Immortality for the Rich: From Zhang Sanfeng to Cellular Rejuvenation Labs

In 2021, news reports said that Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner were behind a new biotechnology company called Altos Labs. The company recruited leading scientists to study how older cells might be returned to a younger state. At the same time, Alphabet’s Calico continued asking how people might live longer and healthier lives. This race has private funding, private laboratories, and data that ordinary people cannot access on their own.

Almost every culture has an old story about someone who refuses to grow old. Chinese records describe Zhang Sanfeng as a Daoist who lived across several dynasties and may have reached more than two hundred years. Count Saint-Germain appeared in eighteenth-century Europe, used a name with no clear origin, and was described as a man whose appearance did not change over decades. The stories are separated by thousands of kilometres, but they make the same promise: age is only the outside, while the real method is kept for a small group.