Altos Labs: The immortality C-Suite is White & Male

Around these parts, the quest for longevity goes beyond Peter Thiel, and well beyond the personal pumping of youthful blood to fend off aging. Unfettered capital and interest in the area at the high level does make it seem like the SF Bay Area or Silicon valley has an obsession with immortality. Altos Labs, a $3B mega-startup focused on this idea, does little to dispel the notion.

Over the past few months, following this Press Release, tweets and headlines have declared that Altos Labs has exited stealth mode. But as far back as November last year, MIT Technology Review reported on the larger-than-life biotech company –  “Silicon Valley’s

latest wild bet on living forever” – with enough details to suggest insider leaks. 

According to the Review feature, Altos was spun-off of a high-level scientists conference at Yuri Milner’s Los Altos hills home —

“Last October, a large group of scientists made their way to Yuri Milner’s super-mansion in the Los Altos Hills above Palo Alto. They were tested for covid-19 and wore masks as they assembled in a theater on the property for a two-day scientific conference. Others joined by teleconference. The topic: how biotechnology might be used to make people younger.”

That meeting then led to the formation of a new ambitious anti-aging company, Altos Labs. The scientists think that the biological reprogramming technology could be used to “revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.” 

A year ago, as per the same MIT Review feature, Altos Labs was setting up institutions in the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK, and Japan and was hiring a huge number of university scientists to research how the cells age and how the process can be reversed.

Now, we may need to dismount from these rarified heights, catch our breath, and inquire, ‘why does the immortality project look predominantly white and male?’ — Hal Barron will be CEO of the Altos Labs dreamteam C-Suite, after leaving GlaxoSmithKline, Barron will join Rick Klausner as Chief Scientific Officer, along with President Hans Bishop; Ann Lee-Karlon, COO, is the only woman at the top-level of this multibillion dollar endeavor that could have an impact on all of humanity. 

An early 2018 survey reveals that MIT and Harvard professors who started biotech companies are more than 95% male, and 90%-95% serve on the board of directors and advisory board.  Nanay Hopkins, who led the survey, reveals, “We were a young MIT faculty when the biotech industry began. One of us (NH) was told that colleagues would like to ask her to join a start-up called Biogen, but they couldn’t because ‘businessmen won’t work with women.’”  

In 2017, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a biotechnology trade group, consisting of 1,100 members including pharmaceutical companies set goals for the industry to have 50% female representation among management and 30% on company boards but no vision was set for the female CEO percentage. 

“That is the profound problem that we have. Everyone wants to believe it is a natural priority, but if it is not on your list, it won’t be,” Bonnie Anderson, CEO of Veracyte, a global diagnostics company, says on prioritizing gender disparity.

To return to the business of “bringing rodents back from the brink of death,”  the SF Bay Area has been the center of significant investments in the reversal of aging. Paleontologist-tuned-author Pete Ward’s much-lauded book on immortality has a chapter dedicated to this quest. 

“Biotech companies have always fit snugly into the startup template. They begin as cash-hungry long shots, and when their treatments are approved, they pay gigantic dividends. When the men with the money sensed a quickening in anti-aging, they fell over each other to pump cash into young companies addressing just the kinds of fields that make immortalists so hopeful. 

And so the world of immortalism crashed headlong into Silicon Valley and all its billions…”

And, as Ward goes onto say, “the technology industry’s march into life extension is not limited to crazed opportunists; some of the biggest names in the world are involved. Like Google.

The founders of the search engine giant, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced their intention to cure death in 2013”

The MIT Technology Review’s headline describes it as, “Google’s Long, Strange Life Span Trip”

“MIT Technology Review has learned that Calico is, in effect, an elite university research group housed within a corporate bunker, doing mostly basic science. It has more than 100 employees and has assembled Noah’s ark of yeast, worms, and more exotic creatures like the naked mole rats, which are kept at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, about 30 miles from Calico’s South San Francisco headquarters.” 

Last year, Calico and Abbvie (a biopharmaceutical company that was spun off of Abbott) announced an extension of their collaboration, which originally began in 2014; with each company chipping in with $500 million. 

While these companies have similar missions, what separates them is their C-Suite.  Calico has more female leaders in its aging research and technological discoveries, and in Human Resources as well: Rochelle (Shelley) Buffenstein,  Ph.D, is senior principal investigator at Calico. She is a former professor in the department of physiology, Barshop Institute for Aging and Longevity studies. Amoolya Singh, Ph.D, is former VP of R&D at Amyris, now Head of Discovery Technologies at Calico. Magdalena Preciado López, Ph.D, is a former postdoctoral fellow at NIH. She is the principal scientist, group leader in cell biology, assay development & biochemistry at Calico, and one of the founding members of the Calico Forum. Ellie Karlsson, DVM, is a former attending veterinarian at Tenaya Therapeutics and NIBR, now associate director, LAR at Calico.

Tech companies have difficulty both attracting and retaining female leaders. This could affect innovation at these diverse companies, as research from Stanford University shows that diversity and inclusion lead to greater innovation. Paradoxically, research and findings by minorities is not readily accepted by the wider scientific community, which is predominantly white and male. The research spanned several decades and studied vast tranches of data, and its findings cannot be taken lightly. 

“When someone enters a particular context with an outsider perspective, they tend to look at things in new ways and to make novel connections between old and new ideas,” says Bas Hofstra, one of the leaders of the study. 

Will the longevity/immortality project — a concept that’s so ‘out there’, suffer from something as banal (in the relative context) as a lack of diversity?

“If celebrity is the measure of our priorities as a civilisation, then we need science to be wider represented because science should be one of the main priorities, if not the priority,” says Yuri Milner in this Tatler Asia feature, where Yuri and his wife Julia pose in several futuristic portraits. 

And what about female and minority representation in science? More specifically, at the Altos Labs C-Suite?