The prospect of eternal youth has long tantalized humanity, with its earliest recorded depiction dating back to 2100 B.C., in The Epic of Gilgamesh. This fixation continued, from Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s ill-fated quest for the elixir of life to the legend of Juan Ponce de León’s fruitless search for the Fountain of Youth.
Our persistent fantasy has, in turn, proved to be a reliable means of exploitation. In the late 19th century, traveling salesmen hawked concoctions of snake oil, uranium, or anything vaguely iridescent and passed it off as a youth tonic to unsuspecting customers.
In our own time, few expect eternal life from a bottle. Although if we can’t actually stay young, we can at least look smooth by way of Botox or a facelift.
But the ancient promise has returned. Thanks to Silicon Valley philosophies, A.I.-accelerated development, and the midlife crises of certain divorced tech billionaires, youth might no longer just be wasted on the young.
Two notable start-ups have emerged, both tackling fundamental aspects of aging with alarming potential. Altos Labs, backed with $3 billion from investors including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos and Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner, focuses on “cellular re-programming.” Forever Labs, funded in part by Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures and Silicon Badia, meanwhile acts as a biological bank, freezing a customer’s youthful stem cells for his or her future rejuvenation.
Together, the companies cover both fundamental areas of age reversal. These can be understood and differentiated as both hardware and software. If Altos Labs “re-programs” our cells, it’s effectively resetting our biological software to default, like installing a new Mac OS that doesn’t crash violently when one opens FaceTime.
But just as a software update won’t fix a cracked screen or tired battery, so would our hardware—the matter of our physical bodies—remain the same. This is where Forever Labs comes in. By “banking” our frozen stem cells, the company aims to be able to re-grow new organs or tissue cells. Annual storage costs $250, after the $2,500 extraction fee.
Framing his venture as a biological 401(k), Forever Labs C.E.O. Kevin Virgil has proclaimed, “Think of it as a backup. As you age, you lose the ability to make new cells, and now you have the option of accessing them later in life. What could be more valuable than that?”
However, it is the combined software-and-hardware approach that indicates such promise. According to Virgil, “the combination of stem-cell therapies with cellular re-programming represents one of the most promising frontiers in regenerative medicine and aging reversal.”
While that may sound like science fiction, and although these therapies are not yet currently available for human use, the science suggests they soon will be.
Cellular behavior in mammals is relatively consistent, and the tests of these therapies on mice have proved remarkably successful. In June 2025, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences rejuvenated aged primates using stem cells enhanced with the FOXO3 longevity gene, while at Harvard in 2023, the Sinclair Lab extended mouse lifespan by 109 percent through OSKM re-programming, a technology developed by Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka.
According to Virgil, Forever Labs anticipates partnering with longevity clinics around the world within just the next five years to start delivering stem-cell therapies and improving quality of life. They also expect overall biological-age-reversal treatments for humans (like that in the FOXO3 study) within the next 10 years.
Altos Labs remains more secretive, but its $3 billion backing and team of Nobel Prize–winning scientists position it to develop existing cellular science for use on humans.
This raises the question: Isn’t this all a little out there? Or vain? Or both? Whatever the case, it’s certainly out of the ordinary, and the striving for immortality has been the subject of countless cautionary tales in literature. But what if Dorian Gray had been able to actually hack his way to permanent youthfulness?
Even the possibility touches a societal nerve. Consider the polarizing reactions to the technologist Bryan Johnson’s unconventional experiments with life extension, including blood-plasma infusions from his teenage son. Johnson claims his mission is a spiritual one, with the professed philosophy underlying it all being simply “Don’t die.”
As technology progresses closer to feats typically associated with divinity or mystical forces, the awe surrounding it is being redirected toward the tech moguls, or the tech itself.
Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski has even started a church called Way of the Future, dedicated to the worship of A.I., while wellness gurus vlog about their “age score” and their nicotinamide-mononucleotide regimens on TikTok.
Will we reject our pale new gods? Or will we soon be making withdrawals from our stem-cell banks? Only time will tell.
Lucas Chancellor is a writer and model who lives in London
