goes on
a journey and the mast of his ship break, so
they replaced the mast. The board's break, so they replace
the boards, and by the end of the journey they've
replaced every single part of the ship with a new piece.
But everybody still calls it Theseus's ship and the like.
(25:56):
The philosophical question is if you completely play something piece
by piece, is it still what it started to be?
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Nikoa has a theory about how you can replace your
entire brain piece by piece and still retain your identity.
And I want to know how he came to that belief.
Nikoa grew up in Hawaii with the health conscious hippie mom.
In college, he identifies two event horizons, and since he's
(26:23):
quote not good at ai, he decides to lean into
the other one, longevity. But even after studying biochemistry and
molecular biology and moving to the West Coast to work
in a Stanford lab, he wasn't satisfied.
Speaker 7 (26:38):
So one of my lab mates goes, well, you won't
stop talking about immortality. Here's a house full of people
that just do That's amaze. So then I applied and
they gave me a very serious interview and they're like, yes, well,
we'll see if you're good enough for the next cohort.
(27:00):
I was like sweating, this is extremely serious. I'm going
to be living with a whole bunch of biotech legends.
And then I showed up and it was just like, oh,
what's up, bro.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
But at Vida's house, whose stated mission is to create
community and quote incubate the most promising moonshots at the
intersections of biology and tech, was just what Nikoa needed.
I was out of Vida's house the day before and
had been charmed by the college off campus house feel
of it.
Speaker 7 (27:31):
Our fridge had a whole bunch of different peptides in
it on the side, and I was having space to
store my hot sauce because there was like too many
vials of Reddit, trude eyed and other tiny little peptide fragments.
So that was fun.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And he finds inspiration all around him that make some
investors and fame researchers who drop by to give talks,
and the like minded residents who lived there.
Speaker 7 (27:55):
Just having conversations and sharing my ideas with people and
coming like, look, I have this precious faberget egg of
an idea and I'm so proud of it. And then
they smash it and they're like, ninety percent of this
is garbage, and I go, okay, well I'll take this
ten percent. Look I have another wife.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Boom, Okay, well now I.
Speaker 7 (28:14):
Have twenty percent of a good idea and just refeeding
that process.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
And that's on a CoA started Sundial Therapeutics, an early
stage company focused on cellular brain replacement, whereas he likes
to call it.
Speaker 7 (28:27):
The brain of theseus. Basically, what we do is we
look for stem cells that can cross the blood brain
barrier and home to sights of damage and injury in
the brain and replace the dead and dying cells with
new healthy cells, so you can slowly replace the brain
over time. Every time one of the cells in your
brain dies, we send a stem cell in there and
(28:49):
it replaces it with a new, younger, healthy cell.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
What's fascinating about Nikoa is that he's actually tackling one
of the hardest problems in biotech. It's one thing to
coax stem cells into becoming skin or blood cells, or
even say a liver, things that have a very straightforward purpose.
It's another to get new cells across the blood brain
barrier into the right part of the brain, not to
(29:20):
mention doing it without disrupting the existing circuitry and the
person inside. But Nikoa is a rising star, and his
hope is that you can heal traumatic brain injuries and
replace damaged cells without the need for surgery. But also
he knows these advances take time because he knows just
how complicated the body is.
Speaker 7 (29:43):
This is going to go on the record, right, so
I'll check back in ten more years. But I don't
think the predictions of curing all diseases using AI and
synthetic biology in ten more years are going to play
out in anywhere near the time span, because biology doesn't
move at machine speeds.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
It's something I've been thinking about a lot, like there
is so much optimism and hype in the space, but
also there's a real tension between the people in the
university labs who believe advances take decades, people like doctor
Cy who is effectively replicating simplified brains in petri dishes,
from the tech optimists, people who are certain that death
(30:21):
with enough computing power is a very solvable problem.
Speaker 7 (30:26):
I think tech teaches you to be optimistic and biotech
teaches you to be pessimistic. Here, when you're working with
living systems, you get used to things taking twice as
long and costing three times as much as you thought
every single time.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
He's cautious about putting a neat timeline on biology, but
also just look at the scale of his ambition. He's
trying to replace an entire brain cell for cell, and
despite his caveats, Nicoa's Brain of THESEUS project is moving
at a surprisingly fast clip. He tells me that just
this year.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
We're planning to launch our first pre clinical study in
an animal model of Alzheimer's to see if they can
actually reduce the burden of the disease.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Of course, the bigger question I have is the original
philosophical one. If you replace a brain sell by cell,
and at the end of it you have a totally
new brain, is that still you? Nikoa has a theory.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
My conjecture is, because of how the brain works, even
if you replace every single cell in your brain over
time with a different cell, you're not going to lose
your identity because identity is encoded not in the individual neurons,
but in the patterns of firing between them. And every
time a new cell comes into your brain, it's trained
(31:54):
by all of the neurons next to it in order
to start behaving as part of your brain. So as
you get this gradual replacement, the parts that are there
train the new parts that are coming in, which train
their replacements, which train their replacements, and you eventually get
full replacement of your brain with healthy, er, younger sells,
(32:16):
but you're still you.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
It's not an answer that would have occurred to me
that despite replacing your entire brain, you still might be
you at the end of it. And yet maybe that's
just how humans work because I'm not the person I
was as a kid, or even the person I was yesterday.
I have experiences that continuously change me. Our brains are
constantly changing. So maybe he's right. I don't know enough
(32:44):
to know if it's optimism or wishful thinking or just true.
I'm worried the trail has gone cold on the mystery.
I'd initially set out to solve the one about the
company making clones for organ farms, but before I go,
(33:05):
I decide to take a wild swing. I asked Nicole
if his brain, if theseus idea extends to the whole body,
and whether Putin's supposed goal of continual organ replacement is possible.
Speaker 7 (33:18):
I don't think organ by organ is going to work
just because the environment has such a big impact. Like
you can take a day's zero embryonic cel but put
it in an old organism and it'll rapidly age just
because of all of the signals it's getting from the
older organism. So you see this with organs. Even if
(33:42):
you take an organ from a younger person, like a
kidney from a younger person, and put it into an
older person, it'll degrade in function to match the older
person's other kidney much more rapidly, just because it's in
an older, more damaging environment.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
And then he says something i't expecting.
Speaker 7 (34:02):
So I think, to get big gains from replacement, doing
as much replacement as possible, all at once.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
And with those words, I realize he knows what I
want to know, because as I've been digging for clues
in Silicon Valley about the human cloning, about the organ replacement,
I've heard shades of exactly this language, doing as much
replacement as possible, all at once. So I asked Nicole
about the company. I only have a vague description of
(34:34):
if we're possibly talking about the same thing, and it
feels like we are, So I ask if he can
make an introduction for me, and he says he'll ask.
Speaker 7 (34:43):
They sometimes don't like going on the record, just because
of the nature of what they do.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
And then about a month later, I hear from Alice
(35:11):
Chapter four, Alice in monkey.
Speaker 8 (35:14):
Land, I had a phenomenal lamp wreck at the hotel
that I'm staying at. I woke up at twelve, so
I decided to make it a brunch and it was great,
zero complaints.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Alice Gilman won't tell me where she is exactly, and
I can't really see her either. The room is dark
and I can only make out her shadow next to
the curtains billowing in the breeze, which adds to the mystique.
Alice is the co founder of the startup ar three bio,
and she's talking to me from a hotel somewhere in
the vicinity of their newest workspace on one of the
(35:57):
one hundred and forty three islands that make up Puerto Rico.
Speaker 8 (36:01):
You know, working on a science project in an island.
People are like, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
But I've been chasing a shadow for five months, and
I think I've finally found the person who belongs to
Alice and her company are three Bio, seem to operate
on that outermost ring where science kisses the impossible, and
up until this point in mid February twenty twenty six,
her company has been in stealth mode, a phrase I
(36:29):
keep hearing in Silicon Valley where people are very happy
to talk about their work but also pretend like it's
a secret. But those secrets have generated a lot of buzz.
Speaker 8 (36:39):
I think that we're just like entertainingly a company that
is actually extremely boring, but a lot of people decided
that we are radically crazy.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
As we talk, it's clear we're both walking on eggshells.
This is what I think I know about Alice.
Speaker 6 (36:57):
One.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
He's connected for the Residency and incubator, associated with Sam Altman.
She has spent time at Prospera, and she gives talks
to Adam Greeese's longevity conference Vitalist Pay. Two. There are
whispers about our three all over Silicon Valley, more than whispers,
actually palpable excitement, but there is very little online. And three.
(37:24):
She is not a scientist, She's an operator the COO.
But as I begin to ask her take on radical
life extension, she wants to start with the story of
her grandmother, a woman with an epic biography.
Speaker 8 (37:38):
She escaped World War two, stole a horse from the
Nazis and got her three year old sister on a
horse across. She went from Germany to China basically over
like five years in them, ended up with Shaolin monks.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Alice grew up in Kazakhstan, spending time with her grandmother.
This woman who should have died but instead fought to
stay alive and now struggles in body she's in.
Speaker 8 (38:03):
I'm like sitting in front of this person who's like
a legend, right, who's here playing with pills.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Alice tells me she can't stomach the disconnect. Why should
someone so full of life, so committed to life, have
to suffer just because their body is older? More than aging,
What terrifies Alice is death, because it wasn't so long
ago that she remembers sitting and waiting for news about
(38:34):
whether her father would live.
Speaker 8 (38:36):
My dad had a open heart surgery. I got very
lucky my dad is still around. I made myself a
point of I want to make sure my dad gets
to live longer this decade. And I didn't find anything
technologically that would guarantee that this decade, so I decided
to help make it.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
The experience drove Alice into the longevity space. She began
scouring for solutions scientists who might be able to help,
and then she finds a way to John Schloendorn, a
self proclaimed biological designer and PhD in molecular biology. He
counts Peter Teele as a benefactor. Teal invested and reported
one point five million dollars in one of Schlowendorn's previous startups.
Speaker 8 (39:25):
I ended up meeting John, who's sitting there in his
little garage lab out in the middle of nowhere, and
I talked to him for a few hours and realized
that this guy can build things that no one can build.
And I informed him that I now work with him.
I've seen him do things in our lab that I'm
afraid to name because I think they sound like miracles.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Miracles. Whatever Alice saw convinced her that she and John
together could offer new solutions to the world.
Speaker 8 (39:55):
We are making very strong statements and we can deliver
the extraordinary evidence. Someone called us the right hemisphere and
left hemisphere of real and musk.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Like.
Speaker 8 (40:03):
One of our investors is like, yeah, you guys are
like a feeling musk was two separate people, and we're like, yeah,
that's not a bad branding. We'll take it.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
She believes a partnership with John could be the ticket
to saving her dad.
Speaker 8 (40:14):
So I'm like, wait, so could I grow him a
new heart that will never develop heart disease because I
genetically engineered it at like stage one?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
And so Alice is in Puerto Rico at a bougie
hotel and near some type of monkey reserve. She wants
to grow replacement organs for people, better ones that will
never fall prey to disease like her dad's heart did
to me.
Speaker 8 (40:35):
Tattoos are much more biologically damaging to the body than
like an organ transplant, because you're like eternally inflaming your
system forever, your body will be screaming in pain, right,
and so that is somehow normal to eternally have your
body screaming in pain, And like getting a heart transplant
is not normal somehow, right, Like what how did we
(40:59):
decide that?
Speaker 1 (41:01):
But to get there, she can't just start with humans.
Speaker 8 (41:04):
We have a few milestones that we're hoping to achieve.
The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal
testing by using skin stem cells. We take skin cells
from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanoca
miracles that result in fully grown organ systems.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
The Yamanaka factors are these seemingly miraculous proteins that won
Shinya Yamanaka a Nobel prize. He and another scientist turned
adult cells into fresh stem cells, which can then be
reprogrammed to become any kind of cell. But what does
she mean by an organ system? In the course of
our conversation. She also calls these organ sacks.
Speaker 8 (41:49):
So it's just pretty much a heart, like lungs and
everything that you would find in a body, but it's
not technically alive because it's exclusively the organs, and they
are kind of in this like little biological platform that
you can test on and you can map out the
cross organ interactions.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
The language feels almost purposefully oblique. It's quote not technically alive.
It's everything quote you'd find in a body. It takes
me a while to piece together what Alice is talking about, because,
as Alice tells me, I.
Speaker 8 (42:21):
Try to not be scary to an average person.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
But what she's describing here, I finally figure out is
a shell of a body. A layperson like me might
call it as a clone. Alice and R three Bio
have called this quote immunocompatible organs grown out of your
skin cell, and the ones she's talking about as the
future of biological testing come from scraping skin cells from
(42:48):
a monkey. But the big difference, Alice claims, is that
R three would grow these without any sentience, meaning they
would use proprietary techniques to knock out the brain function
from inception so that the creatures would have no memory,
feel no pain, and have no consciousness, hence an organ sack.
(43:18):
But I'm curious, how do you get organ sacks that
grow but don't feel anything? So, like, do these organ
sacks like have the stem of a brain?
Speaker 8 (43:30):
So the mice models can exist without any like like
with like a very limited set of nervous systems. But
then there are other constraints on the ability of like
the organs to preserve themselves. So there's a way in
which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less
nervous system And then when you skew towards social acceptance,
(43:51):
it looks better, but it's less scientifically feasible. Oh and
so we are still like making observations about how that
would work.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Alice is saying, less sentient the organ sack, the more
people are okay with it, but the science doesn't work
as well. The more sentient the test subject, the better
it works. But then it freaks everyone out and that
doesn't solve the unanswered scientific question about whether the clone
test subject would actually feel zero pain have zero sentience.
(44:29):
But Alice wants me to know this is sci fi
with a heart.
Speaker 8 (44:34):
I'm a big animal rights advocate, and I believe in
making a better world, So I don't want to keep
monkeys in cages, and there's an option to have them
run around the island with bracelets on.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
On its website. Our three Bio says we do not
work with live primates. Alice tells me the logic for
her being in Puerto Rico is.
Speaker 8 (44:54):
We wanted monkey access, and there's a lot of monkeys
here that we can after negotiating with local companies that
are like supervising them, we can walk up to them
get some of their skin cells.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Wired magazine reported after our call that Gilman posted a
job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico to quote
implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births in
non human primates. So I don't know, it seems like
they might start working with live primates. And also, just
(45:28):
to be clear, in today's world, with today's science, for
that organ sack to exist, some poor being has to
give birth to a brain dead offspring. But as Alice
keeps reminding me, she doesn't want to put living animals
in pain, and she doesn't see these organ sacks as
(45:51):
real monkeys, so she feels the ethics check out.
Speaker 8 (45:56):
Hypothetically, so you imagine COVID hits. A bunch of AI
lab scientists already generate a hypothesis for what would be
a good vaccine and start infusing these little room cabinets
with these organ stacks, and in two hours we already
have reactions and they're like self recursive, so you can
keep updating whatever you're infusing into their body and like
(46:16):
check out what all the organ system reactions are creating.
By the time the first scientist walks in at six am,
you already have basically multiple proof of concepts for vaccines,
and we could actually have a COVID vaccine in two weeks.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
The scene feels like pure science fiction. Cabinets full of
allegedly non sentient monkey bodies hooked up to AI, ready
to test for lightning fast medical advances. Instead of a
year and change in lockdown. In Alice's world, complex vaccines
are just a few weeks away. That image is overwhelming.
(47:00):
You know that William Gibson quote, The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed. Alice is forcing me to
confront a sci fi present. I didn't know existed and
now I'm trying to get my bearings.
Speaker 8 (47:16):
This could mean things like designer organs, and now we
can have Olympic lungs, and we can have extremely healthy
organs where your genetics actually you know, your whole liver
is going to consist of like cells that are from
the beginning program to not form any diseases.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Vcs and scientists in Silicon Valley have also been telling
me that when autonomous cars take over, car crashes will
go down and the number of legitimate organs available for
donation will decrease significantly. To keep humans alive, these organs
will need to come from somewhere. So why not organ bags.
Speaker 8 (47:50):
Say we grew a set of human organs and say,
like a rich person orders a heart, we still have
all of the other organs. There is nothing stopping me
from donating the rest of them to someone who needs
them in a wait list of one hundred thousand people
instead of a car accident or a suicide.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Alice blames the media for making people feel scared of
the future when there are solutions around the corner. Remember
she's half an Elon Musk.
Speaker 8 (48:25):
People hating on billionaires for investing in anti aging makes
people want to hide working on anti aging and like
the whiplash you get just for working on something scientific
because of the propaganda that people see that was filmed
by people who were also potentially genuinely afraid of the future.
(48:45):
I think is kind of a gap I'm noticing between
the rest of the world and the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
She feels compelled to keep pushing humanity forward because the
way she sees it, there's limited downside.
Speaker 8 (49:00):
Worst case scenarios. I say, millions of lives, and to me,
that is a be worth taking, regardless of any kinds
of blows that are going to come our way.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
I noticed that whenever we start talking about ethics or feasibility,
she sways the conversation to how much good R three
is doing, or about not putting cute monkeys in pain,
or the cows and Cowshwitz an animal rights term for
factory farms.
Speaker 8 (49:26):
I live in a contextual world where just because we
don't talk about a lot of things, that doesn't mean
they're not happening.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
I feel like I'm on the receiving end of debate tactics,
though I don't know. I wasn't on the debate club,
but I was on the high school newspaper, and I
do know how to press gently for facts. So fifty
five minutes into our call, I just decided to talk
about it. This idea. I keep hearing this persistent rumor
(49:57):
in Silicon Valley that there are people, maybe r through bio,
working to make nonsentient clones of people's bodies. So then
when your body at seventy or eighty or whenever has
outgrown its use, you can snap your head onto a
younger version of yourself. The more I talked to people
(50:17):
in San Francisco about it, the more I heard people say, like,
transferring one organ just isn't efficient, and ultimately, like a
surgical like cut for where where you replace a head
on a new body is actually much much more efficient
and you're not asking an organ to adapt to like
the circumstances of a body.
Speaker 8 (50:39):
Well, if I was to join you in your Sciphi
speculations of the future, as long as we can figure
out surgical infrastructure, it would be I would take I
would probably be open to living in a younger, healthier
set of organs in the future, and I think that's
a desirable thing to have in the world.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
She keeps bringing it up.
Speaker 8 (51:03):
Would you get a new body if you wouldn't a
younger one?
Speaker 1 (51:10):
And then this about full body replacements. And I also
think that, like as you pointed out earlier, the ways
that we embrace change is very slow. Right, Like the
idea of getting a heart transplant initially was so foreign.
Speaker 8 (51:28):
I think head transplants are definitely a scary way of
thinking about the future. Right. It feels like either like
it sounds like a lot of people are going to
be taken advantage of, and this is something either only
available to the ridge but also somehow very horrible and
four people are going to be taken advantage of, and
like it just creates an ick. And so that's one
(51:49):
example of like, no, we're not doing that.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
By the way, the thing is, I can't say head
transplants or what Alice is working towards. I can't say
that a company in stealth mode whose chief operating officer
tells me that it's working towards an organ sack of
a monkey with aspirations of making an organ sack of
(52:14):
a human might want to sell you a clone so
you can avoid death by cutting off your head and
implanting it on a younger you. But the MIT Technology
Review did because when they released a story in late
March this year, over a month after I chat with Alice,
(52:36):
they found this.
Speaker 5 (52:39):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Last September, Alice and her co founder John Schlowandorn presented
at Abundance Longevity, a seventy thousand dollars per ticket event
in Boston, and while that presentation was meant to be confidential,
the article alleges the agenda leaked the name of our
three session quote full body replacement. Alice and I talked
(53:10):
for an hour and forty five minutes, but now it's
time for her to go.
Speaker 8 (53:14):
I think we covered a lot of it. I wish
people knew the perspective of how hard it is sometimes
to be guiding a company based on like a moral compass,
like we would be triple funded if we were not
making decisions with certain moralities attacked. And I hope people
(53:35):
get really excited about things that will save hundreds of
millions of people's lives and explore and how to scale that.
And I love all these intelligences in the world, and
I hope that we can make a world better for
all forms of intelligences and people to live healthier longer
lives and think about infrastructure in more efficient ways.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Some important points here. Our three Bio rejected the claims
in the MIT Technology Review, giving the following repudiation to
the outlet quote, any allegations of intent or conspiracy to
create human clones or human beings with brain damage are
categorically false. Alice did share with me a piece she
(54:20):
liked better. That article m wired with a quote about
the veterinarian posting. It came out days before the MIT
Tech Review piece. It still focuses on their work with
monkey skin cells, organ sacks for testing and transplants, and
it even quotes an our three Bio investor saying, quote,
if we can create a non sentient, headless bodyoid for
(54:41):
a human being, that will be a great source of organs. Also,
the week before this episode came out, we did a
fact check and call with Alice. She asked us if
we could postpone the episode. We declined. She told us
all of this is theoretical and just her opinion. She
also wants us to know that our three BI isn't
working on organ sacks quote for now period. What are
(55:05):
they doing? She won't say, though she did start the
fact check and call by letting us know r III
is now quote a federal asset. For me, the whole
thing is a head trip. I started this quest trying
to track down a rumor. Who was this company that
(55:27):
had pitched investors on funding a business with a dream
of full body replacement. After a lot of digging, I
think it's fair to say we found it, and I
heard the way one of its co founders talks about
the future. Here's what I can tell you. The technology
is nowhere near close to the promise, at least not yet.
There are so many milestones, and for right now, even
(55:51):
the first ones, those organ sacks made from monkey skin
cells are all theoretical. I still don't know how to
answer Alice's question, wouldn't you want to live in a
younger body? I don't even know how to live in
a world where that is a question, because the answer
is maybe, but not that way. Sherlock Holmes always sank
(56:19):
back into an ui, what he called the dull routine
of existence whenever a case ended. And that's kind of
where I am feeling unsatisfied and a little creeped out,
because I thought I was in a detective case, but
I was really in a sci fi novel, and all
(56:40):
I can think is what I always think when I'm lost.
I just need to get home next time on how
to live forever.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
What our ancestors were eating five hundred years ago may
have worked really well for them, but then our biology
was perturbed by two hundred years of trauma.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Let's do the credit. Skyline Drive is a production of
Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This show is hosted and written
by Me Mongage Artigulu, but I could never do this alone.
The show is story edited by Mark Lotto, who told
me to indulge my inner Encyclopedia Brown for this one.
Lizzie Jacobs, my partner in solving crimes, is the EP
(57:43):
on the show. I also have massive, massive help from
the only kid who loved Sherlock Holmes more than me,
Mary Philip Sandy, and our international man of Mystery science
producer Mark Stephen Allen. This episode was mixed by Casey
Holford As who also worked on the first season of Skyline.
Thank you so much, Casey, with beautiful music from Botany Bliss,
(58:06):
Samsa and the Zadi Records. We are so lucky to
have these tunes. If you want to hear more we
made you mixtape. Just check out the show notes. This
show is executive produced from My Heart, but my good
friends Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel from Kaleidoscope. We've got
my co founder Oswold Listen also cost Us Lina's cost us.
How could you leave us for Greece? We are going
(58:27):
to miss you enjoy so much. Julia Nutter Our head
of studio, Rachel Strom our wonderful lawyer and friend who
somehow reviewed this episode and made it to the front
page of the Liberties Instagram that in itself is a mystery. Also,
thank you to the team here, Christy David, Dara Agne,
Sheina calypso El Viney for the beautiful collage art. There
(58:49):
are so many of you. I also want to give
a little special thanks to all the kiddos out there,
Henry Ruby, Julian Brendel, lou Baby, leon Enzo and Pearl Etour.
You guys make us so happy. All my friends at iHeart,
including Bob Connell, Will, Carrie, Nikki, Jason, Jerry and Moore,
also Shanta and Sarah, my family in India, my family
(59:12):
in the States, my cousin Roshni and Rohan, who promoted
us to first cousins because of Carmen San Diego. The
very biggest thanks to Lucas Adams, founder and editor of
The New York Review of Comics, and the person who
introduced me to the Hot Rock and the wonderful Donald
Westlake Mysteries books that made me smile wide. A very
(59:33):
big thank you to my cousin and our family playwright
Akshay Srivastov, and also to his dog Dimmy, just because
he's also great. And thank you to our pal Natalia Fiddleholts,
who also lent us her acting chops. Thank you so much, Natalia.
Just one last thank you to my Amma and my
dad Lalita and Omesha Ticular who let me stay up
(59:55):
so late and ordered pizza and we would watch Mysteries
together even though I had school the next day. Thank
you so much for listening
When I was in second and third grade, I was
obsessed with mysteries Carmen San Diego, Encyclopedia Brown, Agatha Christie,
and especially Sherlock Holmes. On Thursday nights, I would stay
up late and snuggled under a blanket with my mom
watching mystery on PBS. But as much as I wanted
to solve all the neighborhood mysteries, I only ever cracked
(00:34):
two of them. First, the case of the nine year
old boxing champ. When a new kid moved to the
cul de Sac and claimed he was a world boxing
champ elementary school division, words spread fast across my neighborhood.
The kid was tough, He talked back to his mom,
he cursed, he spit, and he let it be known
(00:56):
he could beat up anyone who wanted to fight. My
neighbor dragged me along to see if it was true.
But a few questions about where he trained, what international
cities he traveled to, He had a hard time naming
any and also just pointing out the fact that he
had very soft hands quickly took the air out of
the myth. Second, the case of the Secret Admirer. Some
(01:24):
creep had signed all the Valentines to every girl in
our third grade class from your secret Admirer. My friends
Kristen and Sarah brought me the case. Our homeroom teacher,
Missus DeLong, had even received a secret Admirer card, which
was a total scandal. But after a little slew thing,
I realized that the night before, when I was out
(01:45):
playing basketball, my parents had called me in to sign Valentines,
and then after a while it got sick of calling
for me. My dad thought it would be funny to
sign all the cards anonymously, like I was some love
sick Casanova. It didn't take that long to solve the case,
but I didn't let on. I pretended it was unsolvable,
(02:07):
a mystery for the ages, and quickly shifted the conversation.
Sometimes solving a case is worse than not solving it.
Sometimes the answer feels wrong, even when it's right. All
(02:30):
that's to say, I think my work is often about
solving mysteries. I like patching the hole in the story.
I love hearing a curious fact or reading a line
that doesn't sound right, and then poking around to get
the full story. So in October of last year, as
I was starting to gather leads for this show. I
hopped on the phone with an investor to hear about
(02:50):
what they'd been pitched in the longevity space, and as
they walked me through new ideas for drugs and procedures,
suddenly I heard a cloud of phrases that made me
lean in.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
We didn't invest because it makes us too uncomfortable. It's
pulled straight out of sci fi. They're brilliant, but their
reputations are controversial.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
They want to remain anonymous, so I've had their tape
replaced with an actor, by which I mean my cousin. Anyway,
the investor tells me that in the.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Pitch there's a line item that stands out. It's for
buying property in South America.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So then they asked why is real estate part of
this pitch, and the answer it's.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Because they're going to buy property to catch monkeys they
can test on what.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
My mind is spinning trying to understand what they're talking about.
And then I hear.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
This The goal is to clone humans and use them
for human organ farms.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
And that's the moment I knew the game is afoot.
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, I'm Monga's heat there. This
is Skyline Drive How to Live Forever, Chapter one. Dear Leaders,
(04:44):
as the present.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Dish state, you.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Americans do not eat what grows for free, like amazing,
very tasty fruit lying on the end. In Russia, people
gather things from the treats. I think Americans want to pay, definitely,
this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I'm walking with Mikyle Rubin over to this little patch
of grass on the Stanford campus, and he's right. We
spot orange trees everywhere, and despite my love of citrus,
it hadn't occurred to me to pick up any fruit
off the ground. In spite of his scolding slash teasing me,
I feel lucky to be here with Mikyle. He made
(05:32):
his name at a publication called Prey Act, breaking stories
about Russia's political corruption and the oligarchy.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
There.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
The guy is fearless.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
We specialize on prohibited topics in Russia. So our goal
is to tell the stories that no one else would
ever tell, which is mostly everything about lighting me Puicha actually.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
But Mikile is an exile here because us. In twenty
twenty one.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
We got, let's say, a signal that we need to
leave the country, which was very direct searchers by the police,
questions by the police. Then we got this title of
undesirable organization, which means prison, so very pretty direct signal
that we need to leave the country. Since my exile
(06:26):
started four years now, five years ago now, we changed
places very often, countries places.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
So I really do feel like I'm in a mystery
or maybe a paranoid conspiracy thriller. I'm chasing this rumor
of human cloning, human organ farms. I'm meeting with an
exile journalist under an orange tree at Stanford, and right
now we're talking about a strange bit of tape that
emerged on the internet last year. That's Chinese President Hi
(06:57):
Jinping walking with Vladimir Putin during a military parade in Beijing.
An essays stroll through the help of their translators, the
two seventy two year olds are saying that seventy used
to be considered ancient, but these days being seventy is
like being a child. Then Putin suggests that maybe people
will age backwards by replacing their organs and so essentially
(07:20):
becoming immortal. She chuckles and ads it could be in
this century humans might be able to live to one
hundred and fifty years old. That exchange went viral, because
of course it did. It's terrifying, But to Mikail.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
It wasn't surprised for me at all, as an investigative
journalist who covers lead in the Putin for most part
of his career, that he is definitely obsessed. I am
using this word intentionally. He's obsessed with his health.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
All knows a lot about that. Among other things. He
was the one who broke the story about Putin adding
a bath bomb of antler blood extract to his top,
a Siberian folk treatment for virility, which only amplified Putin's
myth internationally.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Like back at like fifteen years ago, they were published
his photos half naked you riding a horse and swimming.
It was important part of his image. What we understand
now is that he wants to live for a very
very long time, and we found some proofs for that.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Mckail and his team also broke a story about contracts
between the Russian President's office and hotels near his various
homes and who was traveling with Putin along with when.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
So we find that every time Putin travels some way
out of Moscow, there is a bunch of doctors traveling
with him and who have to leave very close to
his residences. Usually it is from four up to seven
doctors traveling with him, but there were two times when
(09:12):
Putin was visited by twelve doctors simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The reporters determined that Putin was likely treated for thyroid
cancer in secret, and that he'd had hernia surgery too.
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing the Kremlin confirms.
If Putin disappeared for a few days, Mikael says, they'll
release pre recorded tapes of meetings to make it seem
like he's on the job as normal. How do you
(09:38):
figure out someone like Putin's health.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It is a prohibited topic in Russia, totally prohibited. This
is a part of Putin's image. He's always healthy. They
never tell that he's ill. Never.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
In late May of twenty twenty six, the Wall Street
Journal released a story clarifying that Putin had earmarked twenty
six billion dollars for a longevity initiative. Pudin's daughter, a
pediatric endocrinologist who advises her father on genetics, and a
physicist who led the USSR's nuclear research project were put
In charge, and along with delivering new gene therapies for
(10:16):
slowing cellular aging. The scientists have two key tasks, both
dealing with organ transplants. The first to figure out how
to three D print organs in a lab, the second
using mini pigs as living incubators to grow and harvest organs.
(10:37):
If everything goes to plan, Russia will basically have generated
a body farm where fields of hearts and lungs and
kidneys will either be printed on demand or plucked from
a pig host to be implanted into a human. According
to the journal, the hope is that between these two initiatives,
people will be able to switch out body parts indefinitely.
(10:58):
Putin has invested billions in the idea and is targeting
a deadline that isn't as far off as you think,
just four years, which happens to be before the country's
next presidential election. Of course, all of this is being
pitched as a state priority, a way to make Russians healthier.
Right now, the life expectancy for the average Russian is
(11:20):
seventy three, putting Russia at a dismal one hundred and
nineteen out of two hundred and nine countries studied and
for a new recruit to its military from the moment
training starts to death in battle, their life expectancy averages
only up to three weeks. But when this organ replacement
(11:41):
therapy is ready, which Russian will be first in line.
I'm sure you can guess.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
What I'm trying to say is that definitely this conversation
with presidentcy wasn't something newte and unfortunately for Russia that
his plan is also too for a very very long time.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Chapter two, Library Science. I can't stop thinking about this
dystopic vision for the future where if you have a
good mechanic and a warehouse full of parts, you can
(12:35):
keep a body running endlessly. I mean, I get the
idea you might need a pacemaker or to replace a
bum heart, but to just keep replacing parts forever. And
it makes me wonder about the urban myths I heard
in middle and high school of people going to a party,
getting drugged and then waking up in bathtubs of ice
without a kidney, which is why Lizzie and I ended
(12:58):
up in a local public library on a chilly January day,
sitting with a white hat hacker named Searchlight.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
Going on to Darknet used to be a lot easier
because you could just go to a website and be like, look,
this is who's advertising organs.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Just so you know, that's not Searchlight's actual voice. Searchlight
works as an elite cybersecurity consultant and studies at one
of the country's most prestigious universities, and they only agreed
to talk to me if we kept their voice and
identity out of the show. It's near closing time, and
while it's not exactly busy, I'm nervous about who might
catch wind of what we're doing. The Searchlight tells us
(13:38):
that the library is a convenient way to access the
web without using your own IP address. They boot up
the computer, clear it of the existing searches and credentials.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
If you ever want to take a photo of like this,
just don't take a photo of me.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They reassure us we won't actually be doing anything illegal,
which is a welcome reminder. A Searchlight begins typing, I'm
giddy to tour the dark web. I'm still thinking about
Silk Road, the so called black market Amazon where organ
trafficking was rumored to take place, but Searchlight says that
(14:15):
that part of the net is filled with government agents
running honeypot schemes on unsuspecting nubes and anyway, it's not
where the action is these days. So we're going regular
old surface web and searchlight starts by demonstrating how embarrassingly
easy it is to find longevity drugs here on the internet.
(14:36):
We all use how.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Long to take? And did it seem surprising?
Speaker 1 (14:39):
How long a tike?
Speaker 6 (14:40):
It took? Under a minute, which is wow, this is
so easy that why would you ever go through the
effort of going through the dark web for any of
these things?
Speaker 1 (14:53):
By current estimates, the shadow markets are a six trillion
dollars a year economy. That includes money launcher and other
illicit activity too, but it also includes what we're looking
at right now, purchasing cancer drugs and anti virals for
HIV and anabolic androgenic steroids.
Speaker 6 (15:12):
I'm assuming there's a lot of business incentives for why
this is happening, and a lot of incentive for illicit
pharmacies in other countries to be targeting the US market.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
I angle my body boxing out any nosy neighbors from
being able to see the screen. I can't believe how
brazen this marketplace is. And while we're not talking about
purchasing organs. These are serious pharmaceuticals, things with real side effects,
which are being recommended on dodgy sites as off label
longevity meds search sites. Starts pecking at the keys again
(15:45):
and we're transported to the world of longevity chatboards, the
so called community helping a new class of initiates navigate
their hunt for drugs. The boards point new longevionauts to
which sites are most reliable, which services to use to
drop ship the drugs, which banks are better for discrete
international transfers.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
Yeah, this is super detailed. This person decided to say
which regional facility their package arrived that and also when
they paid for it, and also when it arrived to them,
which is extremely detailed amount of information to put on
the public Internet about your crimes. Whether this is a
real name or not doesn't really matter. Essentially, if these
(16:27):
people are not having some dark web conversation or secret telegrams,
it's just on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
One post we look at about how to order rapamycin
has over fifty thousand views and hundreds of comments. Rapamycin
is an immunosuppressant, especially helpful in preventing rejection after say
a kidney transplant. While the drug has been much hyped
in longevity circles, it has plenty of documented side effects,
(16:53):
including mouth ulcers, wound healing issues, and disabling your immune system.
Anti aging potential for humans, if any is still unclear,
but at Searchlight points out, we don't really know anything
about who has set up this forum and what their
(17:15):
motives could be.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
Who is this person? No idea. If this person's a
broker or supplier, then there's an incentive for them to
lie right and tell the people that it's safe when
it's not, and that's predatory.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
A long time ago, a writer friend of mine told
me the story about getting in a minivan with a
formulae one driver on some blocked off roads in New Jersey,
a new supposed test track. The driver guns it, hurling
the minivan around corners, and as the writer sweats and
white knuckles the grab handles, the driver looks over and smirks,
(17:54):
showing just how much control over this soccer mom vehicle
he has. I'm reminded of that scene. A surflight whips
the browser across the web. Click, click, click, A few
keystrokes and something we're looking at discount injectables that stimulate
bone marrow to make more red blood cells. A few
more and we're racing to a site that claims to
(18:15):
be quote the best Indian pharmaceutical supplier in the Philippines
that also ships to the US. This is f one handling,
not some web tourists working the wheel, and we skid
past disclosures or lack of them on so many sites.
(18:35):
When we tap the brakes, Searflight points out the market
here is wider than just longebonouts. It's also filled with
people with serious health conditions who've been abandoned by a
broken healthcare system. People left scouring the internet for cheaper
versions of the drugs they can't afford, for.
Speaker 6 (18:53):
People who actually need these medications and are going on
these websites because they just can't afford them, because they're
like five thousand dollars injection in the US. They're like,
they're like really expensive. You can't blame them for going
on these websites.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
And Searchlight tells me these chemicals are not made for
people to take, They're for research only.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
It's still unsafe and it should be shut down.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I'm thinking of my dad, how at the end of
his life when he knew things weren't going right. He'd
ordered these ira Vedic tinctures that he thought could maybe
heal him. It was this act of desperation, and I
had no idea what he'd bought, or from where, or
how he'd even research these supposed cures. But as much
(19:42):
as I didn't want it to be true, I knew
they weren't going to work.
Speaker 6 (19:48):
I think what it really says about the longevity situation
is like this is being discussed openly. There is the
opportunity to know, hey, these drugs are dangerous, Like there's
guidance that can be and hasn't been put up by
FDA saying these longevity drugs are off label and are
dangerous to be using.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
My mind is reeling. For the same price as a
dinner out, I can buy research grade drugs that cure
major diseases on essentially an open market. It's barely harder
than ordering sneakers off of eBay. But what about the
people who aren't desperate? What about the prudence of the
world who talk of switching out a bad heart or kidney,
(20:42):
treating the human body like a Lego kit where you
can just snap in new parts, or the whispers. I
keep hearing of ultra elite longevity mansions, residences where New
Zealand oil airs and their friends. The actual phrase one
source used gream up longevity experiments they can fund without
worry of ethics. So I go back to my original
(21:04):
question and ask Searchlight, are people buying new livers and
spare kidneys online?
Speaker 6 (21:10):
Well, there's a lot of conversation about replacing kidneys and
things like that in the longevity community, but actually acting
on that is extremely fringe. And not only do I
not know anyone who's done that, I've never heard of
anybody who's heard of anybody who's done that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
For a minute, I feel relief, like an anxious parent
looking out onto an ocean and not seeing any fins
taking that is proof that the water is safe. Searchlight
says that if we want to go hunting for organ sales,
they could reboot the system and find a burner phone
for us to use, but the various security measures would
(21:49):
take more time than we have. The library is about
to close. Besides, they explained to me, organ trafficking isn't
just illegal, it also requires an incredible amount of coordination.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
For extreme cases. Let's do an organ transplant illegally. It
requires a donor who's forced into donating organs, be trafficked
to a safe house and then have organs removed, and
then have a surgeon and a surgical feed are nearby
implant them into the recipient, and all of that has
to be coordinated by a broker.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
A searchlight walks me through this. I'm realizing how hard
the recovery is, how easy it is for the body
to reject a foreign organ. The medicines you need to
override it. Even in the best circumstances. It is far
from smooth.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
People who are primarily trying to get transplants on. Here
are people who actually need them but are just going
about it in extremely unethical ways that they just don't
care about the people who they're trying to get things
transplanted from.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
And it feels like there's desperation on both sides, from
the person in dire need of a failing organ, but
also from the person for whom their own internal organs
maybe the most valuable things they have in or on.
In twenty twenty three, when inflation had gotten so bad
that poverty was rampant, people were posting on telegram offering
(23:11):
their livers, their bone marrow. According to Business Insider, someone
even posted an offer to sell their testicles quote twenty
five years old. Oh positive, I know searchlight can illuminate
the darkest corridors of the Internet, places I'd never be
(23:34):
able to find. Were all those rumors I'd heard from
vcs about organ replacement just another kind of urban myth.
Had we hit a dead end? I can't believe it.
There has to be.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
A way Chapter three, Cracking the Faberge Egg.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
In any detective story, there are moments when the trail
goes cold, when the pieces don't seem to fit, and
there are always options. You can play a violin and
hope for an inspired connection, or you can keep working
the neighborhood, tracing acquaintances, looking for one name to daisy
chain into the next. And in a community this small,
(24:37):
there's a sense that the young scientists with the boldest,
wildest ideas have all met each other, which is how
three days into my trip to San Francisco, I find
myself talking to Nicoa Poe.
Speaker 7 (24:49):
The people I valued the most actually weren't encouraging at all.
They were just like, that's stupid entire thing, scrap.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
That's what helped me, oh a lot of things. A vegan,
a former research assistant at Stanford an Army, National Guard Reserve,
and a startup founder running his trials at the Buck Institute,
a prestigious research institute devoted to longevity, where he's worked
on a way to replace his brain. But as we
(25:18):
sit in his office in Marin overlooking sweeping hills thick
with fog, he tells me he doesn't want to replace
his organs by transplant putin style. Instead, he's taking his
inspiration from an old philosophical thought experiment. The Ship of Theseus.
Speaker 7 (25:35):
Theseus was this Greek explorer, right, and he goes on
a journey and the mast of his ship break, so
they replaced the mast. The board's break, so they replace
the boards, and by the end of the journey they've
replaced every single part of the ship with a new piece.
But everybody still calls it Theseus's ship and the like.
(25:56):
The philosophical question is if you completely play something piece
by piece, is it still what it started to be?
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Nikoa has a theory about how you can replace your
entire brain piece by piece and still retain your identity.
And I want to know how he came to that belief.
Nikoa grew up in Hawaii with the health conscious hippie mom.
In college, he identifies two event horizons, and since he's
(26:23):
quote not good at ai, he decides to lean into
the other one, longevity. But even after studying biochemistry and
molecular biology and moving to the West Coast to work
in a Stanford lab, he wasn't satisfied.
Speaker 7 (26:38):
So one of my lab mates goes, well, you won't
stop talking about immortality. Here's a house full of people
that just do That's amaze. So then I applied and
they gave me a very serious interview and they're like, yes, well,
we'll see if you're good enough for the next cohort.
(27:00):
I was like sweating, this is extremely serious. I'm going
to be living with a whole bunch of biotech legends.
And then I showed up and it was just like, oh,
what's up, bro.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
But at Vida's house, whose stated mission is to create
community and quote incubate the most promising moonshots at the
intersections of biology and tech, was just what Nikoa needed.
I was out of Vida's house the day before and
had been charmed by the college off campus house feel
of it.
Speaker 7 (27:31):
Our fridge had a whole bunch of different peptides in
it on the side, and I was having space to
store my hot sauce because there was like too many
vials of Reddit, trude eyed and other tiny little peptide fragments.
So that was fun.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And he finds inspiration all around him that make some
investors and fame researchers who drop by to give talks,
and the like minded residents who lived there.
Speaker 7 (27:55):
Just having conversations and sharing my ideas with people and
coming like, look, I have this precious faberget egg of
an idea and I'm so proud of it. And then
they smash it and they're like, ninety percent of this
is garbage, and I go, okay, well I'll take this
ten percent. Look I have another wife.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Boom, Okay, well now I.
Speaker 7 (28:14):
Have twenty percent of a good idea and just refeeding
that process.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
And that's on a CoA started Sundial Therapeutics, an early
stage company focused on cellular brain replacement, whereas he likes
to call it.
Speaker 7 (28:27):
The brain of theseus. Basically, what we do is we
look for stem cells that can cross the blood brain
barrier and home to sights of damage and injury in
the brain and replace the dead and dying cells with
new healthy cells, so you can slowly replace the brain
over time. Every time one of the cells in your
brain dies, we send a stem cell in there and
(28:49):
it replaces it with a new, younger, healthy cell.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
What's fascinating about Nikoa is that he's actually tackling one
of the hardest problems in biotech. It's one thing to
coax stem cells into becoming skin or blood cells, or
even say a liver, things that have a very straightforward purpose.
It's another to get new cells across the blood brain
barrier into the right part of the brain, not to
(29:20):
mention doing it without disrupting the existing circuitry and the
person inside. But Nikoa is a rising star, and his
hope is that you can heal traumatic brain injuries and
replace damaged cells without the need for surgery. But also
he knows these advances take time because he knows just
how complicated the body is.
Speaker 7 (29:43):
This is going to go on the record, right, so
I'll check back in ten more years. But I don't
think the predictions of curing all diseases using AI and
synthetic biology in ten more years are going to play
out in anywhere near the time span, because biology doesn't
move at machine speeds.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
It's something I've been thinking about a lot, like there
is so much optimism and hype in the space, but
also there's a real tension between the people in the
university labs who believe advances take decades, people like doctor
Cy who is effectively replicating simplified brains in petri dishes,
from the tech optimists, people who are certain that death
(30:21):
with enough computing power is a very solvable problem.
Speaker 7 (30:26):
I think tech teaches you to be optimistic and biotech
teaches you to be pessimistic. Here, when you're working with
living systems, you get used to things taking twice as
long and costing three times as much as you thought
every single time.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
He's cautious about putting a neat timeline on biology, but
also just look at the scale of his ambition. He's
trying to replace an entire brain cell for cell, and
despite his caveats, Nicoa's Brain of THESEUS project is moving
at a surprisingly fast clip. He tells me that just
this year.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
We're planning to launch our first pre clinical study in
an animal model of Alzheimer's to see if they can
actually reduce the burden of the disease.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Of course, the bigger question I have is the original
philosophical one. If you replace a brain sell by cell,
and at the end of it you have a totally
new brain, is that still you? Nikoa has a theory.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
My conjecture is, because of how the brain works, even
if you replace every single cell in your brain over
time with a different cell, you're not going to lose
your identity because identity is encoded not in the individual neurons,
but in the patterns of firing between them. And every
time a new cell comes into your brain, it's trained
(31:54):
by all of the neurons next to it in order
to start behaving as part of your brain. So as
you get this gradual replacement, the parts that are there
train the new parts that are coming in, which train
their replacements, which train their replacements, and you eventually get
full replacement of your brain with healthy, er, younger sells,
(32:16):
but you're still you.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
It's not an answer that would have occurred to me
that despite replacing your entire brain, you still might be
you at the end of it. And yet maybe that's
just how humans work because I'm not the person I
was as a kid, or even the person I was yesterday.
I have experiences that continuously change me. Our brains are
constantly changing. So maybe he's right. I don't know enough
(32:44):
to know if it's optimism or wishful thinking or just true.
I'm worried the trail has gone cold on the mystery.
I'd initially set out to solve the one about the
company making clones for organ farms, but before I go,
(33:05):
I decide to take a wild swing. I asked Nicole
if his brain, if theseus idea extends to the whole body,
and whether Putin's supposed goal of continual organ replacement is possible.
Speaker 7 (33:18):
I don't think organ by organ is going to work
just because the environment has such a big impact. Like
you can take a day's zero embryonic cel but put
it in an old organism and it'll rapidly age just
because of all of the signals it's getting from the
older organism. So you see this with organs. Even if
(33:42):
you take an organ from a younger person, like a
kidney from a younger person, and put it into an
older person, it'll degrade in function to match the older
person's other kidney much more rapidly, just because it's in
an older, more damaging environment.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
And then he says something i't expecting.
Speaker 7 (34:02):
So I think, to get big gains from replacement, doing
as much replacement as possible, all at once.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
And with those words, I realize he knows what I
want to know, because as I've been digging for clues
in Silicon Valley about the human cloning, about the organ replacement,
I've heard shades of exactly this language, doing as much
replacement as possible, all at once. So I asked Nicole
about the company. I only have a vague description of
(34:34):
if we're possibly talking about the same thing, and it
feels like we are, So I ask if he can
make an introduction for me, and he says he'll ask.
Speaker 7 (34:43):
They sometimes don't like going on the record, just because
of the nature of what they do.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
And then about a month later, I hear from Alice
(35:11):
Chapter four, Alice in monkey.
Speaker 8 (35:14):
Land, I had a phenomenal lamp wreck at the hotel
that I'm staying at. I woke up at twelve, so
I decided to make it a brunch and it was great,
zero complaints.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Alice Gilman won't tell me where she is exactly, and
I can't really see her either. The room is dark
and I can only make out her shadow next to
the curtains billowing in the breeze, which adds to the mystique.
Alice is the co founder of the startup ar three bio,
and she's talking to me from a hotel somewhere in
the vicinity of their newest workspace on one of the
(35:57):
one hundred and forty three islands that make up Puerto Rico.
Speaker 8 (36:01):
You know, working on a science project in an island.
People are like, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
But I've been chasing a shadow for five months, and
I think I've finally found the person who belongs to
Alice and her company are three Bio, seem to operate
on that outermost ring where science kisses the impossible, and
up until this point in mid February twenty twenty six,
her company has been in stealth mode, a phrase I
(36:29):
keep hearing in Silicon Valley where people are very happy
to talk about their work but also pretend like it's
a secret. But those secrets have generated a lot of buzz.
Speaker 8 (36:39):
I think that we're just like entertainingly a company that
is actually extremely boring, but a lot of people decided
that we are radically crazy.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
As we talk, it's clear we're both walking on eggshells.
This is what I think I know about Alice.
Speaker 6 (36:57):
One.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
He's connected for the Residency and incubator, associated with Sam Altman.
She has spent time at Prospera, and she gives talks
to Adam Greeese's longevity conference Vitalist Pay. Two. There are
whispers about our three all over Silicon Valley, more than whispers,
actually palpable excitement, but there is very little online. And three.
(37:24):
She is not a scientist, She's an operator the COO.
But as I begin to ask her take on radical
life extension, she wants to start with the story of
her grandmother, a woman with an epic biography.
Speaker 8 (37:38):
She escaped World War two, stole a horse from the
Nazis and got her three year old sister on a
horse across. She went from Germany to China basically over
like five years in them, ended up with Shaolin monks.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Alice grew up in Kazakhstan, spending time with her grandmother.
This woman who should have died but instead fought to
stay alive and now struggles in body she's in.
Speaker 8 (38:03):
I'm like sitting in front of this person who's like
a legend, right, who's here playing with pills.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Alice tells me she can't stomach the disconnect. Why should
someone so full of life, so committed to life, have
to suffer just because their body is older? More than aging,
What terrifies Alice is death, because it wasn't so long
ago that she remembers sitting and waiting for news about
(38:34):
whether her father would live.
Speaker 8 (38:36):
My dad had a open heart surgery. I got very
lucky my dad is still around. I made myself a
point of I want to make sure my dad gets
to live longer this decade. And I didn't find anything
technologically that would guarantee that this decade, so I decided
to help make it.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
The experience drove Alice into the longevity space. She began
scouring for solutions scientists who might be able to help,
and then she finds a way to John Schloendorn, a
self proclaimed biological designer and PhD in molecular biology. He
counts Peter Teele as a benefactor. Teal invested and reported
one point five million dollars in one of Schlowendorn's previous startups.
Speaker 8 (39:25):
I ended up meeting John, who's sitting there in his
little garage lab out in the middle of nowhere, and
I talked to him for a few hours and realized
that this guy can build things that no one can build.
And I informed him that I now work with him.
I've seen him do things in our lab that I'm
afraid to name because I think they sound like miracles.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Miracles. Whatever Alice saw convinced her that she and John
together could offer new solutions to the world.
Speaker 8 (39:55):
We are making very strong statements and we can deliver
the extraordinary evidence. Someone called us the right hemisphere and
left hemisphere of real and musk.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Like.
Speaker 8 (40:03):
One of our investors is like, yeah, you guys are
like a feeling musk was two separate people, and we're like, yeah,
that's not a bad branding. We'll take it.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
She believes a partnership with John could be the ticket
to saving her dad.
Speaker 8 (40:14):
So I'm like, wait, so could I grow him a
new heart that will never develop heart disease because I
genetically engineered it at like stage one?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
And so Alice is in Puerto Rico at a bougie
hotel and near some type of monkey reserve. She wants
to grow replacement organs for people, better ones that will
never fall prey to disease like her dad's heart did
to me.
Speaker 8 (40:35):
Tattoos are much more biologically damaging to the body than
like an organ transplant, because you're like eternally inflaming your
system forever, your body will be screaming in pain, right,
and so that is somehow normal to eternally have your
body screaming in pain, And like getting a heart transplant
is not normal somehow, right, Like what how did we
(40:59):
decide that?
Speaker 1 (41:01):
But to get there, she can't just start with humans.
Speaker 8 (41:04):
We have a few milestones that we're hoping to achieve.
The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal
testing by using skin stem cells. We take skin cells
from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanoca
miracles that result in fully grown organ systems.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
The Yamanaka factors are these seemingly miraculous proteins that won
Shinya Yamanaka a Nobel prize. He and another scientist turned
adult cells into fresh stem cells, which can then be
reprogrammed to become any kind of cell. But what does
she mean by an organ system? In the course of
our conversation. She also calls these organ sacks.
Speaker 8 (41:49):
So it's just pretty much a heart, like lungs and
everything that you would find in a body, but it's
not technically alive because it's exclusively the organs, and they
are kind of in this like little biological platform that
you can test on and you can map out the
cross organ interactions.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
The language feels almost purposefully oblique. It's quote not technically alive.
It's everything quote you'd find in a body. It takes
me a while to piece together what Alice is talking about, because,
as Alice tells me, I.
Speaker 8 (42:21):
Try to not be scary to an average person.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
But what she's describing here, I finally figure out is
a shell of a body. A layperson like me might
call it as a clone. Alice and R three Bio
have called this quote immunocompatible organs grown out of your
skin cell, and the ones she's talking about as the
future of biological testing come from scraping skin cells from
(42:48):
a monkey. But the big difference, Alice claims, is that
R three would grow these without any sentience, meaning they
would use proprietary techniques to knock out the brain function
from inception so that the creatures would have no memory,
feel no pain, and have no consciousness, hence an organ sack.
(43:18):
But I'm curious, how do you get organ sacks that
grow but don't feel anything? So, like, do these organ
sacks like have the stem of a brain?
Speaker 8 (43:30):
So the mice models can exist without any like like
with like a very limited set of nervous systems. But
then there are other constraints on the ability of like
the organs to preserve themselves. So there's a way in
which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less
nervous system And then when you skew towards social acceptance,
(43:51):
it looks better, but it's less scientifically feasible. Oh and
so we are still like making observations about how that
would work.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Alice is saying, less sentient the organ sack, the more
people are okay with it, but the science doesn't work
as well. The more sentient the test subject, the better
it works. But then it freaks everyone out and that
doesn't solve the unanswered scientific question about whether the clone
test subject would actually feel zero pain have zero sentience.
(44:29):
But Alice wants me to know this is sci fi
with a heart.
Speaker 8 (44:34):
I'm a big animal rights advocate, and I believe in
making a better world, So I don't want to keep
monkeys in cages, and there's an option to have them
run around the island with bracelets on.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
On its website. Our three Bio says we do not
work with live primates. Alice tells me the logic for
her being in Puerto Rico is.
Speaker 8 (44:54):
We wanted monkey access, and there's a lot of monkeys
here that we can after negotiating with local companies that
are like supervising them, we can walk up to them
get some of their skin cells.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Wired magazine reported after our call that Gilman posted a
job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico to quote
implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births in
non human primates. So I don't know, it seems like
they might start working with live primates. And also, just
(45:28):
to be clear, in today's world, with today's science, for
that organ sack to exist, some poor being has to
give birth to a brain dead offspring. But as Alice
keeps reminding me, she doesn't want to put living animals
in pain, and she doesn't see these organ sacks as
(45:51):
real monkeys, so she feels the ethics check out.
Speaker 8 (45:56):
Hypothetically, so you imagine COVID hits. A bunch of AI
lab scientists already generate a hypothesis for what would be
a good vaccine and start infusing these little room cabinets
with these organ stacks, and in two hours we already
have reactions and they're like self recursive, so you can
keep updating whatever you're infusing into their body and like
(46:16):
check out what all the organ system reactions are creating.
By the time the first scientist walks in at six am,
you already have basically multiple proof of concepts for vaccines,
and we could actually have a COVID vaccine in two weeks.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
The scene feels like pure science fiction. Cabinets full of
allegedly non sentient monkey bodies hooked up to AI, ready
to test for lightning fast medical advances. Instead of a
year and change in lockdown. In Alice's world, complex vaccines
are just a few weeks away. That image is overwhelming.
(47:00):
You know that William Gibson quote, The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed. Alice is forcing me to
confront a sci fi present. I didn't know existed and
now I'm trying to get my bearings.
Speaker 8 (47:16):
This could mean things like designer organs, and now we
can have Olympic lungs, and we can have extremely healthy
organs where your genetics actually you know, your whole liver
is going to consist of like cells that are from
the beginning program to not form any diseases.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Vcs and scientists in Silicon Valley have also been telling
me that when autonomous cars take over, car crashes will
go down and the number of legitimate organs available for
donation will decrease significantly. To keep humans alive, these organs
will need to come from somewhere. So why not organ bags.
Speaker 8 (47:50):
Say we grew a set of human organs and say,
like a rich person orders a heart, we still have
all of the other organs. There is nothing stopping me
from donating the rest of them to someone who needs
them in a wait list of one hundred thousand people
instead of a car accident or a suicide.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Alice blames the media for making people feel scared of
the future when there are solutions around the corner. Remember
she's half an Elon Musk.
Speaker 8 (48:25):
People hating on billionaires for investing in anti aging makes
people want to hide working on anti aging and like
the whiplash you get just for working on something scientific
because of the propaganda that people see that was filmed
by people who were also potentially genuinely afraid of the future.
(48:45):
I think is kind of a gap I'm noticing between
the rest of the world and the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
She feels compelled to keep pushing humanity forward because the
way she sees it, there's limited downside.
Speaker 8 (49:00):
Worst case scenarios. I say, millions of lives, and to me,
that is a be worth taking, regardless of any kinds
of blows that are going to come our way.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
I noticed that whenever we start talking about ethics or feasibility,
she sways the conversation to how much good R three
is doing, or about not putting cute monkeys in pain,
or the cows and Cowshwitz an animal rights term for
factory farms.
Speaker 8 (49:26):
I live in a contextual world where just because we
don't talk about a lot of things, that doesn't mean
they're not happening.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
I feel like I'm on the receiving end of debate tactics,
though I don't know. I wasn't on the debate club,
but I was on the high school newspaper, and I
do know how to press gently for facts. So fifty
five minutes into our call, I just decided to talk
about it. This idea. I keep hearing this persistent rumor
(49:57):
in Silicon Valley that there are people, maybe r through bio,
working to make nonsentient clones of people's bodies. So then
when your body at seventy or eighty or whenever has
outgrown its use, you can snap your head onto a
younger version of yourself. The more I talked to people
(50:17):
in San Francisco about it, the more I heard people say, like,
transferring one organ just isn't efficient, and ultimately, like a
surgical like cut for where where you replace a head
on a new body is actually much much more efficient
and you're not asking an organ to adapt to like
the circumstances of a body.
Speaker 8 (50:39):
Well, if I was to join you in your Sciphi
speculations of the future, as long as we can figure
out surgical infrastructure, it would be I would take I
would probably be open to living in a younger, healthier
set of organs in the future, and I think that's
a desirable thing to have in the world.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
She keeps bringing it up.
Speaker 8 (51:03):
Would you get a new body if you wouldn't a
younger one?
Speaker 1 (51:10):
And then this about full body replacements. And I also
think that, like as you pointed out earlier, the ways
that we embrace change is very slow. Right, Like the
idea of getting a heart transplant initially was so foreign.
Speaker 8 (51:28):
I think head transplants are definitely a scary way of
thinking about the future. Right. It feels like either like
it sounds like a lot of people are going to
be taken advantage of, and this is something either only
available to the ridge but also somehow very horrible and
four people are going to be taken advantage of, and
like it just creates an ick. And so that's one
(51:49):
example of like, no, we're not doing that.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
By the way, the thing is, I can't say head
transplants or what Alice is working towards. I can't say
that a company in stealth mode whose chief operating officer
tells me that it's working towards an organ sack of
a monkey with aspirations of making an organ sack of
(52:14):
a human might want to sell you a clone so
you can avoid death by cutting off your head and
implanting it on a younger you. But the MIT Technology
Review did because when they released a story in late
March this year, over a month after I chat with Alice,
(52:36):
they found this.
Speaker 5 (52:39):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Last September, Alice and her co founder John Schlowandorn presented
at Abundance Longevity, a seventy thousand dollars per ticket event
in Boston, and while that presentation was meant to be confidential,
the article alleges the agenda leaked the name of our
three session quote full body replacement. Alice and I talked
(53:10):
for an hour and forty five minutes, but now it's
time for her to go.
Speaker 8 (53:14):
I think we covered a lot of it. I wish
people knew the perspective of how hard it is sometimes
to be guiding a company based on like a moral compass,
like we would be triple funded if we were not
making decisions with certain moralities attacked. And I hope people
(53:35):
get really excited about things that will save hundreds of
millions of people's lives and explore and how to scale that.
And I love all these intelligences in the world, and
I hope that we can make a world better for
all forms of intelligences and people to live healthier longer
lives and think about infrastructure in more efficient ways.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Some important points here. Our three Bio rejected the claims
in the MIT Technology Review, giving the following repudiation to
the outlet quote, any allegations of intent or conspiracy to
create human clones or human beings with brain damage are
categorically false. Alice did share with me a piece she
(54:20):
liked better. That article m wired with a quote about
the veterinarian posting. It came out days before the MIT
Tech Review piece. It still focuses on their work with
monkey skin cells, organ sacks for testing and transplants, and
it even quotes an our three Bio investor saying, quote,
if we can create a non sentient, headless bodyoid for
(54:41):
a human being, that will be a great source of organs. Also,
the week before this episode came out, we did a
fact check and call with Alice. She asked us if
we could postpone the episode. We declined. She told us
all of this is theoretical and just her opinion. She
also wants us to know that our three BI isn't
working on organ sacks quote for now period. What are
(55:05):
they doing? She won't say, though she did start the
fact check and call by letting us know r III
is now quote a federal asset. For me, the whole
thing is a head trip. I started this quest trying
to track down a rumor. Who was this company that
(55:27):
had pitched investors on funding a business with a dream
of full body replacement. After a lot of digging, I
think it's fair to say we found it, and I
heard the way one of its co founders talks about
the future. Here's what I can tell you. The technology
is nowhere near close to the promise, at least not yet.
There are so many milestones, and for right now, even
(55:51):
the first ones, those organ sacks made from monkey skin
cells are all theoretical. I still don't know how to
answer Alice's question, wouldn't you want to live in a
younger body? I don't even know how to live in
a world where that is a question, because the answer
is maybe, but not that way. Sherlock Holmes always sank
(56:19):
back into an ui, what he called the dull routine
of existence whenever a case ended. And that's kind of
where I am feeling unsatisfied and a little creeped out,
because I thought I was in a detective case, but
I was really in a sci fi novel, and all
(56:40):
I can think is what I always think when I'm lost.
I just need to get home next time on how
to live forever.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
What our ancestors were eating five hundred years ago may
have worked really well for them, but then our biology
was perturbed by two hundred years of trauma.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Let's do the credit. Skyline Drive is a production of
Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This show is hosted and written
by Me Mongage Artigulu, but I could never do this alone.
The show is story edited by Mark Lotto, who told
me to indulge my inner Encyclopedia Brown for this one.
Lizzie Jacobs, my partner in solving crimes, is the EP
(57:43):
on the show. I also have massive, massive help from
the only kid who loved Sherlock Holmes more than me,
Mary Philip Sandy, and our international man of Mystery science
producer Mark Stephen Allen. This episode was mixed by Casey
Holford As who also worked on the first season of Skyline.
Thank you so much, Casey, with beautiful music from Botany Bliss,
(58:06):
Samsa and the Zadi Records. We are so lucky to
have these tunes. If you want to hear more we
made you mixtape. Just check out the show notes. This
show is executive produced from My Heart, but my good
friends Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel from Kaleidoscope. We've got
my co founder Oswold Listen also cost Us Lina's cost us.
How could you leave us for Greece? We are going
(58:27):
to miss you enjoy so much. Julia Nutter Our head
of studio, Rachel Strom our wonderful lawyer and friend who
somehow reviewed this episode and made it to the front
page of the Liberties Instagram that in itself is a mystery. Also,
thank you to the team here, Christy David, Dara Agne,
Sheina calypso El Viney for the beautiful collage art. There
(58:49):
are so many of you. I also want to give
a little special thanks to all the kiddos out there,
Henry Ruby, Julian Brendel, lou Baby, leon Enzo and Pearl Etour.
You guys make us so happy. All my friends at iHeart,
including Bob Connell, Will, Carrie, Nikki, Jason, Jerry and Moore,
also Shanta and Sarah, my family in India, my family
(59:12):
in the States, my cousin Roshni and Rohan, who promoted
us to first cousins because of Carmen San Diego. The
very biggest thanks to Lucas Adams, founder and editor of
The New York Review of Comics, and the person who
introduced me to the Hot Rock and the wonderful Donald
Westlake Mysteries books that made me smile wide. A very
(59:33):
big thank you to my cousin and our family playwright
Akshay Srivastov, and also to his dog Dimmy, just because
he's also great. And thank you to our pal Natalia Fiddleholts,
who also lent us her acting chops. Thank you so much, Natalia.
Just one last thank you to my Amma and my
dad Lalita and Omesha Ticular who let me stay up
(59:55):
so late and ordered pizza and we would watch Mysteries
together even though I had school the next day. Thank
you so much for listening
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