A hot mic revealed Putin’s secret immortality hope. Here’s how that could go

1 week ago 4

They’re all-powerful, democracy-quashing, sabre-rattling despots. And they’re trying to live forever.

A hot microphone caught a 40-second snippet of chatter between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un at Beijing’s largest-ever military parade. The clip revealed some of the lifespan-boosting ideas three of the world’s most powerful and unpredictable leaders find compelling.

Could Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin beat ageing?

“With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s 72-year-old president told the leaders of China and North Korea.

“These days, at 70 years you are still a child,” remarked Xi, also 72. Putin later confirmed the trio discussed how modern medicine and organ replacement surgery could push the human lifespan to 150.

If anyone has a shot at extending the human lifespan, it might be these men with access to almost unlimited resources and their nations’ brightest scientific minds. But could repeatedly swapping out an autocrat’s ageing organs really deliver us our first centuries-long dictatorship?

“That doesn’t have any basis in scientific method or fact,” Professor Peter Currie, an international leader in regenerative medicine from Monash University in Melbourne, said.

“Serially replacing your organs is probably not going to extend your life expectancy, because ageing is a multi-organ, systemic failure.”

Transplanting donated organs to extend lifespan isn’t feasible long-term, partly due to complications of powerful immunosuppressant drugs transplant recipients have to take indefinitely.

Most doctors would also find the practice morally reprehensible, particularly during a chronic shortage of organ donations for the treatment of disease.

But there are new technologies that could one day skirt this problem. The head of Russia’s Kurchatov nuclear research institute and a close Putin ally, Mikhail Kovalchuk, who’s reportedly “crazy about eternal life”, has ordered health officials to investigate 3D bioprinting, according to the London Times.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (centre) with Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and other world leaders in Beijing on Tuesday.

This technology uses living cells, scaffolding gels and biomolecules instead of ink to “print” functional body tissues and organs. Patients’ own cells could be used to create a replacement kidney or heart, ruling out the need to source donated organs and take immunosuppressant drugs.

The technology is young but developing quickly.

“In terms of making 3D-printed organs from cells of your own body, we can make little replicas or avatars of individual organs, but only in their very embryonic and rudimentary forms,” Currie said. “We can’t make a scaled functional organ in a dish yet.”

Clinical trials are testing 3D-printed pancreatic islets, the clusters of cells that produce insulin, which doctors could one day transplant into patients and eliminate the need for insulin injections.

Professor Peter Currie at Monash University.

“So there are burgeoning efforts to do this, but transplants of whole organs is really not on the horizon in any time in the immediate future. Certainly not in the lifetime of these dictators,” Currie said.

Xenotransplantation, however, in which human organs are grown in genetically modified pigs, is closer to clinical reality. In a trial under way in the US, kidneys grown within pigs will be transplanted into 50 people with end-stage renal disease.

Many scientists say pig-derived organs could become available for some patients within five to 10 years.

But even if genetically modified pigs could yield an endless supply of hearts, kidneys, lungs, stomachs and livers for immortality-seeking autocrats, there’s one organ that will continue ageing and can’t be replaced: the brain.

“Interestingly, we can make organoids of neural cells which have brainwave patterns that can approximate that of newborn infants,” Currie said.

Brain organoids [3D miniature versions of organs] created by scientists at the University of Queensland’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

“But they in no way represent fully functional brain tissue. That’s in the realms of science fiction. In terms of building an organ, we’re on the first two to three steps of a 150-step ladder.”

Currie has made global breakthroughs in borrowing a molecule from fish that triggers human muscle to regenerate. The finding could one day lead to treatments for sarcopenia, the natural wasting of muscle as we age. “We could probably incrementally increase lifespan in the next decade” with such discoveries, he said.

But the 150th birthday envisaged by Putin is unlikely to eventuate. Recent research has shown the maximum human lifespan may be 150, but at the current rate of how our lifespans are improving, we won’t get there for centuries.

Scientists have thrown our best lifespan-extending therapies at lab rats and can barely extend their lives by 15 to 20 per cent. There is no proven way humans could get anywhere close to 150, let alone immortality. Even dictators cannot overpower death.

“I always wondered what those people talked about when they met each other, but now I know they talk about their own mortality,” Currie said. “And when you have so much power, what else would you think about?”

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