Putin aide ‘crazy’ about eternal life orders research on anti-ageing treatments

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Russian scientists are working on new anti-ageing treatments on the orders of a close aide of President Putin, who is reportedly consumed by the idea of eternal life.

Research institutes have been ordered to report on efforts to combat cellular ageing and osteoporosis, cognitive and sensory disorders and to boost immune systems.

The Russian leader is due to turn 72 in October.

3D bioprinting, a technology which scientists hope will enable organs and tissue to be ‘printed’, is also a keen interest of the health ministry.

A Kremlin source told The Times that Mikhail Kovalchuk, 77, who has reportedly been pushing forward the anti-ageing research, is “crazy about eternal life”.

Kovalchuk is the chief of the Kurchatov nuclear research institute and a senior member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is overseeing a state-backed research programme into genetics, the Times reported.

The Kremlin source said Kovalchuk “ran to the president [with the idea]” of the programme,

A source at the national medical research centre indicated that either Putin or Kovalchuk was pushing for research into prolonging lifespans, saying the “big boss” set the task while the officials “rushed to implement it in every possible way”.

According to one researcher, scientists have been “asked to urgently send all our developments” on the work ordered by Kovalchuk.

One research centre employee described his order to develop remedies to combat ageing while hundreds of thousands of young Russians are being sent to die in Ukraine as “cynicism”.

Issuing sharp words towards the Russian leadership, the researcher told The Times: “As if we have no one to put back on their feet but these boneheads.”

Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov has also made efforts towards prolonging the human lifespan. He is funding a project aiming to transfer a human consciousness into a computer, effectively allowing the consciousness to live forever after the human body dies.

Itskov aims for the first transfer of consciousness to be done by 2035.