In early September, a microphone that was supposed to be off caught Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping talking, as men of their station sometimes do, about not dying. Putin mused about advances in organ transplantation. Xi, sounding cautiously optimistic, cited predictions that humans might live to 150 within this century. Russia has reportedly directed billions of dollars toward organ transplantation research and regenerative medicine. The exchange was fleeting, but it landed on something old. The world’s oldest surviving literary epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written down nearly 4,000 years ago, is largely an account of one king’s search for immortality after the death of his companion Enkidu forces him to confront his own. The desire has not changed. Only the tools have.
So argues Omar Shabana, a molecular biologist who took stock of the modern version of that search in an essay for Al Jazeera this week. His verdict, delivered with the patience of a man who works with cells rather than capital, is that the money has arrived well ahead of the science.
The hallmarks, and the hype
The field in question is longevity biotechnology, a fashionable subfield of biotech with a simple aim and a punishing mission: treat the underlying biological mechanisms of age-related disease, and thereby extend healthspan, the years lived in good health, or lifespan, the years lived at all. Shabana distinguishes it from traditional pharmaceutical research, which designs chemicals to interact with biological targets; biotechnology uses biological systems themselves. Its successes are real. The cancer immunotherapy Keytruda is one of the best-selling drugs in the world.
The intellectual scaffolding of the field is a set of twelve interconnected cellular and molecular processes known as the hallmarks of ageing, among them genomic instability and chronic inflammation. Researchers comparing long-lived organisms with short-lived ones, the bowhead whale with more ordinary mammals, the cancer-resistant naked mole rat with its shorter-lived cousins, have identified numerous genes that regulate these processes. Manipulating those genes in animal models has improved health and function in older animals and, in some cases, significantly extended lifespan. That is the science. The money is something else.
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, longevity biotech companies raised approximately $3.74 billion, Shabana writes, citing a Forbes article that called longevity the billionaire’s next big bet after artificial intelligence. Academic journals now exist solely for ageing and longevity. Pharmaceutical companies are waiting eagerly on clinical trial results. The appetite has precedent. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, is said to have died of suspected mercury poisoning while chasing an elixir of immortality. In the 1920s, Alexander Bogdanov pioneered transfusions of young blood into old recipients as an anti-ageing therapy. There is little proof that it worked; Bogdanov himself died after one of his own transfusion experiments. The market, undeterred, has grown.
Why now
Two things, in Shabana’s account, explain the flood. The first is the general boom in artificial intelligence, which has left investors with a feeling that biology is next. The second is the obesity-drug phenomenon. Obesity is a complex, multifactorial disease, entangled with genetics, environment, living standards and class, and the older drugs for it were of modest effect. The new generation of highly effective obesity medicines changed the industry’s assumptions; they are among the top ten best-selling drugs in the world, and they work surprisingly well. If that can be solved, the reasoning runs, why not ageing? Add the fact that ageing populations are predicted to become ever larger burdens on their economies, and there is, as Shabana puts it, no better market.
The reasons for caution
Here the essay turns, because ageing is not obesity. It is baked into living systems, and manipulating something that ubiquitous will almost always produce side effects, likely big ones. Clinical trials are early, and it will take years, probably decades, to learn whether any approach meaningfully extends human healthspan. A structural obstacle sits in the way as well: the Food and Drug Administration does not currently regard ageing itself as a disease target, so companies must demonstrate benefit against specific diseases or measurable aspects of health.
The theoretical obstacles are subtler, and Shabana spends his most exacting passage on one. Some longevity approaches aim to manipulate DNA repair, since human DNA is damaged daily and the cellular machinery that fixes it weakens with age. But that machinery does other jobs. Antibody-producing B cells deliberately introduce mutations into their own DNA to generate effective antibodies. A therapy that tunes up DNA repair could dampen that capacity, with unknowable consequences for a patient’s immune system. Decades of clinical research offer the general lesson: antibiotics alter the microbiome and select for resistant bacteria; chemotherapy kills healthy fast-dividing cells along with malignant ones. Intervene here, pay there.
Living systems, Shabana notes, have spent billions of years balancing ageing against immunity, reproduction, growth and maintenance, and anyone proposing to treat ageing will have to fine-tune one variable without wrecking the rest. Perhaps ageing will yield to treatment someday. Not soon, and probably not free of cost. In the meantime, the presidents talk on hot microphones, the billions accumulate, and Gilgamesh’s question, asked four millennia ago on clay tablets, remains without an answer.