Our Centuries-Long Quest for Immortality From Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Biohacking

Somewhere between scheduling my first prenatal appointment and Googling the cost of term life insurance, I realized I had become a person who thinks about their longevity. I’m pregnant with my first child and approaching 40. I’ve done the math. I’ll be close to 60 when she is halfway through college. I’ve started doing things I previously considered optional, like tracking my vitamin intake on my phone, starting my mornings with hot water and lemon, and searching for longevity workouts. As existential crises go, mine is not exactly original—humans have been avoiding death since the dawn of time.

The oldest story ever written down, The Epic of Gilgamesh, after all, is about someone who doesn’t want to die. In ancient Mesopotamia, Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk (now Warka, a city in Iraq), traveled across land and sea in search of a magical plant that could restore youth. He found it, but a snake ate it one night while he slept.

The ancient Greeks, namely the physician Hippocrates and his followers, turned to the humoral theory to outrun death. The theory posits that the body was governed by four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Keeping them in balance through diet and lifestyle, bloodletting, purposeful vomiting, and enemas, was the key to a longer, healthier life, though life expectancy during this era was between 20 and 35.

Fast forward to 1900, human life expectancy sat at 47.3 years. By 1950, it had climbed to 68.2, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it jumped to 79 in 2024. There are a few reasons behind these increases in longevity, including clean water, flushing toilets, vaccines, advising people to wash their hands, and emulating the habits of people who seemed to live to 100 in so-called longevity hotspots, places known as Blue Zones.

A 1996 study, the “Danish Twin Study,” confirmed that genetics accounts for only about 20 percent of how long we live. The rest comes down to how we eat, where we live, and who we surround ourselves with. That’s reassuring, as those lifestyle factors are largely controllable.

Since we have been afraid of dying since we understood that we would, we’ve leaned into managing and optimizing those factors—hard. Right now, that fear has facilitated the growth of the biohacking and longevity industry, which is currently valued at a staggering $30 billion.

This innate fear of death is so strong that it has spawned a number of gurus and scientists who suggest that dying is optional. A Harvard University geneticist argues that aging is a disease we can treat, and there’s at least one man in California who tracks his nighttime erections as a health metric. Whether any of it works is one question, and what our quest for longevity says about us is another, better one.

What We Can Learn From the People Who Reach 100

In the early 2000s, National Geographic Explorer and journalist Dan Buettner and a team of researchers went looking for places on earth where people not only routinely lived past 100 but were in good health. They found five: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California. They drew circles around them on a map with a blue marker and called them Blue Zones. Those who reached centenarian status were living about seven to ten years longer than most Americans.

The habits Buettner’s team identified were not complicated: move your body every day, eat mostly plants, pay attention to your food consumption (Okinawans suggest eating slowly until you’re satiated rather than stuffed), identify your life’s purpose, and build lifelong connections. It’s important to note that, despite Buettner’s discoveries, other research suggests that the accuracy of his data may be skewed, as counting centenarians is difficult due to inconsistent birth record-keeping.

Though the above longevity advice still holds, it wasn’t going to satisfy a culture that prefers its solutions optimized, quantified, and delivered by someone highly (and supposedly) credible—which is exactly what came next.

The Scientists Who Believe Aging Is a Treatable Disease

In 2019, Harvard geneticist David Sinclair published Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, arguing that aging is not random biological decay but a disease that could be treated and potentially reversed.

His central claim is easier to understand through his own analogy: your cells are like a compact disc, all the information encoded and intact. As you age, the disc gets scratched and skips. The signals that tell each cell which genes to activate get corrupted, and the cell loses its identity. Sinclair’s argument is that a backup copy of those instructions exists inside every cell and that science may eventually be able to use it to basically reboot someone’s biological system.

Sinclair is open about his supplement use in his “anti-aging protocol.” He takes nicotinamide mononucleotide for DNA repair, fish oil to reduce inflammation, resveratrol (every morning with a cup of coconut yogurt) to boost heart health and memory, and metformin, a decades-old diabetes drug he takes because he has a family history of the disease (research also posits that the drug could slow cancer and Alzheimer’s). For readers around the globe, that list functioned like a prescription.

In 2022, scientist Charles Brenner reviewed Sinclair’s book in a paper titled “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging.” Long story short, Brenner claims that Sinclair’s book contains several misinformed claims that could be harmful to the general public. But also, both Sinclair and Brenner are associated with two different companies that produce longevity supplements—hinting at competing interests. So take that information as you wish.

The Tech Billionaires Chasing Immortality

It’s not just scientists; tech moguls have also joined the longevity chat. No one has taken the premise further, or stranger, than software developer Bryan Johnson. He formulated and follows a strict longevity protocol called “Don’t Die” and founded Project Blueprint, a longevity supplement company. He does not drink alcohol. He does not eat after 12 P.M. and stops drinking fluids at 4 P.M., and he is in bed by 8:30 P.M. He takes about 60 supplements daily, submits to full-body MRIs, wears a device that tracks his nighttime erections (a metric he uses to gauge heart health), and employs a team of more than 30 doctors to measure, test, and optimize every organ in his body. He spends over $2 million a year doing this. His goal: reach the biological age of an 18-year-old. He is 48.

Not everyone is going about it the same way. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company that created ChatGPT), has invested $180 million of his own money in Retro Biosciences, a startup whose stated goal is to add ten healthy years to the human lifespan through processes such as cellular therapy, which replaces damaged cells with healthy ones. Where Johnson is his own experiment, Altman is funding someone else’s.

Jeff Bezos has backed Altos Labs, a cellular rejuvenation startup. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who once said, “Death has never made any sense to me,” has directed millions toward anti-aging research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has done the same and has even signed up to have his body frozen after he dies so that he can potentially be brought back to life one day in a process called cryonics. While he says he doesn’t think it’ll work, he believes it’s something he should try.

Tech entrepreneurs pursuing longevity, according to Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel laureate, chemist, and author of Why We Die, became successful very young and got used to the idea that they can do anything.

“But they’re only used to software,” he told me. “Biological research takes time, and it’s complicated. You can’t change just one thing, because it affects a lot of other things.” His read on people like Johnson is not unkind, but precise. “They can’t buy youth,” he says. “But they can buy research.”

I agree with him. The longevity industry has acquired a very specific type of believer: people who have already solved every other problem money can solve.

Our Desire Is Simple: We Really Don’t Want to Die

Ramakrishnan’s bigger question isn’t whether any of this works. It’s whether we’ve thought carefully enough about what we’re trying to preserve. When I asked him why we spend so much time and money trying to outrun death, he didn’t hesitate. “We don’t like the idea of not existing,” he says. “I think that’s the real thing. We don’t want to suffer in the act of dying, and we don’t want to not exist. Because this is all we know.” Living forever, he says, remains science fiction. Our natural biological ceiling appears to be around 120 years. But improving the years you spend genuinely well is the part most people can agree on.

There’s a moment in Gilgamesh’s journey that’s worth noting. Before the king crosses the Waters of Death, an innkeeper named Siduri tries to stop him from pursuing that magical plant, insisting that his quest is born out of vanity and encourages him to simply enjoy the experience of being alive. Gilgamesh ignores her, crosses anyway, loses the plant to a snake, and returns home with nothing except the knowledge that he will inevitably die. The oldest story we have about the search for longer life also contains, buried in the middle, an argument against making that search your whole life.

I started writing this story thinking I’d find the answer to a practical question: What longevity methods actually work? I’m leaving it less interested in the answer and more interested in why I was asking. The honest answer is that I care about longevity more than I ever have, not because of the supplements or the science, but because there is now a person on the way who will need me to show up for a very long time. Having a daughter didn’t make me want to live forever. It makes me want to be present for the time I have. Those turn out to be very different goals. Siduri knew which one mattered. It just took me a while to get it.

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