Who Owns “Younger”?

David Sinclair’s secret pill is the decoy. His longevity contest is really a bid to privatize the measurement of aging itself — and a Saudi sovereign wealth fund is paying to host the carving of the ruler. The pill is a decoy. The most valuable thing in David Sinclair’s longevity contest is not a drug that makes you ten years younger; it is the right to decide what “ten years younger” means — and a Saudi sovereign wealth fund has put a hundred and one million dollars on the table to host the auction. Sinclair won’t say what’s in his candidate, code-named SL-100; he calls its contents highly confidential and his animal data sits unpublished in a Harvard freezer. None of that secrecy is a problem for the contest, because the contest does not actually need his pill to work. It needs a tape measure, and it needs that tape measure to belong to someone. However the people running the XPrize Healthspan competition have told you exactly this, in the open, and the field has politely declined…