'To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed': how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about living for ever, it seemed straight out of a sci-fi fantasy. You have everything you could want at your disposal: power, influence, money. But, the problem is, your time at the top is fleeting. In early September, China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin were caught on mic talking about strategies to stay young. "With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality," Putin said via an interpreter to Xi. "There's a chance," he continued, "of also living to 150 [years old]." But is this even possible, and what would it mean for the world if the people with power were able to live for ever? Over the centuries, we have used ever more sophisticated technology to heal ourselves into unprecedented longevity. In the 20th century, it was innovations in public health and medicine that effected this transformation, allowing today's children to live longer, healthier lives than at any time in history.

Some of the earliest connections Alex Zhavoronkov has built for his AI shop at Insilico Medicine involves marrying anti-aging and AI research, two of the buzziest areas in drug development. The collaboration is aimed at developing oral medications targeting the GDF11, or growth differentiation factor 11, pathway and associated targets -- a concept that Elevian has been working on since inception. Elevian is supplying the biological and structural target data that Insilico will use to identify small molecules via its generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) AI technologies. Drawing inspiration from existing libraries of compounds -- to be screened virtually and biologically -- the scientists will then build (virtual) compound candidates to be synthesized by WuXi AppTec, an early collaborator and backer of Insilico. The new partners share a connection in Peter Diamandis' -- of X Prize fame -- BOLD Capital Partners, which invested in both companies.