Of all the things money can’t buy—love, happiness, time machines—immortality is one we sure pay a lot for. According to the market-research firm Global Industry Analysts, the anti-aging industry generates more than $80 billion per year. All this despite the fact that there are no proven ways of extending human lifespan.
Larry Ellison
“Death makes me very angry,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world (his net worth is $43 billion, according toForbes). “It doesn't make any sense to me. Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?” Death may not make any sense, but perhaps it can be defeated? With that in mind, Ellison has set up a foundation dedicated to ending mortality, or at least to “understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.” They spend real money, too: the Ellison Medical Foundation gives out more than $40 million a year. Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson notes that Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.” It’s a Silicon Valley take on The Seventh Seal, with Ellison as the crusading knight and the grim reaper cast as a pasty, wan CEO at a rival software company.
Paul F. Glenn
Santa Barbara–based venture capitalist and investor Paul F. Glenn is the bank account behind a nine-figure endowment that supports laboratory research at institutions like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and more. Alongside the five-year, $5 million grants the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research gives out to their consortium of labs, they also regularly award unsolicited $60,000 prizes to individual scientists doing peer-reviewed work that they believe deserve support. The foundation’s stated objective is to “extend the healthy productive years of life through research on the mechanisms of biological aging.” But they may also have loftier ambitions. When I interviewed Glenn at his home, there was a book entitled Reversing Human Aging on the coffee table. I asked him how he felt about that idea—about making the Benjamin Button fairy tale real, in effect. “I’m of the anything-is-possible school,” Glenn answered. Alongside his donations to Ivy League institutions, he’s also made contributions to the Methuselah Foundation, whose cofounder Aubrey de Grey claims that “the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”
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http://www.thedailyb...ve-forever.html
Edited by marcobjj, 22 August 2013 - 05:02 AM.
