From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Google co-founder Larry Page and, of course, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, American technology billionaires are throwing their money at start-ups promising to extend the human life span.

This week Bezos, who recently stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the sprawling digital economy colossus Amazon he founded and ran as CEO until this summer, reportedly, though officially unconfirmed, made a major investment in Altos Labs. The investment is thought to have been made through his investment office Bezos Expeditions.

Altos, only founded early this year by Yuri Milner, a Russian internet entrepreneur who made a fortune as an early investor in Facebook and Twitter, is setting up labs in Oxford, California and Japan. Office locations have been carefully chosen for access to pools of experts on genetics, DNA sequencing and biotech.

The months-old start-up is reputedly heavily funded, to the tune of at least $270 million, and is hoovering up some of the world’s top scientists, tempting them out of academia with Silicon Valley salaries. Its mission is to crack the code of gene reprogramming to reverse the still murky ageing process that takes place in living organisms on a cellular level. And ultimately to develop commercial therapies designed to extend human life.

The MIT Technology Review online journal describes the start-up’s quest as:

“Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalise entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.” 

Mortality and longevity are said to fascinate Bezos. While relinquishing the reigns of Amazon earlier this year, he chose to quote the British scientist Richard Dawkins in a parting message to shareholders, expressing the need for the company to stay nimble:

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at . . . If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

He is said to be actively trying to prevent his own death for as long as might one day be possible. And happy to put some of his roughly $200 billion personal fortune towards trying to bring that day forward.

And Bezos is far from the only billionaire funding the quest for immortality, or at least a nice little longevity extension. Altos Labs is not even the first longevity company Bezos has extended some of his millions to. He previously, alongside Peter Thiel, invested in a company called Unity Biotechnology.

Unity was co-founded and run by the handily Peter Pan-esque biochemist Ned David. David, who is in his 50s but could pass for 30-something once famously said:

“One class of investor, like Fidelity, finds my youthful appearance alarming. Another class – the Silicon Vally-type, a Peter Thiel – finds anyone who looks over 40 alarming.”

Unfortunately, whatever it is that keeps David looking so youthful isn’t something Unity have succeeded in bottling. Last year the company failed its first major study, cancelled its main anti-ageing program, laid off 30% of its staff, and shifted its focus to ophthalmology and neurology.

Google, in an initiative reportedly driven by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has invested what is thought to be billions in Calico, the internet giant’s health, wellbeing and longevity lab. The company, like Altos, spent millions hoovering up world-renowned longevity experts.

It has a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, establishing long-running partnerships with academic groups and biopharmaceutical companies, most famously with AbbVie, to partner with and learn from.

But other than the occasional superficial soundbite Calico has unveiled very little of what it has learned or worked on since 2013. The biggest news to emerge is that it has created a bit of new technology to help analyse yeast cells, enabling “genome-wide characterization of the ageing process”.

It’s certainly not insignificant and could be a very valuable step in the journey of discovery for scientists. But the fact we’re still on yeast suggests immortality probably isn’t just around the corner just yet.

The lack of inspiring news out of Calico could be because the company wants to keep things under wraps until it has something really concrete. Or because meaningful anti-ageing breakthroughs are proving a hard nut to crack.

Thiel and other Silicon Valley investors view, Thiel has famously stated it directly, ageing and death as problems to be solved. Or “disrupted” in Silicon Valley speak. Most top scientists in the field agree that as it doesn’t violate physics and nature has already found ways to regenerate cells (when parents reproduce their ‘old’ genetic material is wiped clean of the effects of ageing) we will eventually learn the key to rolling back the ageing process.

However, in the meanwhile, start-ups in the longevity space, at least those with the right scientific and investment names attached to them from an early stage, don’t seem to struggle to attract funding. But that funding is dominated by the ultra-wealthy and it probably isn’t allocated with the ROI it will generate the primary motivation.

The chances of any of the current crop of longevity start-ups commercialising the kind of mass-market therapy that would represent a genuine return on hundreds of millions in investment in the next decade or two probably isn’t high. And even if one or two do, what are the chances of an investor having backed the right horse?

Spreading investment across several promising longevity start-ups, which many of the billionaires like Bezos and Thiel investing in the field have done, is one way to mitigate risk. But it again feels like, at least in the case of the billionaire investors in the sector, the reasoning is less investment return and more about hoping to personally live longer. There has been enough progress in our understanding of how ageing works over the past decade or so to offer a tantalising glimpse of the possibility something can be done about it. Which has been enough to convince the world’s richest to invest hundreds of millions in the pursuit.

However, new fields of science have a habit of turning out to take a lot longer and suck up far more money to reach commercialisation than hoped in the exciting early years. Driverless vehicles being just one example.

As a regular, non-billionaire, investor, longevity, in its pure sense, is probably not a viable investment in 2021. But one level of ambition down, biotech companies that use cutting edge AI, the latest gene sequencing technology and other major, tangible breakthroughs of recent years, working on drugs discovery and other therapies might be.

The kind of biotech companies that are already listed or are still private but investible in through venture capital, private equity or mixed funds open to retail investors tend to already have, or are realistically close to having,  commercially viable products and business models.

They are not pursuing immortality or even the prospect of extending the presumed natural human lifespan of up to around 115 that can be achieved without any kind of illness or chronic condition and a lot of genetic and socio-economic luck.

But they are using the latest science and technology, which is advancing at a rapid pace, to cure diseases still resistant to medical science. And to understand more about the role things like sleep, nutrition and exercise play in the ageing process and how they can be more precisely calibrated for our bodies to be their best selves for longer.

Riskier growth and tech funds often have an allocation to promising biotech companies and could form part of a risk diversified investment portfolio for a relatively average investor without a fortune to speculate with. There are also thematic funds, including ETFs, with a focus on life sciences and biotech.

Other “longevity” funds take a different approach and invest in the kinds of businesses that will benefit from more people living for longer in future years as medical science continues to advance. Financial products related to longer expected average periods of retirement like pensions and insurance are one area such funds invest in. Care homes, retirement villages and other property+service businesses targeted at the grey economy are another.

There is certainly money for investors to make from more the right investments in more of us living for longer and being healthier until nearer the end of our lives in the decades to come. But that’s not why the richest are investing in the companies they hope will make the breakthroughs that will significantly lengthen the number of years we might realistically expect to live to. That’s a moonshot only the richest can afford.