A few months ago my friend [Martin](https://www.martinborchjensen.com/) texted me with an idea: > What if there was a "$ per kg to Orbit metric for Longevity?" This was not very long after we made [[New Space]] — a film about the recent renaissance of spaceflight thanks to SpaceX's work in reducing the cost of launch — or, optimizing the cost per kilogram to orbit. This is a lovely framework to consider accelerating other fields through: are there "master metrics" that can *clearly* be measured and if optimized drive unbelievable growth? So, what should these metrics look like? 1. Clear to measure at a market level — *A satellite manufacturer has a concrete understanding of the cost per kg to launch their satellite* 2. Can be engineered against — *The goal of cheaper launch was and is SpaceX's primary goal — Falcon 9 reusability (check) and even larger and more efficient launch with Starship (hopefully soon: check)* 3. Is ~probably~ economic — *If there's a cost attached, there's a clear value driver and flywheel potential* 4. Widens the playing field — *SpaceX reducing the cost of launch spawned hundreds of new startups that can only now as a result* So on Martin's recommendation, I embarked upon a quest to search for a "$/kg to orbit" for longevity! Here are a few answers I found... ### 1. Healthy Years / $  One of the first people that replied to my tweet was [Jacob Kimmel](https://jck.bio/) — the Co-founder (alongside Coinbase's Brian Armstrong) and President of NewLimit, one of the hottest longevity therapeutics startups in the space.  Jacob's reply was exciting not only because he now runs NewLimit, but because he also played a big role while at Google Calico. I remember the day in 2013 when Calico was announced to the world and thinking, "Oh man, Google is trying to solve aging! They've got a ton of money, they're going to figure it out." Well aging as it turns out is hard, but they're making good progress! I asked Jacob during our recording what he thought of Calico's progress: > The first thing I'll say is it's a really amazing place to do science. They just have an incredible bar and eye for talent. Art Levinson, my old CEO is one of the greatest leaders in the industry's history and someone I have learned a ton from. So I think they've made incredible progress. But as you said, I think the zero-order answer to your question is that the problem of aging and longevity is larger than any one company will go after. > > And so I think Calico is really focused effectively on a couple specific areas. They're focused on oncology and neuroscience for advancing some of their therapeutic programs. They don't make as much fanfare as other biotechs. But if you go to clinicaltrials.gov and type Calico in the search bar, **you'll see they're actually doing more in terms of therapeutic development than most people expect.** > > And so I think they've really made tremendous advances on those fronts. But the problem of aging biology is just much broader. And so, for instance, epigenetic reprogramming likely requires a new therapeutic modality. It's likely going to be nucleic acid-based medicines rather than traditional small molecules and antibodies. So while organizations like Calico are really great at advancing those, we imagine that ultimately the ecosystem of companies trying to help all of us live healthier and longer, will have hundreds of players rather than just a few. And we'll probably have firms like ours specialized on one particular modality, one particular type of intervention. And so we see ourselves as yet another flower blooming in the forest rather than as direct competitors with them, for instance. Okay anyways, back to Jacob's point — his answer to my tweet was deceptively simple: > Healthy years per dollar. It’s elegant in the same way $/kg to orbit is elegant, perhaps a bit less specific, but still elegant. It captures the end state that actually matters: how many more years of _good_ life can a therapy give you, and at what cost? This is the breakfast factory analogy Andy Grove loved — the only thing that matters is the breakfast on the plate, not how many eggs were cracked by however many cooks were in the kitchen. People don’t care about molecular pathways or fancy biomarker readouts — they care about whether they get to live another decade with their grandkids, and whether that decade is spent hiking or bedridden. Some medicines already look like local maxima of this metric. Statins, for example, cost pennies and extend average life by about a year by preventing cardiovascular disease. That’s staggering leverage — a few dollars for a year of healthy life! Healthy years per dollar is a powerful north star, but it’s not as clean or specific as $/kg to orbit. A kilogram is a fixed unit — everyone agrees on its meaning. A “healthy year,” on the other hand, is messy. Is it free of disease? Free of pain? Free of decline? Different studies, insurers, and patients will all define it differently. That ambiguity makes it harder to engineer against in the same ruthless, iterative way SpaceX drove down launch costs. The other issue is that orbital mechanics and physics, in some ways, is far simpler than biology and longevity. We understand the rules of orbital mechanics pretty well, a lot of really smart physicists have thought about this for a really long time:  As a result, we get a nice clean answer for unlocking the new space economy — but biology is complicated, I'd even argue [[Biology is the New Physics]]. ### 2. Experiments / Unit of Time As soon as Martin texted me, I texted my friend [Lada](https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz/) and asked her what she thought answer was: > Number of experiments / time Her point was that longevity research is bottlenecked not just by big ideas, but by iteration speed. If it takes ten years and $100Ms to know whether a single intervention worked... Well it's going to take awhile. Lada argues the way out is to compress the cycle — run more experiments, faster. **The field’s success rate in drug discovery is still < 1%.** That’s not because scientists are bad at their jobs, it’s because the denominator is way too small. We aren’t testing nearly enough. So Lada’s metric shifts the focus upstream: how many shots on goal can we take, and how quickly? In her framing, the field needs to look less like a cathedral being built stone by stone, and more like SpaceX’s launch cadence — lots of attempts, lots of failures, and learning baked into every iteration. But Lada’s answer raised a natural question: if we’re going to run more experiments, how do we actually know whether they’re working? Speed only matters if you have a reliable odometer. That's where Martin's answer comes in: ### 3. Aging clock accuracy I do find it ironic that the guy who inspired this video wanting a nice ratio metric didn't end up coming up with one! Well that's how you know he's a real scientist in search of truth! Aging clocks try to give us a readout of biological age by measuring chemical marks on DNA, blood biomarkers, or other signatures that shift predictably as we get older. In theory, if those clocks are accurate, they let us tell in months rather than decades whether an intervention is slowing or reversing aging. Instead of waiting a lifetime to know if a therapy works, you could measure its impact in real time. So Martin’s argument was: experiments per unit of time is only useful if you can score the game. Aging clocks are that scoreboard. Without them, the whole field risks iterating blind. ### Final thoughts — Now's the time to get into longevity! Something I've found interesting about the longevity space is the amount of negative perception it has with the general public. It seems to me there are a lot of folks who view longevity research today as, "a bunch of (probably evil) billionaires who want to live forever." My issue with this view comes from what I see as two key misunderstandings: 1. Most billionaires (that I'm aware of) are developing companies that are focused on creating **public-good therapeutics** — not out-of-price solutions only for them and their yacht buddies. 2. The % of billionaires building companies in the longevity space is pretty limited, it's not the majority. At the end of the day, the goal of the longevity field is to increase healthspan and lifespan for all. More time with loved ones, more memories, more life. To me, this field seems like the 60s/70s of the early computer industry — there are a lot of different foundational ideas all chasing the same end goal, except instead of bigger better computation it's about increasing life/healthspan. I spend a lot of my time wondering what fields are ripe for young, ambitious people to have a prosperous and productive career in — to me, longevity seems like a prime pick. Thanks for reading (and hopefully watching!) it's quite exciting and scary to get back to weekly uploads, but now that [Story](www.story.inc) is well underway we can get back to making more science/engineering stories! Stay tuned, we've got some pretty exciting stuff coming. P.S. I asked GPT-5 what it thought the best "master metric" for longevity would be, it's answers below ([full chat link](https://chatgpt.com/share/68a9265a-199c-800b-8db3-b16b1d52a1b4)): - **$/Validated Biomarker of Aging** - Every new, reliable biomarker (epigenetic mark, proteomic signature, etc.) dramatically improves the field’s ability to test interventions quickly. Measuring how cheaply and reliably we can _discover and validate_ biomarkers could be the master metric. - **Cost per Rejuvenated Cell/Tissue in Humans** - This zooms in: what’s the cost to _demonstrably_ revert a cell, tissue, or organ to a younger functional state (using reprogramming, senolytics, etc.). That’s almost like “cost per kg payload to LEO” but at the cellular/organ level. - **Time-to-Signal (TTS)** - How long does it take to know whether an intervention changes biological age? If we can compress the feedback loop from decades to weeks, the whole field accelerates. You could measure **$/ΔTTS** (dollars per reduction in time to get a reliable signal). - **% Reduction in Age-Related Disease Burden per $** - More public-health–aligned: not just lifespan, but reducing incidence of the “big four” (cancer, CVD, dementia, diabetes). Ties longevity back to immediate economic and societal wins. *Until next time, keep on building the future!* *J*