The main plot, which attracted this reviewer’s interest, follows the political manoeuvrings around a newly discovered life extension drug Juventel. In the first chapters, the author makes a good effort to dip enough into the science that those with prior knowledge will not reject the premise as flawed. Less believable perhaps for those steeped in the subject matter is the fact that Juventel was developed, apparently entirely in-house, by the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world. This company now faces the dilemma that has often been discussed in LongeCity circles: how to get the drug approved given that its suspected life-extending properties would take decades to establish?

Here life-extension policy nerds may have expected more discussion of classification of ‘aging as a disease’ (which I was content to see omitted entirely) and possible ‘surrogate endpoints’ (which the author obliquely touches on, but does not develop- perhaps because it might lessen the dilemma on which the hinges the plot).

But the further trajectory is realistic: to fast-track market entry the life extension drug is developed for a niche (‘orphan’) indication with a view towards off-label sales. The neat tweak: to circumvent rules against off-label promotion the company introduces a bill relating to the drug, thereby covering the ensuing political discourse under ‘free speech’.

Again, were this a treatise on “how to get an anti-aging drug to market” one might criticise the lack of attention to many aspects: consideration of the Caronia decision, a look at FDA-internal processes, pressures and politics, the strategies to get into ‘off label’ prescribing circles, the difference between the US and the international markets etc.

But if one follows the plot to this point it then develops themes that relate to the professional experience of the author: more by accident, the ‘smokescreen’ bill becomes a political hot potato and now the rest of the story charts manoeuvres of political decision making in congress. A major sub-plot, and one where the author draws on experience and passion, is the re-election campaign of a John McCain-like figure: an elderly distinguished veteran, a Republican Congressman, who faces for the first time in his long political career an electoral challenge which also becomes a challenge to his ‘old-fashioned’ decency. He emerges as the noble hero of the piece, but it is nice to see that protagonists and arguments on both sides get a relatively fair treatment. There are villains: “Big Pharma” gets short shrift and in the process any discussion about potentially legitimate reasons for opposing lower drug prices or how significant the effect of the medicare drug prices negotiation ban might be. There are Russian troll factories and corrupt politicians, but by and large the author manages to uphold to the end (and despite of the foreseeable twist) a mature ambiguity that contrasts refreshingly with the ‘morality tale’ tone of the book. This contrast also gives rise to the terribly awkward title: there are “no popes in heaven” because no-one who wields real power can stay ‘pure’.

In the face of this aspiration the book does not stand out as an exemplar for exploring the dilemma of power - and not for its literary qualities. The narrative voice fails in trying to assume three tasks at once: a teacher-explainer for political and technical circumstances, a rather stilted inner voice reporting directly what the characters are thinking and feeling, and also a third party commentator remarking on “evil laughs”. Most forays into descriptive prose fail but remain mercifully rare.

Yet once the reader manages to set misgivings about these aside, the story nonetheless flows apace: through dialogue which constitutes most of the text and through its structure of quick back-and forth scenes often only 2 pages in length. An ideal ebook for a public transport commute.

Of course the reason that one might pick the book up and then finds it pleasantly easy to persist, are its qualities as treatise: a “Washington insider” sharing insights into a hidden world. Hal Malchow is chairman of MSHC Partners, one of America’s leading “voter contact” firms, he has a law degree and served as campaign manager for Al Gore’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate. The reader might be sceptical about the million-dollar PR shenanigans described in this book, but surely the author knows what he is talking about. This makes one basic tenet of the book particularly interesting: Malchow assumes that –albeit abetted by nefarious internet troll factories– once a life extension drug becomes available, voters will clamour for it. I have always been sceptical about this assumption. Surely voters (Americans especially) encounter claims for ‘miracle’ drugs every day? The backpage presents a quote attributed to Mark Twain “if voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it” – but the book actually portrays the opposite: politicians swept aside by the voters desire to live a few extra years in spite of a lack of expert consensus, counter-spin, economic concerns, big-pharma lobbying, tribal politics and ‘fake news’.

In describing these strategies mustered by both sides in a morally ambiguous battle the book hits its strongest notes.

There are weaknesses: for all its valiant attempts at even-handedness the ‘other side’ is not always developed. An inside-FDA perspective is presented very late and rather perfunctory; an inside perspective from the Democratic challenger is missing almost entirely. For a ‘realistic’ scenario it seems unlikely that Juventel would face scientific criticisms only from bought stooges, or that the action should be limited to the USA.

Nonetheless, the novel delivers unique, informed and nuanced insight into US lobbying applied to a potential life-extension treatment via an enjoyable read.

EDIT: LongeCity has conducted an interview with the author

The word is a constriction of ‘zealot’ and ‘shallow’ and also a reference to Tennyson’s poem ‘the Lady of Shalott’ (2x’t’) as someone who is removed from the real world, obsessed with images and appearances and likely to disappear suddenly and pointlessly.
“Shallot” (2x’l’) Is a word for a type of onion. A bland yet pungent vegetable that can make you cry when you work with it…

Characteristics of a shalot:

1) Shalots know little about the history of science and technology, let alone in life-extension. They fail to appreciate how much they risk repeating the past, and moreover, how much they themselves are –hopefully unwittingly– playing the part of a peddler of hype and false promises in the footsteps of hundreds who have come before. Instead, they are usually convinced that it’s all new and unheard of –including their own schemes and fancies.

2) Shalots don’t understand a lot about science. Most of the time they obfuscate this fact, sometimes they are quite upfront, even aggressive about it. They make a distinction between scientists as people who do the grunt work and people like themselves who are ‘organisers’. They understand even less about medicine.

3) They are interested in media buzz and talk a lot about ‘mass movements’ and ‘marketing’ about ‘policy’ – but usually fail to demonstrate where these factors have ever been truly relevant in producing tangible scientific advances.

4) Shalots often lament that different activities are not well-coordinated enough and paint a picture where global innovation would function much more efficiently if only someone would be in charge to co-ordinate.

5) They are usually not very successful in their professional life but are fairly sure that they were born to greatness. Even worse, if they have been successful once, they are now convinced that they have all the answers.

6) When a shalot accepts a specific, useful, or even important task they often under-perform… which should come as a surprise because the things that they really wanted to do would have been much more demanding.

7) Shalots tacitly assume Life Extension is a kind of ‘pill’ – something that will be invented at some stage and then solve all medical issues associated with aging in one go. They therefore talk about things like “before and after” and “until”. Some shalots declare that they realise it is more complicated than that, but their attitudes don’t suggest this is true.

8) They come onto the scene with a splash, a rush of activity. Sometimes that is very welcome because you can’t or don’t want to identify them as a shalot straight away. Sometimes, it is clear to most who have been there before that shalot shenanigans are in evidence, but not giving them a minimum of time would look bad and –who knows?– maybe, just maybe, the shalot can make a useful contribution before wandering of. And they will disappear after a while. Sometimes they get a job or a girlfriend.

You can tell that my own studies about shalots are as frustrating as they often purport themselves to be. I try to avoid them. Nonetheless I might return to this polemic with more observations as my experience may regrettably inspire.
This is a private rant, in no way related to anything I do at LongeCity or elsewhere.

I. LongeCity is, first and foremost, an internet forum.
This in itself is an operational challenge: LongeCity emerged when forums (‘bulletin boards’) were just taking over from email-lists as the preferred means of group communication. New trends have emerged since: blogs where individual authors have greater control, but still attract a crowd of readers, news sites now have ‘comments’ pages, and then social media changed the internet for a lot of users. These factors lead to a decline in the prominence of forums. A few super-forums like ‘reddit’ now dominate the field. LongeCity has sought to link into these developments (you can publish a blog on longecity, there is a longecity facebook page, you can share content to twitter, reddit etc..) but held on to the basic forum model. I believe that this model has much to recommend itself in terms of thematic structuring, non-centralised content, accessibility to new readers, and technical and editorial independence. Like there are still successful and influential mailing lists, we need to stay in our niche of providing a useful forum – over time that will mean more integration and more features, but the first consideration is to maintain what exists.

II. LongeCity's main role is sharing information
LongeCity has always aimed to go beyond ‘basic’ forum functionality. We offer custom facilities to share and curate: videos, links, pdf files, regimen recipes, quizzes. We maintain a ‘virtual economy’ where users can commend and reward each other prestige for information or activities. But these facilities are not widely used. Here, we come back to No1- to most visitors the basic forum functionality is sufficient. Attempts to ‘force’ the use of more specific features, even attempts to enforce higher quality in the basis forums are always controversial. Similarly, the forums are not a natural recruitment ground for other activities, over the years we have sought to recruit contributors to many initiatives – with few exceptions this has often proved very tricky even where efforts were bolstered by financial incentives. Any calls on LongeCity to ‘do more’ need to be measured against this experience.

III. LongeCity is a community platform
As with most forums, a ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ dominates the dynamics at LongeCity. People are given the tools to generate content and to react to it, but there are very few ‘officially sanctioned’ pieces. Instead we rely on the individual free will and initiative to create, and on crowds, groups, communities to curate. That means many things nor all of them unproblematic: we need to hope that people will care enough to contribute, that they will be fair in judging others, that they will be knowledgeable and (as the internet often demonstrates, this can be a tall order) respectful and intelligent. This means content is only as informative, initiatives only fly as high, joint actions are only as effective as the people that come together to create them. It also means that we can’t be unreasonably competitive about the domains and communities that people have created or adopted. (More: LongeCity & others).

IV. Many LongeCity visitors are not primarily interested in fostering its mission
This has been true (and complained about) since our founding: LongeCity attracts many different perspectives and conversations and the link to our mission is not always obvious. Many –probably most– visitors are only attracted by a very particular issue in health, nutrition or philosophy. ‘Converting’ these people to an ‘immortalist outlook’ would be pointless and sinister. Instead, we hope that nearly all conversations on the site help to bring together little pieces of information for the common cause. And, quite frankly, we are also extremely happy to derive some donations or advertising income from this ‘unaffiliated’ traffic that we can then put to use for the LongeCity mission. Hence, in contrast to other sites who –for very good reasons– eschew advertising, such revenue (in line with our policies on neutrality) is part of the ‘LongeCity model’ of openness.
Even for those who are interested or passionate about our mission, this does not translate readily into an interest specifically into LongeCity conversations, agendas and projects. Many times when LongeCity tries to be consultative and democratic about internal decisions, feedback has been rather limited. This lead to a situation where we would have to agitate and cajole for weeks and months in order to get a halfway representative sample of voices from membership. The same goes for volunteers: it is very easy to come up with interesting project, but hard to lead them, assemble a team and see them through.

V. LongeCity is not a place to spend your days forever
This may sound odd since ‘forever’ is part of our mission, but from a user perspective let us be realistic: people have better things to do than spend their days on a forum. And we should be fine with that. We have a proud track record of welcoming people who then get on to work hard on the LongeCity mission in very practical ways. Many people who once served in LongeCity leadership were novices then and went on to a full-time commitment in life extension research and advocacy. We can hope that these veterans check in from time to time. We can hope that we help to foster new generations on that journey. But we should appreciate and celebrate that people have lives to get on with. In line with what has been said above, we should also appreciate that interest in life extension is a journey with many winding paths. Hence we need to consistently welcome new blood and remain relevant to the once-in-a-blue-moon return visitors. The student still honing a skill, the stay-at-home mum, the labourer who struggles to make a living, those who just want to look younger, or live healthier but are not convinced about ‘forever’ – all these need to be welcome at LongeCity, not be pressured into some ‘creed’ but still be given the opportunity to gain relevant knowledge and to make as small or big a contribution to our mission as feels right and feasible to them.

VI. LongeCity is small & thrifty
LongeCity does not make a lot of money – small donations from a few hundred members, a bit of advertising. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to spend money effectively. Other organisations (some that were there today and gone tomorrow) spend more in a month on equivalent IT and management than LongeCity spend during its entire 15+ year existence. The bulk of our spending was on research which can be extremely high-cost and yet we consistently found ways of making very little money go a very long way. To be fair, this approach was necessary because LongeCity has never been well-endowed financially. We have never courted big donations. For our own forum infrastructure the bottom-up approach works well enough and if there is a large spending need it should go directly to the researchers concerned.

VII. LongeCity’s leadership first duty is stewardship
This experience lead to a clearly defined fallback position for LongeCity: the first duty of leadership is to keep the organisation afloat with minimum commotion and effort. This does not mean turning your back on the community-focused outlook. Instead, the task is to maintain a stable infrastructure that allows for such community projects to emerge, to be critiqued, vetted and improved, and to garner support and traction according to the strengths of its merits and team.
Many people on LongeCity talk about how an ‘anti-aging’ revolution needs to sweep the globe. They envisage a global movement, they conceive of a research agenda that is dramatically more effective than our current attempts to defeat death. One can have different perspectives on this, but in line with the LongeCity mission, these are valid, even laudable goals. However, LongeCity is the place to discuss, in an (“open forum” in the widest sense of the word) ideas, perhaps to help make connections or gain some orientation – not the organisation to suddenly morph into a political party, research hub, or church. Such organisations exist. Every once in a while we get people clamouring that LongeCity should, must stretch further. We must make sure that such enthusiasm is encouraged not stymied, provide the tools and guidance that people can apply themselves effectively, but also efficiently filter to those ideas, contributions, and characters that are right for LongeCity itself – remain thrifty, and be mindful that our volunteers have a limited time budget. Above all, we must be vigilant about remaining true to our mission. We have had the finest minds in life extension among our member- and leadership. We also have had a few who were of a more questionable disposition. Our organisation is small, democratic and has some assets and resources. Hence an important task among the leaders, guardian and friends of LongeCity is to ward against misappropriation.

VIII. Outlook
What has LongeCity achieved? There are other articles (e.g. here, here& here and the newsletter) discussing the small but significant contributions that LongeCity has made over the years. But perhaps even more importantly: through changes in leadership, significant restructuring, technical developments, and in the face of many other structures and organisations growing around us, we still exist. We still exist as a lively forum for the free exchange of ideas and information about the scientific conquest of death.
This may be an odd, controversial thing to say as a leader of an organisation, but I hope it is clear how it follows from all that has been discussed above: LongeCity does NOT have the structure, wherewithal, or ambition to become a ‘global player’. We changed the name ‘Immortality Institute’, because in truth, we were no ‘Institute’ and many supporters felt very uncomfortable about ‘Immortality’. We changed it to LongeCity in our usual way: in a community-led bottom-up process with all the benefits and drawbacks that that entails. Whether it’s a great name or not, I can identify with the ‘city’ part: I want LongeCity to be a city: a bustling place where very different people come together, for different things - from that meeting place new ideas are forged, new journeys begin to other places, but ideally, the city remains a home to return to once in a while. I want LongeCity to be a safe and constant place where the ‘curious’, the ‘part time’ and the ‘fully fledged’ immortalist can meet. Not more. Not less.

Note: I wrote the LongeCity/Imminst constitution and joined the first board. I am Administrator, Director, advisor on law and ethics, Chairman of the Board and President of LongeCity. Nonetheless, as I tried to make clear in the above: LongeCity is diverse and never the project of any single person. Consequently, all of the above is a purely personal perspective and not a statement of settled or official policy. I may return to this entry later to add and refine.