Who Wants to Live Forever?
Immortality—it sounds like the stuff of fantasy. Dracula longed for it, Voldemort feared the lack of it, and today, a wealthy tech entrepreneur named Brian Johnson is spending millions trying to buy it.
Johnson pours roughly $2 million a year into Project Blueprint, his ambitious anti-death experiment. To him, “Don’t die” isn’t just a personal mantra—it’s practically a new religion, an economic model, even a political ideology. His competition? In his own words—Jesus.
Project Blueprint is a highly regimented lifestyle. Every single day, Johnson eats exactly 1,977 calories before 11 a.m., tracks his bodily functions (yes, even collecting stool samples), and sleeps wired up to a device that monitors his nightly erections. He’s even tested blood plasma transfusions from young donors—one being his 17-year-old son.
But Johnson isn’t alone in chasing the fountain of youth. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is funding Altos Labs, a biotech company researching age reversal at the cellular level. Their goal? Reprogram aging cells by manipulating chromatin structure, effectively rejuvenating them. In the eyes of billionaire investors, death looks less like destiny and more like just another bug to fix—if you can throw enough money at it.
Of course, history reminds us of two inevitabilities: death and taxes. The ultra-rich have found ways around the latter, so why not try to outwit death too?
Many scientists dismiss true immortality as impossible, but research into aging is revealing ways to delay decline—perhaps even push back the Grim Reaper’s appointment indefinitely. If you were a billionaire bent on cheating death, where would you begin?
One clue comes from an unlikely creature: George the lobster.
George, estimated to be 140 years old, was once the prized possession of a New York seafood restaurant before being set free. Unlike humans, lobsters don’t seem to slow down with age. Their secret weapon? Telomerase, an enzyme that continually repairs and extends the protective caps at the ends of DNA strands called telomeres.
Here’s why that matters. Each time your cells divide, their DNA is duplicated. But the very ends of DNA strands—the telomeres—get a little shorter. Over time, this wear-and-tear leads to cellular senescence, where damaged cells stop dividing and begin releasing toxic signals, fueling inflammation and age-related diseases like arthritis, heart failure, and Alzheimer’s.
Lobsters, however, keep producing telomerase throughout their lives, preventing this decline. That’s why they don’t appear to age in the same way we do. Humans also produce telomerase, but only in limited cells like stem cells. Everywhere else, the system is switched off.
Could artificially activating telomerase help us live longer? Possibly—but there’s a catch. A Johns Hopkins study found that people with naturally long telomeres showed signs of slower aging—like delayed graying—but also faced much higher cancer risks. The same mechanism that extends cell life also gives mutations more chances to spread unchecked. More telomerase means youth… but also tumors.
Interestingly, lobsters don’t suffer this trade-off nearly as often, though scientists still don’t fully understand why.
But there’s hope. In 2024, University of Texas researchers conducted an experiment on mice, temporarily activating telomerase only in brain and muscle tissue. The results were astonishing: stronger muscles, sharper memory, lower inflammation, even new neurons forming in the brain. And importantly—no spike in cancer risk.
We’re still far from handing Brian Johnson—or anyone—the keys to immortality. But extending healthy human life by decades? That suddenly looks possible.
Maybe one day, thanks to creatures like George the lobster, humanity won’t defeat death—but we might just learn to keep it waiting.
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