When world leaders are caught on a hot mic, often what turns up are the banal intimacies of power. George W. Bush greeting the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with ‘Yo, Blair’ certainly put the Special Relationship in a certain light.

But the mic that caught Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at their Beijing summit offered a far clearer view of power. “In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a child,” Xi’s Russian translator explained, on behalf of the Chinese premier.

An inaudible passage from Putin followed, before his Mandarin translator added: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.” “Predictions are,” Xi’s translator then replied, “This century, there’s a chance of also living to 150.”

It is tempting to believe that Xi and Putin have insider info: top secret reports fed to them by white-coated lab assistants, with Kremlin doctors covertly harvesting organs to create the Putin of Theseus.

In March of this year, the Chinese succeeded in connecting a pig’s liver to a man in a persistent vegetative state. But the quest for immortality remains fraught. Even conventional organ transplants haven’t outrun problems with immune system rejection, still requiring a cocktail of drugs that are in themselves life-limiting.

Radical life extension always seems both on the cusp of happening and dismally far off, just as it has been since the mid-Nineties when science began to take the problem seriously. The basic principles are known: preserving the integrity of telomerase in DNA, using stem cells to regenerate worn-out tissue, replacing organs, better insulin response, and so on. But eventually, most projects run up against the sheer complexity of the human organism.

Conventional experts are downcast; they tend to posit a “natural limit” of 120 years. But the question is still being taken seriously by the Silicon Valley set. After all, much like the invention of flight, the answer might require a kind of off-grid tinkering beyond the orthodox structures. And much like the invention of flight, that will in turn require scraping a lot of failed experiments off the tarmac.

Google’s founders have thrown billions into Calico — the California Life Extension Company. Sam Altman has chucked $180 million at Altos Labs, focused on cellular reprogramming, while Jeff Bezos has also invested in the $3 billion venture, founded in 2021, and focused on stem cell interventions.

The holdout is Elon Musk. In 2024, he told a Wall Street Journal event that he was not aware of any secret technology of radical life extension. In fact, he has actively criticized the movement: “If we live for too long […] it ossifies society, there’s no changing of the leadership because leadership never dies.” He could have been talking about the present Sino-Russian axis.

In one sense, life extension is already here. Rather than being the subject of billion-dollar bio-breakthroughs, it is a function of solving tens of little problems related to diet, screening, and previously fatal pathologies. A nurse of my acquaintance claims that the main problems she now sees in her small provincial hospital are those of advanced age: not disease as such, rather the constellation of issues that come from living into the late 80s and 90s.

Even a decade ago, she says, this was not the profile of the average patient of her ward. A cohort effect is already moving through advanced economies, slightly under the radar. We can reasonably assume that there is another, even larger cohort set to live longer behind that one. Xi and Putin may even live to see it.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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