When my father Ted Goertzel co-founded an anti-death student protest organization at Antioch College in 1961 the Student League Against Mortality it was in large part a joke. Of course, Ted and his colleagues genuinely didnt want to get old and die, and they were science-oriented enough to understand the in-principle feasibility of curing aging but at that time the actual abolition of involuntary death seemed like a bit of a pipe dream.
Yet it was only a few years later, in 1968, that Princeton physicist Gerald Feinberg wrote The Prometheus Project, a book I discovered in 1974 or so as an elementary school student browsing the town library which argued that, within possibly just decades, humanity was going to create superhuman AGI, strong nanotechnology along the lines of molecular assemblers, and technologies enabling essential physical immortality. The real question, Feinberg proposed, was not whether or precisely when these feats would be achieved, but rather whether humanity was going to put them to good ends or not, and whether their utilization was going to be guided democratically.
Today things look a bit different! Radical human healthspan extension is widely accepted as a reasonable scientific goal, and the US FDA has finally sanctioned aging as a disease category that drugs and other therapies can be approved to address. There are multiple investment firms focusing on companies developing longevity therapeutics. The understanding of the causes of aging has progressed dramatically, with comprehensive perspectives like Aubrey de Greys Seven Pillars of Aging [link] and the Hallmarks of Aging [1, 2].
For all the radical advances weve seen over the past decades, though, there is still a gap between the present situation and what is really needed for the scientific conquest of involuntary death.
While the amount of funding going into solving the aging problem is large by historical standards, its still ridiculously small in comparison to the practical magnitude of the issue. I feel little doubt that our descendants, who have been liberated from death by science, will look back in wonder and befuddlement at the minuscule percentage of global GDP that their ancestors spent on applying science to preventing their own unnecessary demise.
We also see today, in the West in particular, a widespread failure to acknowledge the holistic nature of the aging phenomenon. This is merely a special case of the more general failure of modern Western medicine and science to come to grips with the holistic, emergent nature of so many of the important dynamics in complex self-organizing systems (such as bodies, minds, societies the Internet ). But its an especially glaring problem in the longevity therapeutics context because aging is a very definitively whole-body, multi-scale, multi-system, and individually varying phenomenon.
Most longevity-oriented research today is focused on highly specific biological factors that influence particular aspects of aging rather than trying to understand aging as a change of state that affects numerous parts of the body in a coordinated way. Lists like the hallmarks of aging are too often interpreted as collections of problems to be separately addressed, rather than multiple important windows into a unified whole-organism dynamical phenomenon.
In line with this overly reductionist scientific focus, most longevity-oriented investment is currently directed toward therapies targeting one small aspect of aging because these are the easiest ones to study and develop using the standard tools of the pharma industry. To be clear, one can do good this way, and one can prolong human life this way just not to the same extent that would be possible with a whole-systems approach.
The way longevity research currently utilizes AI mostly fits into this same pattern of insufficient whole-system understanding. Using machine learning to make new isolated discoveries about specific biological mechanisms is exciting to be sure. But the real power of AI for longevity will lie in its power to integrate diverse domains and aspects of aging into a unified rigorous understanding. This requires first of all integration of a wide variety of data, and then after that integration of a diversity of AI architectures and approaches to identify a rich ensemble of patterns in this data and conceive hypotheses and experiments accordingly.
SingularityNET spinoff Rejuve Network is attacking part of the problem here creating a decentralized network of longevity enthusiasts who contribute data about their own bodies for analysis, and participate in early trials exploring the effectiveness of therapies, including those derived based on their own data. Rejuve Networks Generative Cooperative Network software platform aims at a judicious combination of diverse AI models, paradigms, and approaches to longevity data.
Rejuve Network contributes key parts of the puzzle, but solving the aging problem requires additional ingredients as well. Data is key, and the combination of different AI algorithms into appropriate ensembles and networks is key but there is also the problem of actually discovering and evaluating therapeutics based on applying said AI to said data in a manner that reflects a holistic understanding of aging.
Enter Rejuve Biotech, whose AI experts and biomedical scientists have been working together with AGI leaders at SingularityNET and TrueAGI to create a uniquely powerful neural-symbolic framework for analyzing and understanding longevity-related data, systems, and processes. This framework brings together deep neural networks including LLMs and others, with symbolic and evolutionary AI implemented in OpenCog Hyperon, the newest version of the OpenCog integrative AGI toolkit.
The Rejuve Bio AI framework applies to all sorts of biomedical data across different systems, organisms and scales. However, particular attention has been paid to one unique source of valuable longevity data to which Rejuve Bio has gained access via its partnership with Genescient Inc.: the -omics data from the long-lived Methuselah flies, fruit flies that have been experimentally evolved to live ~5x as long as the control flies from which they originated.
The Methuselah flies differ dramatically from ordinary-lifespan control flies across multiple different tissues and systems, and the study of their genomics, proteomics, and other aspects provides unique and invaluable insights into how lifespan is coordinated holistically across all the different parts of an organism. The Rejuve Bio AI framework then applies its transfer learning capability to understand the implications of these insights for human longevity, leading to a wide variety of new insights regarding the pathways and networks underlying aging in humans, and potential therapies for extending human healthspan.
The practical results of all these AI analytics include suggestions for novel nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and gene-therapy interventions for healthspan extension. The viability of this approach is demonstrated by work done by the Rejuve Bio founders in an earlier collaboration with Genescient Inc. in 2010, in which the results of AI analytics applied to a much earlier generation of the Methuselah flies were used to guide the creation of novel nutraceuticals which were then trialed on human subjects and demonstrated highly positive impact on biomarkers of aging, as well as delivering immediate health benefit to many. (See the Rejuve Bio whitepaper for more details!)
After several years of incubation within the SingularityNET Foundation, Rejuve Biotech is now ready to move on to the next phase of its development, and spin-off as a fully autonomous entity. To fuel the first stages of this transition, Rejuve Biotech is offering a crowdfund raise via https://netcapital.com/companies/rejuvebiotech
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