In 2010, Jason Hope joined Peter Thiel’s bold $3.5 million commitment to ending aging by making a $500,000 donation to the SENS foundation at an event Mr, Thiel held for SENS. The SENS Foundation is the world’s foremost anti-aging lab, working on cutting edge technologies to cure the world’s worst diseases including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and many others.
Peter Thiel regularly donates in the general range of $1 million annually to the foundation and has been matched by Jason Hope for the last two years.
Many now consider Mr. Hope and Mr. Thiel visionaries in the anti-aging space as the virgin industry is beginning to explode. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page recently announced they were investing over $100 million dollars into forming a new Google Company called Calico, with the incredible goal of curing aging.
Art Levinson, the famed former CEO and current board chairman of Genentech, has been tapped as CEO. Genentech is the world’s first biotech company, and its founding in 1976 marked the beginning of the accelerating march of technology’s impact on biology. Genentech has made the world a better place for hundreds of millions of people and has grown to be valued at more than $100 billion in less than 40 years. Art Levinson is also the Chairman of Apple, the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of over half a trillion (yes, trillion) dollars.
Technology has been experiencing exponentially accelerating growth for some time and we are now at this tipping point where technology is close to allowing us to cure all the diseases of aging within the next few decades. The investment of significant dollars into this endeavor by the world’s foremost tech leaders truly signals the onset of this inevitability.