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Thus did art Levinson find himself motoring along the ribbons of Silicon Valley highway on Oct.18, 2012, headed to Larry Page's house, where he would soon be discussing the extermination of death.

The dinner was easy-going enough. At the Pages', there were generally no fancy preparations or elaborate meals. Those convened included Page and Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, Levinson and Sergey Brin, the kids and Lucy, Page's wife, plus a longtime Google associate, Salar Kamangar, who was running YouTube at the time.

After dinner, everyone got down to kicking around the Big Idea. At this point Levinson, Genetech's former CEO and chair of Apple Inc.'s board, still didn't know that anyone was interested in him actually heading up the new venture. As far as he was concerned, they were all there having a nice chat and running a few hypotheses up the flagpole. Page quickly laid out all the thinking he and Maris had discussed. What did Levinson think? Was this a business that had any chance of working?

He wasn't trying to be argumentative or difficult, you understand, but, at least from his scientific viewpoint, why sugarcoat the truth? Aging was an unbelievably complex biological problem. And figuring out why we age—let alone how we age, let alone how to stop aging—well, you didn't have to be a molecular biologist to see that on a scale of difficulty from one to 10, this was a 20. And because Levinson was a molecular biologist, he put it pretty unequivocally that a business like this probably wouldn't stand a chance.

By 2009, though, Genentech had been folded into Roche, a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, after Levinson arranged a $46.8 billion merger. He was ready to move on. So he began planning a nice early retirement to spend more time with his wife Rita, maybe play a little tennis now and again, and dial back his board memberships, except for his duties as Apple chairman.

And then he gets the call from Google Ventures. Out of nowhere he finds himself facing one of the greatest scientific mysteries ever. It was as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Ahem. Would you care to save a few million lives, and utterly transform the course of human history?"

ACCELERATING RETURNS
Biotechnologist and businessman Craig Venter's gene-sequencing company Celera didn't map the human genome in four years or even three; it did it in two—by July 1, 2000, to be exact.

During that time, all parties—the National Human Genome Research Institute and Celera—eventually negotiated an agreement and announced that the genome had been sequenced as a joint effort. Everyone bought in: Venter, famed genetic scientist Francis Collins, President Clinton and all the other organizations involved from around the world. The big day, at last, had come.

Six hundred members of the world press arrived on cue to hear the word: TV crews with their glaring lights and lenses; journalists from the most influential magazines and newspapers, notebooks and recorders poised, eyes wide; photographers and assistants, all scrambling like some immense, many-legged beast to learn how science had accomplished what the president of the United States himself described as "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind"—the map of the human genome.

The Law of Accelerating Returns, or what Ray Kurzweil came to call LOAR, had begun to dawn on him as early as the 1980s, but wasn't really codified until the publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines. It started out mostly as a practical matter; he needed a system for timing the rollout of all of those technologies he was continually creating. In Kurzweil's universe there was never a shortage of concepts—but what good did it do to conjure a good idea, or even a well-executed invention, if there wasn't a market for it? Timing was paramount.

That's what exponential growth did: It started out slowly and looked almost flat until it reached what he called "the knee of the curve," an inflection point that suddenly shot upward. The human race was now approaching that inflection point, Kurzweil would say, and events that had so long looked level and slow over the incomprehensible epochs were now poised to leap upward almost vertically.

What had been accomplished in 20 years during the 20th century would soon be accomplished in the first 14 years of the 21st, and within seven years after that, and three-and-a-half after that, and so on. By the end of the 21st century, human technology would advance at the current equivalent of 20,000 years!

It was all writ large in everything from the chemical and molecular interactions that shaped the early universe right up through the advent of DNA, genes, language and mathematics. And it was gathering speed with the absolute reliability of a Swiss watch. As proof, Kurzweil still likes to show pictures of Martin Cooper walking around holding the world's first cell phone back in 1973. The thing was huge—like a giant loaf of bread with an antenna on it—and hardly worked at all. But the next thing you know, flip phones are everywhere, looking like Star Trek communicators.

Then Apple invents the smartphone, which quickly becomes much more than a phone. Suddenly, everyone is carrying around a handheld computer linked to the Cloud with all of its untold knowledge and information right there at their fingertips. Early on, the idea of lugging around some big, clunking phone would have seemed like the world's stupidest idea. Kurzweil would often smile wryly at this. Because soon, as the phones shrank in size and grew in power, people found they couldn't imagine life without them. And then they would say, "Ahh, that's not really a big deal; it's been around for years."

Kurzweil and longevity doctor Terry Grossman laid out how everyone could live forever using what they called their "three bridges" strategy. Each bridge would be a little like skipping across a creek from one rock to the next. In Bridge One, readers were asked to live a smart, healthy lifestyle to take advantage of Bridge Two, which constituted breakthroughs in biotechnologies largely based on insights from the human genome. This, in turn, led to Bridge Three, Kurzweil's favorite: nanotechnology and artificial intelligence that would replace our "suboptimal" biology and make radically long life a reality.

LONGLIFE PURSUIT: Author Chip Walter will be among the guest speakers at an upcoming Commonwealth Club event discussing the viability of vastly extending the human lifespan.

DECODING DEATH
Gerontologist and author Aubrey de Gray sat down and furiously scribbled out a list of the ways that humans commonly broke down, and how they might be repaired. The key was not to look at aging as something natural, but as a disease, and then to cure it.

First, there was the mutation of chromosomes, which led to cancer. Then came glycation, the warping and disruption of proteins caused by glucose (sugar). And there were the so-called "extracellular aggregates"—all the junk that accumulated outside the membranes of the body's trillions of cells that, as we aged, increasingly failed to be properly cleaned up, like a house gone to seed. This included beta-amyloid, which was related to Alzheimer's.

Next, de Grey identified intracellular aggregates, the goo that gummed up the works inside of cells over time: substances like lipofuscin, the so-called "wear and tear" pigments that damaged many major organs, eyes and brains. Cellular senescence was another big problem. This happened when cells aged but didn't entirely break down, creating those zombies that sent out misfired chemical signals and damaged their cellular neighbors.

And finally, there was the depletion of the stem cells that drove the development of all humans in the womb and during childhood. De Grey knew the body tapped these cell reservoirs throughout life to renew heart or liver or collagen cells, but he also saw that stem cells aged over time, which made them less than the perfect replacements they were in youth. And of course, their supplies were not unlimited. When they were gone, they were gone.

These were the six culprits that aged and unhinged us. Unlike Kurzweil and Grossman, de Grey's solutions to the problem of mortality imagined science making a series of incremental advancements in drug therapy that would extend the lives of still-healthy people who hadn't yet shown symptoms of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease and other illnesses that so often accompany aging. He was, in effect, proposing to find ways to do what the body does well when it's young, but slowly fails to do as we age.

De Grey didn't pretend his prescriptions would be perfect; they just had to be good enough to slow, and eventually reverse, aging so that people who remained healthy at 70 would live youthfully to 150, at which time more advances would allow them to live to 300, at such time still more would come along, and so forth. Somewhere along the line, the really big breakthroughs would reverse aging altogether.

He called this theory "longevity escape velocity." You would die eventually, of course, because statistically something was going to get you: a bolt of lightning, abduction by aliens, a spouse who simply couldn't stomach the idea of celebrating her 950th wedding anniversary with the same person. But for all intents and purposes, life everlasting was possible.

NO PRESSURE
Google's boardroom wasn't very fancy, but it was generous enough to seat its 11 directors. Levinson knew most of them from his days on Google's board: Page and Brin, Google's founders; and John Doerr, one of Google's original board members, chair of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), and the man who had loved Maris' genie-in-a-bottle idea so much. Eric Schmidt, former CEO and now executive chairman of Google, was there, too.

Between 2006 and 2009, Schmidt and Levinson had both been on the boards of Google and Apple simultaneously, something that placed each in a very exclusive club. The point was, all attendees were comfortable in the room that January day. Google's board respected, even liked, Levinson. Hadn't Schmidt himself said, when Levinson left the board in 2009, that Art would always have a special place at Google?

Well, here he was. Together, as they sat at the table, the group discussed ideas for creating the company soon to be known as Calico. Laura Melahn, who headed GV's marketing team, had come up with the name, and Levinson liked it—a kind of acronym for the California Life Company, but also a nod to a cat and its nine lives.

Fifteen minutes or so later, Schmidt walked out of the boardroom, looking very serious. He ambled down the hall to where Levinson was standing and grabbed his hand. "Well," he said, "you got it." Pregnant pause. "Now don't fuck up!" And then they all laughed—the chairman of Apple, the executive chairman of Google and the CEO of Google Ventures. Such are the little pivots that arise when decisions to change the course of history are made.

Excerpted from Chip Walter's new book, 'Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever,' published by National Geographic, Jan. 7, 2020.

Immortality, Inc. Discussion
Jan 30, 7pm, $55
Oshman Family JCC, Palo Alto
commonwealthclub.org