Speculation here, but I think the uber wealthy and top level connected are engaging in longevity experiments that we regular folk can only imagine. I’ve been looking into the scientists and biotech companies that are associated with this in the states, and it all seems pretty secretive and so far very few responses e-mailing and trying to contact them. All the big companies, like Calico, people like Yuri Milner, they have social media but seems like they go out of their way to hide any real information about what’s going on. You can call it a conspiracy, but I’d bet these people are hiding the current state of what’s been discovered from the rest of us. Dr Yamanaka made IPSCs way back in 2006, and they’ve had a superstar lineup of scientists at Altos Labs since at least 2021, literally billions $ poured in, but 0 further breakthroughs (for real??). I think these assholes are keeping us in the dark, what do you guys think?
I think your comment is off base. I don’t think there’s a behind the curtain conspiracy to keep aging research out of the hands of the mass public, in fact, there’s a race to be the person/company to solve some of these age related diseases. There’s nothing stopping you from attending the same conferences that age researchers attend … you can buy a ticket to the October 2025 Biomarkers of Aging Conference. The fact that some people aren’t responding to you might be because of the approach - change the approach and you might change the response!
I imagine it’s nothing more than if you are connected you get first access, before things are ready for prime time.
If they had things far enough along, I think they’d want to release it to the masses so they could cash in. So, for no other reason than pure greed, I don’t think they are hiding it from us.
For example, I know Attia and Ferris are going to be guinea pigs for some A Klotho research. Do I guess they are taking some early and maybe their best friends, you betcha, but I don’t think there is anything more nefarious going on. Would I like them to share dosing so those who want to can follow along, yes I do, but the secrecy seems standard .
I don’t think there is a conspiracy but it is true that private enterprises build up around billionaires and extending their lifespan is one initiative that takes focus with almost all of them. Anyone who has worked closely with a billionaire has seen how this subculture thrives. I’m sure that would be true of us as well if we were billionaires. I personally observed how a former mentor and boss, who had become a billionaire, funded a lifespan extension startup in the 1990’s. The institute he started had two goals: to extend the knowledge base such that it could become a viable business and to extend the life and healthspan of the person funding them. They were quite sincere and had no intentions of keeping anything secret.
To take the opposite side of this issue – perhaps closer to yours – a strong empirical case can be made for economic policy that effectively prevents the development of a billionaire class. When an individual becomes wealthy enough that he or she can buy elections and social policy which, in turn, set prices and directional growth, the nations in which they operate are no longer an open functioning democracy.
The problem is democracy. Not billionaires.
Do you mean the process and funding of democracy? Sorry, your pithy statement is ambiguous 
.
You can “effectively prevent the development of a billionaire class” somewhere (that’s the case in most countries in the world), and then your democracy will be hijacked by billionaires elsewhere. So, the core problem is democracy itself: a failed system.
Isn’t the issue then the fragility of democracy, not democracy itself. Rather than setting up the billionaires versus democracy debate as though they were mutually exclusive; the issue can then be framed as : can everyone participate in the appointment and removal of those who govern us, even in a world with unequal wealth? Or are you fundamentally opposed to the democratic impulse?
I’m not opposed to the democratic impulse in my household (even though in that case it turns out that my wife’s vote counts double 
). In other cases, it seems to be a pretty bad system. I’m not sure there will be many democracies left in 100 years.
No, not a chance. Billionaires are not going to try any revolutionary new longevity treatments until its been proven safe; and proven safe means lots of regular people in clinical trials testing something out to see if there are any longer term negative side effects. Why, if you have billions, would you risk it? You can wait for a few years until it’s proven in people with less to lose - then adopt it easily and repeatedly (if need be).
Bryan Johnson is likely as far as it gets right now, and even he is being beaten (from a longevity enhancing perspective) by people like Julie Gibson Clark spending a small fraction of the amount he spends. The science is still quite a ways off, but it is progressing.
I wish it were true that elites had access to secret amazing treatments because that would mean there’s hope for the rest of us to get it. Unfortunately I agree with RapAdmin that it is unlikely.
it will be interesting to see whether democracies survive superintelligent AI and exponential longevity breakthroughs. I do wonder whether lifespan extension will improve democracy (older wiser voters?) or worsen it (grumpier, less tolerant older voters?)
But to counter your sentiment, I’d argue democracies are less brittle than autocracies - which have increased likelihood of economically destructive schisms and revolutions.
Also, Putin, Xi etc are good examples of how autocrats become increasingly isolated and cut off from true information. So their decision making may be faster, but more flawed. Autocracies also lose human capital because they’re less attractive countries to live in. But that may be less destructive in an age of AI
Ominously, it looks like we’ll be running the autocracy vs democracy experiment again over the next five years - so we probably don’t have long to wait…
A lot depends upon what people’s objective is from a political system. A rule of law needs to be a key priority and hence avoiding the concentration of power in an autocracy means that even if democracy ends up making stupid decisions from time to time at least it does not get completely dreadful.
I think the difficulty in terms of what the alternatives are is that Churchill’s view on this is right.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”
Yes, I totally agree. Democracy gets my vote!
My only doubt is whether democracy will be outcompeted by an alternative system in an age of hyper-longevity and superintelligent AI. Survival of the fittest sadly doesn’t always mean survival of the best.
WSJ Sept 8, 2025
The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life:
Investors including Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are making big bets on where longevity science is headed.
The Billionaires Fueling the Quest for Longer Life - WSJ.pdf (5.2 MB)
- Rule of law and democracy are two different things. You have a strong rule of law in Dubai free zones (for commercial matters) or Singapore, despite the absence of democracy there. Meanwhile India and Brazil are great democracies with weak rule of law.
- Churchill said that in 1947. Back then, the House of Lords was still unelected (hereditary peers, bishops, law lords). The Crown (unelected) retained powers (constitutional but in practice mostly ceremonial): appointing the PM and giving royal assent to laws. Needless to say, the UK ruled over vast colonies without democracy for the locals. Every adult man and woman over 21 could vote, but there was plural voting: university graduates and business owners had two votes! On top of that, the full franchise was fairly recent, so the system was still carrying a pre-democratic legacy (the 1928 Equal Franchise Act for all women and the 1918 Representation of the People Act for all land or home owners above 21 / 30). So Churchill had no experience of the full-fledged democracy we have today. What he called “democracy” was in practice a mix of aristocracy (Crown + Lords), plutocracy (plural voting + historical voting rights tied to land ownership + media controlled by the wealthy elite) + democracy (Commons) + white rule (in remaining UK colonies).
I disagree with some of the above on a factual basis. However, this is not really relevant to the issues for Rapamycin.News and hence I am happy to leave it that we don’t agree and not try to work out why.
I agree that it’s off topic 
In any case, the elites don’t have access to age reversal for sure!
In fact not only do the elites not appear to have access to age reversal, but the money that is being spent by them on research seems to be mainly in areas that won’t be that effective.
Yamanaka factors retard tissue and organ aging in experimental animals; this is now known. Who would know if the Yamanaka factor were applied to elites on secret islands?