Oracle founder and America’s Cup financier Larry Ellison, who hopes to live forever, has found a new calling for his outsized ego: Cure death. Or, failing that, extend life spans to 150 years. With an estimated net worth of $54 billion, Ellison has donated $450 million to anti-aging research.
“Death has never made any sense to me,” he says. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”
No doubt, on a personal level, we have all experienced that utter disbelief about death, especially in the case of a loved one who dies suddenly, or in that of a child who dies way before his time. How is it possible? Why?
When offered various fancy life extensions funded by billionaires, who among us would reject rejuvenated blood to treat Alzheimer’s, or the bioprinting of healthy cells fed into a 3D printer to create a new liver or kidney? I wouldn’t.
And, if I could afford it, how can that hurt?
Here’s how: If such measures are available only to billionaires, or millionaires, or even to “one-percenters,” I see a dismal world where healthy, spritely, “reinvented” 105-year-olds walk around, proudly robust and dementia-free. At the same time, many poor and even working-class Americans at the bottom of the economic heap would exist at the same level they do now, lacking preventive care.
estimates what Ellison’s $450 million might do for the uninsured at the other end of life: At $2,000 per pregnancy, $450 million would cover prenatal care for 225 million women. At $1,288 per first year of well baby care, including immunizations, $450 million would cover over 350 million infants.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has donated his millions mainly toward health and education in the less developed world, chides billionaires like Ellison. “It seems pretty ego-centric while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” he says.
Fredrick Abrams, a retired Denver-area obstetrician who has taught medical ethics for over three decades, is not so worried about the immediate impact of Ellison and others of his ilk.
“The entrepreneur who hopes to fund and find someone or something that will quickly extend his/her life in a youthful fashion will have the same failures as did the alchemists of old, trying to … create the secret potion that assures a long and vigorous life.”
But suppose just a couple of their inventions do trickle down to the middle-class elderly?
The average life expectancy of a 65-year-old American is now nearly 85. If just a few of those life spans were increased even by five more years, it would wreak havoc on our already over burdened Social Security and Medicare systems, just now starting to serve retiring baby boomers.
At the individual patient level, Dr. Tom Bost, a Denver intensive care pulmonologist, says, “To me … the concept of kicking the age of death ‘can’ down the road makes little sense. Talk to any geriatrician and/or elderly person and the issue is quality, not quantity.”
No doubt Apple guru Steve Jobs, also a billionaire, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 in 2011, would have liked both more quality and quantity. But his statement before his own death is profound:
“No one has ever escaped (death). And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
Dottie Lamm (dolamm59@gmail. com) former first lady of Colorado, is 77 and a political activist.
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