“There are a lot of secret scientists working in our field, and they’re really excited by increasing lifespan,” explains Shift Bioscience’s Ives. “But you will find people who will accuse you of being a madman who wants to be immortal.” He claims that people representing biotech companies tell him “all the time” that they are secretly longevity companies, but avoid using the term because they do not want to “put off” funders or collaborators.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter how much people adopt the whitelist. label Until the thoughts break. “It’s very simple. (The Vitalist Declaration) has five points – if you agree with the five points, you are a vitalist,” Hämäläinen says. “You don’t have to be public about it.” He says he has talked to others about “coming out of the closet” and it is going very well.
Gries puts it more bluntly: “If you agree with the whitelist declaration, you are whitelisted.”
And he indicates that there are now many people in powerful positions – including in the Trump administration – who share his views, even if they do not openly identify as whitelists.
For Griz, this includes Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill, whom I profiled a few months after he became Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s number two. (More recently, O’Neill was temporarily put in charge of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
Amy Rossetti/Department of Health and Human Services via AP
O’Neill has long been interested in both longevity and the idea of creating new jurisdictions. As of March 2024, he serves on the board of directors of the Friedman Seasteading Institute. He also served as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, a long-term organization founded by de Grey, between 2019 and 2021, and he represented Thiel as a board member there for several years. Many people in the longevity community say they know him personally, or at least have met him. (Tristan Roberts, a biohacker who worked with a biotech company operating out of Prospera, tells me he served O’Neill gin when he visited his Burning Man camp, which he describes as “the technology gay camp from San Francisco and New York.” Hamalainen also remembers meeting O’Neill at Burning Man, a “techno, futuristic” camp.) (Neither does O’Neill. Nor did representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services respond to requests for comment.)
O’Neal’s views are certainly becoming less popular in DC these days. The day after the Vitalist Bay Summit, A4LI was hosting its meeting in the capital with the goal of “bringing together leaders, advocates and innovators from around the world to advance legislative initiatives that promote healthy human lives.” I recognized many of the people there in Vitalist Bay, albeit in more formal attire.
The DC event ran for three days in late April. The first two included conversations with longevity enthusiasts, including scientists, lawyers, and biotech CEOs. Vitalia’s Enzinger talked about the success they have had with Prospera, and ARPA-H’s Brack talked about the work his agency is doing. (Hämäläinen was also there, although he said he was not representing ARPA-H.)
