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The Future of Longevity
Genomic Instability: DNA doesn’t always replicate according to plan.
Telomere Attrition:
Epigenetic Alterations: Nature
Loss of Proteostasis:
Nutrient Sensing Goes Awry:
Mitochondrial Dysfunction:
Cellular Senescence:
Stem Cell Exhaustion:
Altered Intercellular Communication:
That’s an amazing five-fold increase in worm lifespan—the equivalent of four-hundred-year-old humans.”
During the twentieth century, marvels such as antibiotics, sanitation, and clean water extended our average age to forty-eight years by 1950, then to seventy-two years by 2014.
Ray Kurzweil and longevity expert Aubrey de Grey
“longevity escape v...
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Kurzweil thinks this threshold is about twelve years away, while de Grey puts it thirty years out.
aging technologies, with Google’s Calico—an
“California Life Company”—being
demonetized and democratized.
While rapamycin and metformin
Known as senolytic therapies, these drugs destroy the inflammation-producing zombie cells believed to be one of the causes of aging.
Peter
Thiel, Unity Biotechnology is one of the most interesting of these.
Samumed, maybe the most watched of today’s longevity companies.
Sixty-one patients were in the trial, each receiving a single injection of a Wnt-rebalancing drug directly into their knee. All sixty-one saw improvement. When researchers measured the impact of the drug six months later, they found less pain and greater mobility, including an average of nearly two millimeters of new cartilage.
Samumed molecules developed to repair both rotator cuff and Achilles tendon injuries have already made it through Phase I trials, and their knee arthritis drug is now entering Phase III. There’s still a lot more work to be
All of this work has sparked entrepreneurial interest. The Harvard spinout Elevian, for example, led by entrepreneur Dr. Mark Allen and a quartet of the school’s regenerative biology professors, is seeking longevity in GDF11 and similar age-retardant molecules. The Stanford spinout Alkahest, meanwhile, is searching for an optimized plasma cocktail as a treatment for Alzheimer’s.
$2.35 million in funds for scientists interested in the work.
Three major changes are under way. First, by shifting the risk from the consumer to the service provider, entire categories of insurance are being eliminated. Next, crowdsurance is replacing traditional categories of health and life insurance. Finally, the rise of networks, sensors, and AI are rewriting the ways in which insurance is priced and sold, remaking the very nature of the industry.
predicts the car insurance market could shrink by an astounding 60 percent by 2040.
When we combine autonomous vehicle technology with smart traffic systems and sensor-embedded roads—two developments that have already begun rolling out—transit risks don’t just plummet, they mutate. For instance, if the LIDAR sensor that’s helping steer an autonomous car goes on the blink and causes an accident, who do you blame? Not the passenger. Maybe the carmaker. Maybe the LIDAR supplier. Or, who’s fault is it if your Waymo loses its 5G connection and suddenly can’t drive? Is it Alphabet, who owns the car; Verizon, who manages the connection; or OneWeb, who owns the satellite that
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New York–based Lemonade,
The entire experience is mobile, simple, and fast.
Ninety seconds to get insured, three minutes to get a claim paid, and zero paperwork.
Brand new micro-insurance categories—boat-hull insurance, chihuahua insurance—are moving out of the planning stages and
By 2030, the number of humans required to process a claim will drop by 70 to 90 percent, while processing times will shrink from weeks to minutes. This points toward a future where insurance companies become front-line guardians of the health of society, and quite a change from the days of Lloyd, his coffee, and his blackboards.
Insurance companies and financial firms.
Because that’s where they keep the money.”
Thrive uses eco-friendly packaging, zero-waste shipping, and nontoxic ingredients to deliver high-quality organic food at lower prices directly to the door of over 9 million consumers.
his fifth company, Good Money, which is using this same value-driven approach to take on the storage side of the traditional banking industry.
Good Money does the opposite, in a half-dozen different ways. Technically a mobile wallet, Good Money lives on your phone and holds both regular and crypto currencies. It can be used at any ATM, with zero annual fees, no ATM charges, and an interest rate a hundred times larger than most banks. Customers also become owners. Put money into Good Money and you get an equity share in return, while the company funnels 50 percent of their profits into impact investments and charitable donations.
two billion people in the world still lack bank accounts,
Vodafone executive named Nick Hughes
microfi...
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At the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development, Vodafone’s Nick Hughes gave a presentation about risk. His goal was a long shot: convince large corporations to help poorer nations by allocating research dollars for high risk/high reward ideas.
quasi-currency, trading them for goods and services that would normally require cash.
A micro-loan for a cow, motorbike, or sewing machine—that is, the startup costs for a small business—is
M-Pesa lifted 2 percent of Kenya’s population—over two hundred thousand people—out of extreme poverty.
Nor is it just Kenya. M-Pesa now provides banking services to over 30 million people in ten different countries. In places rife with corruption, it’s become a way for governments to protect against graft. In Afghanistan, it’s how they now pay the army. In India, it’s pensions. And it’s no longer just M-Pesa offering such services. In Bangladesh, bKash now serves over 23 million users; in China, Alipay serves just shy of a billion. And like Good Money, Alipay has become a force for social good.
Banks occupy a rare spot in the economic ecosystem: All the infrastructure that money flows through belongs to them. As the trusted central repository, whenever anyone wants to move money around—lend it, transfer it, even give it away—banks can insert themselves into that process. Or, at least, until blockchain came along.
Consider R3 and Ripple, two examples of developing world disruption impacting developed
