Abstract
David Kekich first became intrigued with extreme life extension in 1977 after founding the country's largest life insurance master general agency, which raised $3.1 billion of premium income for First Executive Corp. In 1999, Mr. Kekich founded Maximum Life Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation dedicated to reversing human aging and aging-related diseases. The Foundation, in concert with many of the world's leading researchers, has developed a scientific road map to transform the elderly to biological youth. Mr. Kekich is also active in companies with proprietary stem cell and other technologies that target longevity, and he raises funds for life-extending research. He serves as a Board Member of the American Aging Association, Life Extension Buyers' Club, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation Patient Care Trust Fund. His book, Life Extension Express: 7 Steps You Can Take Now, to Catch the Emerging Wave of Medical Breakthroughs … for a Youthful, Indefinite Lifespan, is a how-to book guide to extreme life extension.
How did you become interested in combating aging?
D.K.: I first became interested in aging when I was in my late 20s to early 30s. I was watching my parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles age, and I came to the conclusion that if I could live to 100, then I could live as long as I wanted. At the time I thought that is how long it would take medical science to catch up and solve the problem of aging. Although I had an interest in aging and kept it in the back of my mind, I didn't make it a vocation.
In 1978, at the age of 35, I had a spinal cord injury, which knocked me out of the box for my business and most of my personal activities. I went overseas for about 16 months, traveling around looking for a cure that didn't exist, and, when I returned to the United States, I lived in Pennsylvania for about 20 years, where I had grown up. I finally regrouped and reorganized my life and, one day, I was making an assessment of my life and I drew a rectangle. I dissected the rectangle with horizontal and vertical lines. I divided it into 24 columns and 40 rows, or 960 squares, with each square representing a month in my life—from the time I was born until the time actuaries predict I would die. I was 55 years old at that time and I was expected to live to about 80.
I did this as a productivity tool, an illustration of how much time I had in my life to accomplish the goals I had set. These were more business and personal goals, not life extension goals at that time. I filled in all the squares I had used up, and when I was finished I was devastated; it was a negative experience and not at all inspirational like it was supposed to be. It certainly gave me a sense of urgency, because I had very few squares left. I had used up the “better” squares of my life, because the months when you are younger are typically the best times of your life, when you are active, more virile, energetic, and healthier. I called the squares that were left over my “crappy squares” and they would get crappier every year as I would deteriorate, fall apart, age, and eventually die.
I needed a solution and I came up with one: I simply added more squares to the bottom of the rectangle. Then I needed to figure out how to put this solution into effect, and about a year later I formed the Maximum Life Foundation. The goal of the Foundation was to reverse aging in my lifetime and in the lifetimes of my peers and my relatives—basically for everyone. About a year later, I sold the house I had recently built and moved to California where there was more happening in science in general and especially in life extension. It was a loose, disjointed industry at that time, and really still is, but it is getting tighter. One of my ambitions was to tighten up the industry and bring together many of the scientists and companies and to organize a concerted effort to work toward reversing aging. I came to California in May of 2000 and, working with many others, we have come up with what we think is a workable project to develop a way to reverse aging by 2029.
How do you define “reversing aging”?
D.K.: I define it as having the ability to transform an elderly person into a biologically young person. Prolonging the healthy life span is an important interim step in that process. We need to do everything we can and utilize all the technologies and knowledge we have today to be able to live long enough to benefit from the technologies we will develop. We are not looking to add 5 or 10 years to our lifetime; we view the extension of life span as potentially indefinite. This is a whole different ball game. The rewards are so much higher now.
What led you to believe that there was a chance of serious success against aging in your lifetime, despite the apparent expert consensus to the contrary?
D.K.: Going into the first conference, it was more wishful thinking, but after the first conference it was pretty much the consensus that we would be able to do it. The timeline then was a little bit earlier, but it was also looser. Since then, I have spent a lot of time with individual scientists going over the specific timelines for their projects, and from that we came up with 2029 as a realistic goal.
What was the original strategy of the Maximum Life Foundation? How did the Foundation get started?
D.K.: The Foundation held its first conference in June of 2000, and we brought together people like Aubrey de Grey and Mike Fossel and about a dozen scientists from around the world, representing different disciplines. We all sat around and brainstormed for 2 days. The brainstorming was intended to put together a roadmap for how to reverse the aging process. It was at that conference where Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) was born. This past year, in November, 2009, we held our fourth conference.
These meetings took place in Manhattan Beach, California, and, ultimately, we announced that we wanted to do a Manhattan Project for aging—a focused effort to cure aging. George Roth, one of the attendees and a caloric restriction (CR) mimetic researcher, suggested that we call it the Manhattan Beach Project, and that name stuck. So in November we held the Manhattan Beach Project 2009 Longevity Summit. We again had about a dozen scientists at the meeting; we had all the pieces of the aging puzzle represented, including biotech, genomics, proteomics, CR, mitochondrial DNA repair, as well as nanomedicine, and information technology. All of the participants are listed on the project website (
We came out of that conference with a plan, and we are now putting the plan into effect. The plan includes establishing a fund to raise the money needed to develop fund the technologies that will allow us to reverse aging by 2029. We feel we are on track to do that.
How has the Foundation evolved?
D.K.: Surprisingly, although our strategy has evolved, the goals and the mission of the Foundation have stayed pretty much the same. Paths lead you to new paths, and evolution is just a natural progression as the science advances. I have also learned more about financial models; whereas I initially had a more complex model, I have now simplified that and now have a model that is more elegant. The current model is more traditional, but with a twist that could make it work really well for life extension technologies. These are difficult technologies to fund, because most people do not accept the fact that we are going to be able to reverse aging. Also, the technologies may take longer to mature and are more risky than typical investments, so venture capitalists tend to shy away. In addition, the government does not recognize aging as a disease, so you cannot patent a drug for aging; you have to patent it for a specific disease.
But we are starting to see the venture capital community get interested in bits and pieces of the technologies, little pockets of information. The Maximum Life Foundation will be the first group to fund only life extension projects. The Manhattan Beach Project is one aspect of the Maximum Life Foundation, but it is becoming the tail that wags the dog.
The Manhattan Beach Project is strongly focused on not only slowing aging down but actually reversing it. You have managed to get people actively involved in the project who have not previously demonstrated much belief that aging can be reversed in their lifetimes, such as Saul Kent and Bill Faloon of the Life Extension Foundation. Why do you think people with those types of views have come on board now?
D.K.: I think it is evolution. Progress is happening a lot faster than we expected, maybe faster than most people expected, except for Ray Kurzweil perhaps. He spends a lot of his time making these kinds of predictions. Much of what I base my assumptions on derives from Ray Kurzweil's work. He and his staff have compiled thousands of pages of documents on which he bases his forecasts, and he has been uncannily accurate.
The big thing is that biology is now merging with information technology. We are recognizing genes as individual computer programs, we are gaining the ability to reprogram genes, and soon almost 100% of biology will be in silico. When you look at the exponential growth if information technology and you extrapolate that out for 5, 10, 15, or 20 years, you can see that you have thousands to millions of times more power in the tools we are using.
As for Saul Kent and Bill Faloon, I wouldn't say that they did not think it could happen in their lifetime, but they were planning very heavily on it not happening in their lifetime, which is very smart, because if it doesn't then you need a backup. For them, and for me, that backup is cryonics. But I want to do everything I can to keep from getting frozen, and it is becoming very apparent that we have a good chance of this happening in our lifetimes, even though many of us involved in the Foundation are in our 50s and 60s. For most of us who were at that first conference and whom I have met in recent years working on the project, whether or not they initially thought this could happen in our lifetimes, even those who did not I think are coming around and believing that it will.
For the skeptics that remain, what do you think is holding them back?
D.K.: I think it is just lack of knowledge, lack of integration. There will always be skeptics, right down to the end; and they will be the first ones to jump on board, although they may never admit that they were wrong, they will make some sort of rationalization. But that doesn't matter, as long as they do not stand in our way for the meantime.
What are your hopes for the Manhattan Beach Project during the next couple of years?
D.K.: Short term, I hope to raise about $100 million within the next year, in 2010. Assuming that happens, or at least half of that happens, we plan on funding at least six or seven projects. If we raise the entire sum we might be able to fund as many as 20 projects, to at least provide seed and start-up funding, with follow-up funding to follow. We want to fund projects in every discipline that we have identified as being part of the aging puzzle. Within 2 or 3 years, assuming we are successful in the first year or two, I expect we will be able to raise more money and complete this project by the target date of 2029.
One of the main goals is to reach longevity escape velocity. There are a lot of paths to doing that, and I believe that within 15 years we can achieve this and we will be adding one more year to the average person's lifespan each calendar year. Many of the technologies that will be developed, simply because of market and regulatory forces, may not get out to the public right away, but the people on the inside—the researchers and the investors—will probably have a head start, and for them that 15-year time horizon might be a bit shorter.