“Longevity” — a buzzy catchall for the quest for a longer life — is having a moment. Tech titans like Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are spending billions to fund research into how to slow aging. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Hailey Bieber are touting peptide use. And the world’s most powerful authoritarian leaders are jumping on the bandwagon too.
Last fall, a hot mic caught Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping gabbing — through a translator — about how organ replacement may soon allow people to live to 150 or older. The conversation caught the attention of Bojan Pancevski, the Wall Street Journal’s chief European political correspondent. He had been curious about Putin’s obsession with health for a long time.
According to Pancevski, Putin is “quite serious about his issues. So I decided to look up and see what he was talking about. It turned out he was actually referencing a state program.”
Pancesvki’s reporting journey led to a viral article on Putin’s $26 billion longevity program. Pancesvki talked to Today, Explained co-host Noel King about how Putin’s scientists plan to replace organs (pity the pigs), the role Putin’s daughter plays, and the long history of Russian leaders pursuing immortality.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
The $26 billion is money being spent on this longevity project. And one of the things it’s being spent on, as you said, is organ replacement. Where do the poor pigs fit in here? Tell me what happened.
The mini pigs. Yeah, that’s a bit creepy. Poor little mini pigs.
Essentially, there are two ways they’re looking to achieve organ replacement for humans. One of them is 3D printing. I think everyone by now has heard of 3D printing — they can print a glass, a glove, even a whole house. But there are also 3D printers that print biological tissue, and the Russians are hoping to print organs quite soon. The idea is you print an organ in the lab and implant it into a human being — say, lungs, a liver, or even a heart. That’s the aspiration.
The second thing is the mini pigs. They are genetically close to humans in some ways, and they are genetically modified as well. They’re growing organs in these mini pigs and then implanting them into human beings. I don’t think people who get organs like that live very long — for various reasons, the body rejects the organs. But it is a technique that is actually quite promising. It’s not a fantasy. Other countries, notably China, are doing this as well.
You also wrote that Vladimir Putin loves a “reverse sauna.” What is this?
He loves a cryo chamber. A cryo chamber is basically a room like a sauna, but the exact opposite, because it’s extremely cold. I think it’s minus 170 [degrees] Fahrenheit, if I’m not mistaken.
What he does is, he strips naked, walks in, and stands there for a few minutes in that horrible cold. I discussed this with the former chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz, who visited Putin in the Kremlin. During the conversation, Putin just brought this up and talked about it for quite a while.
Kurz, who at the time was just over 30 years old — I think he was the world’s youngest leader — was listening to this, and he told me later, “That was weird.” Kurz said, “We were here to talk politics, and then suddenly he started talking about health and longevity and how you should use this reverse sauna.”
They’re looking into how to slow down or even stop the actual aging process within human cells. They’re looking into peptides. Again, something very familiar — I think RFK Jr. is very big on peptides.
Putin had one longevity guru who was a geriatric doctor. He was a very esteemed professor of medicine, and he had been looking into peptides for many decades, even back in the Soviet days. He was a peptide pioneer. When asked in an interview, “What is your research? How does it relate to Putin?”, he said the idea is to prolong the life of a leader who is so important that if he were to die, the country would be thrown into a crisis. That’s how he saw his mission. He also said that people are programmed to live to 120 years old, and he quoted the Old Testament of the Bible as his source for that.
It was interesting for a well-credentialed scientist and professor to quote the Bible as a source of medical knowledge. But the thing is...he then died when he turned 77. He didn’t quite reach the age he prescribed for himself — the age I guess he was hoping Putin might reach.
After the early demise of that guy, Putin had to find another longevity guru. Now he’s got a guy who’s much more focused on the mini pigs and the 3D printing.
I was genuinely impressed to learn that Vladimir Putin’s daughter is involved in this. She is a legit scientist, yeah?
She’s a doctor. Her name is Maria Vorontsova. She is an endocrinologist; she looks into glands and the endocrine system. And she has received quite a substantial grant from one of these state programs to work on longevity research.
Putin has recruited his own family members and scientists he really trusts to work on this issue. It is very close to home for him, which shows it’s something deeply important to him as a leader.
Russia is pretty much a military dictatorship nowadays. He can commandeer the resources of the state the way he likes. Obviously, he’s decided this is a subject that merits a lot of research, a lot of funding, and input from people he truly trusts, including his own daughter.
And to your point, Vladimir Putin is not the first Russian autocrat to try to live forever, is he?
Not at all. I was surprised to learn while researching my article that Russia is kind of the cradle of modern longevity science. Going back to Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union — he had a longevity guru himself. That guru organized what seems to be the world’s first longevity conference back in the late ’20s or early ’30s. It happened in Kyiv, in today’s Ukraine. That guy also claimed in his medical work that people will be living up to 140 years of age. And that guy, too, unfortunately, died at age 65.
It seems to be a trend among these longevity gurus that they don’t really reach the biblical age. I didn’t include this in my article because I couldn’t find hard evidence for it, but there are anecdotal stories about Stalin being very angry about his longevity guru dying young. He didn’t like the sound of that.
Bad look. Alright, so Vladimir Putin is spending a lot of Russian money on this project. It may work, it likely will not work, but let’s say it does work. Let’s say there are some real scientific advances that come out of this project. Is Putin going to share?
If Vladimir Putin were to find the source of eternal youth, obviously he’d be hogging it for himself first, and for his family or the elite. But eventually, these things trickle down. It’s worth remembering that Putin is extremely concerned about the demographics of his country, and the demographics were awful to begin with. Life expectancy for a Russian male is 68 years. That’s very, very low for an industrial nation. It’s terrible.
On top of that, there is this extremely lethal war he started and is waging against Ukraine, and it’s not going well for him or for anyone. There’s a bit of a macabre irony here: He’s trying to prolong the lifespan of a nation that he has dragged into this incredibly damaging and deadly war. He’s trying to somehow undo something that he’s done himself.
