Even rich geeks can't escape the Grim Reaper

New York

SILICON Valley's best and brightest earned fortunes by solving complex problems. Now many are turning brains and wealth towards conquering death. Applying an engineering mindset to health issues may benefit humanity, but it's more likely to burn capital than discover the fountain of youth.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Oracle's Larry Ellison are worth over US$250 billion combined, according to Forbes. They and other Silicon Valley success stories are ploughing money into startups researching ageing and a myriad of conventional illnesses. That partly explains why investment in life-science startups is on track for a record year, according to the National Venture Capital Association, with particularly large growth in early-round funding.

Two big ideas underlie the enthusiasm. Tech barons believe advances in computing, sequencing and gene therapy can revolutionise medicine by enabling researchers to read and manipulate DNA. They also think many drug researchers are too slow and conservative.

Both contain some truth. The amount of biological data available is growing rapidly, and gene therapy may eventually fix many faults. Venture capitalists in life sciences, meanwhile, have frequently been reluctant to fund younger researchers.

Some of the new research efforts have strong scientific foundations. Calico, an anti-ageing effort backed by Google parent Alphabet, is run by the former head of Genentech, Art Levinson. But there's also a strong willingness to try almost anything. Personalised nutrition based on genomic information, microdosing of psychedelics, and blood transfusions from young donors have found adherents in the Valley.

The pace of success will probably disappoint. Information technology advances quickly because it applies known physics principles to design and improve a product, often incrementally.

Biological mechanisms, by contrast, are often poorly understood or unknown, full of bizarre feedback loops, and there's no documentation about the underlying source code. The quest is therefore slower and far more likely to end in failure. The risk of patients dying also explains heavy regulation - and why VCs prefer experienced managers over wild bets.

Tech titans should be applauded for turning their attention to these health challenges. But it will take more than money to disrupt millennia of human evolution. REUTERS