Larry Ellison And Other Tech Billionaires Are Trying To Cure Death, Too
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Microsoft cofounder and angel investor Paul Allen are all working doing the same.
Peter Thiel, who earned his billions largely thanks to backing Facebook in its early days, finances medical research that could help people live to be 150 years or more. He once said that he doesn't believe that people really, truly have to die.
His Thiel Foundation has supports a bunch of anti-aging projects like Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which hopes to reverse aging, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIR), which is working on artificial intelligence. His foundation's newest project, called Breakout Labs, funds startups working on radical science technology.
Larry Ellison may be better known for his extravagant lifestyle than his philanthropy, but he is a generous donor, too, particular for medical projects. He has created his own Ellison Medical Foundation.
Ellison jokes about it: "We are focused on diseases related to aging-I mean, for obvious reasons." (He's 69.)
It's no joke. He's trying to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and arthritis. The foundation awarded 70 new grants, giving away $46.5-million last year alone, reports Philanthropy.com.
Paul Allen, Microsoft's other billionaire cofounder who is also known for an extravagant lifestyle, is interested in curing diseases associated with aging, too.
He's invested a half billion dollars into the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
It will study how the brain works with a goal of curing diseases like Alzheimer's, an illness his mother suffered from. And ultimately, institute has another goal: to replicate the brain and build machines with human intelligence.