Essay by Eric Worrall
Just how close are the super rich to achieving medical immortality?
Inside Putin’s $26 Billion Quest for Longevity
From mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia’s president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority
By Bojan Pancevski
May 28, 2026 at 8:00 pm ETWhen Vladimir Putin was captured by a hot mic telling Xi Jinping that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs, some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats.
In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia’s flagship scientific projects.
Like Silicon Valley billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, Putin has long been fascinated with antiaging research. But in Russia, Putin’s quest to stave off decline is now a state priority relying on methods as wide-ranging as organ printing, harvesting mini-pigs and exposure to ultralow temperatures.
Last month, Russia’s government announced that scientists are developing a gene-therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of “New Health Preservation Technologies,” Putin’s $26 billion longevity initiative.
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Read more: https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-longevity-antiaging-92dee6e8
What Putin and Xi were allegedly talking about, replacing worn out organs – plenty of people have had organ transplants, and received a new lease of life. But I’ve never seen credible research which suggests aggressive organ replacement extends lifespan, other than the obvious benefits of replacing an organ which has ceased to function properly. But perhaps this is because nobody has attempted to replace all their organs, at least all the organs which are replaceable.
The immune suppression therapies which accompany organ transplantation carry their own risks. I have a friend whose daughter is currently in an out of hospital after a major organ transplant, the doctors are really struggling to get the anti-rejection drug therapy right. And when they do get it right, my friend’s daughter will have to live with a lifelong reduction in her resistance to cancer, the anti-rejection drugs which help the body accept transplanted organs reduce the body’s ability to recognise abnormal cancer cells.
It’s not just dictators who are playing the life extension game. Google may have been early entrants to the game of unlocking the secret of eternal youth. In 2012 futurist and pioneering machine learning expert Ray Kurzweil was appointed to help Google master language processing, which raised a number of eyebrows in the high tech industry. Kurzweil is a legendary machine learning expert – he first appeared on CBS in 1965 at the age of 17 to display his machine learning skills, and is still going strong. But Kurzweil is also a major advocate of the technological singularity and transhumanism movement, and has repeatedly expressed a strong interest in medical life extension. Perhaps his duties at Google go beyond helping to advance their language processing technology.
Kurzweil estimates AI will exceed human intelligence in the early 2040s, and very much wants to be around to see this happen. His prediction is looking a lot more likely now than when he originally made this prediction in 1999, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Of course, nobody with the money or the resources is waiting around for super intelligent machines to make such technology available to the masses – they want to punch through, use their billions of dollars or in Russia’s case the resources of an entire nation to compress decades of medical advances into an injection they can receive sometime next week.
Before you dismiss it all as ridiculous, there are genuine scientific hints that greater longevity may be possible, and that the first breakthroughs may not be that far in the future.
Caloric restriction is something which can be done right now. Something strange happens to the body when you reduce food consumption to the equivalent of one cheeseburger per day – everything seems to slow down. Rats, hamsters, even monkeys given caloric restriction diets tend to live significantly longer and have less health problems than their fatter cousins. But before you rush to empty your freezer, this kind of extreme diet, bringing your body to the brink of death by starvation, carries substantial risks. Such diets require constant medical supervision to ensure you don’t tip over into a life threatening health crisis. You have to be born with the right genes – not everyone’s body can take this kind of abuse. So please have a long chat to your doctor before attempting anything like this. More information is available on this US government web page.
Obviously life would be a lot more fun if you could have the benefits of caloric restriction without having to starve yourself. One of the most interesting breakthroughs comes close to achieving this – a small genetic tweak which promotes production of PEPCK-C in muscle tissue.
From the US Government national library of medicine;
Born to run; the story of the PEPCK-Cmus mouse*
Richard W Hanson 1, Parvin Hakimi 1
- Author information
- Article notes
- Copyright and License information
PMCID: PMC2491496 NIHMSID: NIHMS55747 PMID: 18394430
The publisher’s version of this article is available at Biochimie
Abstract
In order to study the role of the cytosolic form of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (GTP) (EC 4.1.1.32) (PEPCK-C) in skeletal muscle, PEPCK-Cmus mice were created by introducing the cDNA for the enzyme, linked to the human α-skeletal actin gene promoter, into their germ line. Two founder lines generated by this procedure were bred together, creating a line of mice that have 9.0 units/g skeletal muscle, as compared to 0.080 units/g in muscle from control animals. The mice were more active than controls in their cages and could run for up to 5 km, at a speed of 20 m/min without stopping (control mice run for 0.2 km at the same speed). Male PEPCK-Cmus mice are extremely aggressive, as well as hyperactive. During strenuous exercise, they use fatty acids as a fuel more efficiently than do controls and produce far less lactate than do control animals, perhaps due to the greatly increased number of mitochondria in their skeletal muscle. PEPCK-Cmus mice also store up to five-times more triglyceride in their skeletal muscle, but have only marginal amounts of triglyceride in their adipose tissue depots, despite eating 60% more than controls. The concentration of leptin and insulin the blood of 8 to 12 month of PEPCK-Cmus mice is far lower than noted in the blood of control animals of the same age. These mice live longer than controls and the females remain reproductively active for as long as 35 months. The possible reasons for the profound alteration in activity and longevity caused the introduction of a simple metabolic enzyme into the skeletal muscle of the mice will be discussed.
Read more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2491496/
PEPCK-C helps the body convert fat into glucose. In most mammals, including humans, this is a slow and limited process – humans in particular have bodies optimised to surviving long periods of starvation, so our body is full of limit switches which help tear down unnecessary muscle, restrict our energy levels, fill our muscles with lactic acid when we exercise, and take many other steps to discourage us from burning fat stores.
Mice also have such limit switches. The results of disabling this particular limit switch in lab mice were extraordinary – not only did the mice live longer, but they could run for hours without getting winded. And that lactic acid buildup which causes muscle pain after exercise was barely present in the tissues of the modified lab mice.
The following is a video of an ordinary mouse alongside a PEPCK-C super-mouse.
There was a side effect – the modified mice were hyper aggressive. Star trek fans would immediately think of the fictional character Khan – a genetically modified superman with extraordinary fighting ability, who almost stole the Starship Enterprise from Captain Kirk. But if you’re super rich or an evil dictator, maybe the thought of becoming even more aggressive towards everyone else would seem a small price to pay for a longer time walking among the living.
Before you rush out and demand your shot of PEPCK-C pep juice, so far the effect has only been demonstrated in lab animals which were modified as embryos. Nobody knows how to retrofit such a genetic tweak to adults, in mice or humans.
The impact on society and the global balance of power of a substantial longevity breakthrough such as a PEPCK-C treatment which works on adults would be profound. Not only would all the super-rich start living longer, agents of whoever developed such a longevity treatment would have a powerful new lever to influence others. An offer of a pill or injection which provides an extra 25 years of good health and boundless physical endurance in return for betraying country or government would buy a lot of souls.
In conclusion, we just don’t know how close the super rich and powerful are to lengthening their own lives. But given tantalising medical hints that life extension is possible, that drastically improved quality of life in old age is possible, given that the adjustment required to achieve the first step on this path is simple – increase the expression of a single peptide – and given the gathering synergy of artificial intelligence and medical science, my prediction in the next decade we’ll start to see a handful of super-rich and powerful people looking ridiculously healthy well beyond their time, achieving at least limited success in their quest for personal immortality.
