Longevity clinics around the world are selling unproven treatments

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Longevity clinics around the world are selling unproven treatments

The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should be fairly obvious that a healthy, plant-rich diet and moderate exercise will help keep you in good shape. And no drugs or supplements have yet been proved to extend human lifespan. The growing field of longevity medicine is apparently aiming for something in between these two ends of the wellness spectrum. By combining the established tools of clinical medicine (think blood tests and scans) with some more experimental ones (tests that measure your biological age), these clinics promise to help their clients improve their health and longevity. But a survey of longevity clinics around the world, carried out by an organization that publishes updates and research on the industry, is revealing a messier picture. In reality, these clinics—most of which cater only to the very wealthy—vary wildly in their offerings. Today, the number of longevity clinics is thought to be somewhere in the hundreds. The proponents of these clinics say they represent the future of medicine. “We can write new rules on how we treat patients,” Eric Verdin, who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, said at a professional meeting last year. Phil Newman, who runs Longevity.Technology, a company that tracks the longevity industry, says he knows of 320 longevity clinics operating around the world. Some operate multiple centers on an international scale, while others involve a single “practitioner” incorporating some element of “longevity” into the treatments offered, he says. To get a better idea of what these offerings might be, Newman and his colleagues conducted a survey of 82 clinics around the world, including the US, Australia, Brazil, and multiple countries in Europe and Asia. Some of the results are not all that surprising. Three-quarters of the clinics said that most of their clients were Gen Xers, aged between 44 and 59. This makes sense—anecdotally, it’s around this age that many people start to feel the effects of aging. And research suggests that waves of molecular changes associated with aging hit us in our 40s and again in our 60s. (Longevity influencers Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia all fall into this age group too.) And I wasn’t surprised to see that plenty of clinics are offering aesthetic treatments, focusing more on how old their clients look. Of the clinics surveyed, 28% said they offered Botox injections, 35% offered hair loss treatments, and 38% offered “facial rejuvenation procedures.” “The distinction between longevity medicine and aesthetic medicine remains blurred,” Andrea Maier of the National University of Singapore, and cofounder of a private longevity clinic, wrote in a commentary on the report. Maier is also former president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, an organization that was set up with the aim of establishing clinical standards and credibility for longevity clinics. Other results from the survey underline how much of a challenge this will be; many clinics are still offering unproven treatments. Over a third of the clinics said they offered stem-cell treatments, for example. There is no evidence that those treatments will help people live longer—and they are not without risk, either. I was a little surprised to see that most of the clinics are also offering prescription medicines off label. In other words, drugs that have been approved for specific medical issues are apparently being prescribed for aging instead. This is also not without risks—all medicines have side effects. And, again, none of them have been proved to slow or reverse human aging. And these prescriptions are coming from certified medical doctors. More than 80% of clinics reported that their practice was overseen by a medical doctor with more than 10 years of clinical experience. It was also a little surprising to learn that despite their high fees, most of these clinics are not making a profit. For clients, the annual costs of attending a longevity clinic range between $10,000 and $150,000, according to Fountain Life, a company with clinics in Florida and Prague. But only 39% of the surveyed clinics said they were turning a profit and 30% said they were “approaching breaking even,” while 16% said they were operating at a loss. Proponents of longevity clinics have high hopes for the field. They see longevity medicine as nothing short of a revolution—a move away from reactive treatments and toward proactive health maintenance. But these survey results show just how far they have to go. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should be fairly obvious that a healthy, plant-rich diet and moderate exercise will help keep you in good shape. And no drugs or supplements have yet been proved to extend human lifespan.

The growing field of longevity medicine is apparently aiming for something in between these two ends of the wellness spectrum. By combining the established tools of clinical medicine (think blood tests and scans) with some more experimental ones (tests that measure your biological age), these clinics promise to help their clients improve their health and longevity.

But a survey of longevity clinics around the world, carried out by an organization that publishes updates and research on the industry, is revealing a messier picture. In reality, these clinics—most of which cater only to the very wealthy—vary wildly in their offerings.

Today, the number of longevity clinics is thought to be somewhere in the hundreds. The proponents of these clinics say they represent the future of medicine. “We can write new rules on how we treat patients,” Eric Verdin, who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, said at a professional meeting last year.

Phil Newman, who runs Longevity.Technology, a company that tracks the longevity industry, says he knows of 320 longevity clinics operating around the world. Some operate multiple centers on an international scale, while others involve a single “practitioner” incorporating some element of “longevity” into the treatments offered, he says. To get a better idea of what these offerings might be, Newman and his colleagues conducted a survey of 82 clinics around the world, including the US, Australia, Brazil, and multiple countries in Europe and Asia.

Some of the results are not all that surprising. Three-quarters of the clinics said that most of their clients were Gen Xers, aged between 44 and 59. This makes sense—anecdotally, it’s around this age that many people start to feel the effects of aging. And research suggests that waves of molecular changes associated with aging hit us in our 40s and again in our 60s. (Longevity influencers Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia all fall into this age group too.)

And I wasn’t surprised to see that plenty of clinics are offering aesthetic treatments, focusing more on how old their clients look. Of the clinics surveyed, 28% said they offered Botox injections, 35% offered hair loss treatments, and 38% offered “facial rejuvenation procedures.” “The distinction between longevity medicine and aesthetic medicine remains blurred,” Andrea Maier of the National University of Singapore, and cofounder of a private longevity clinic, wrote in a commentary on the report.

Maier is also former president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, an organization that was set up with the aim of establishing clinical standards and credibility for longevity clinics. Other results from the survey underline how much of a challenge this will be; many clinics are still offering unproven treatments. Over a third of the clinics said they offered stem-cell treatments, for example. There is no evidence that those treatments will help people live longer—and they are not without risk, either.

I was a little surprised to see that most of the clinics are also offering prescription medicines off label. In other words, drugs that have been approved for specific medical issues are apparently being prescribed for aging instead. This is also not without risks—all medicines have side effects. And, again, none of them have been proved to slow or reverse human aging.

And these prescriptions are coming from certified medical doctors. More than 80% of clinics reported that their practice was overseen by a medical doctor with more than 10 years of clinical experience.

It was also a little surprising to learn that despite their high fees, most of these clinics are not making a profit. For clients, the annual costs of attending a longevity clinic range between $10,000 and $150,000, according to Fountain Life, a company with clinics in Florida and Prague. But only 39% of the surveyed clinics said they were turning a profit and 30% said they were “approaching breaking even,” while 16% said they were operating at a loss.

Proponents of longevity clinics have high hopes for the field. They see longevity medicine as nothing short of a revolution—a move away from reactive treatments and toward proactive health maintenance. But these survey results show just how far they have to go.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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Networking errors pose threat to data center reliability

Still, IT and networking issues increased in 2024, according to Uptime Institute. The analysis attributed the rise in outages due to increased IT and network complexity, specifically, change management and misconfigurations. “Particularly with distributed services, cloud services, we find that cascading failures often occur when networking equipment is replicated across an entire network,” Lawrence explained. “Sometimes the failure of one forces traffic to move in one direction, overloading capacity at another data center.” The most common causes of major network-related outages were cited as: Configuration/change management failure: 50% Third-party network provider failure: 34% Hardware failure: 31% Firmware/software error: 26% Line breakages: 17% Malicious cyberattack: 17% Network overload/congestion failure: 13% Corrupted firewall/routing tables issues: 8% Weather-related incident: 7% Configuration/change management issues also attributed for 62% of the most common causes of major IT system-/software-related outages. Change-related disruptions consistently are responsible for software-related outages. Human error continues to be one of the “most persistent challenges in data center operations,” according to Uptime’s analysis. The report found that the biggest cause of these failures is data center staff failing to follow established procedures, which has increased by about 10 percentage points compared to 2023. “These are things that were 100% under our control. I mean, we can’t control when the UPS module fails because it was either poorly manufactured, it had a flaw, or something else. This is 100% under our control,” Brown said. The most common causes of major human error-related outages were reported as:

Liquid cooling technologies: reducing data center environmental impact

“Highly optimized cold-plate or one-phase immersion cooling technologies can perform on par with two-phase immersion, making all three liquid-cooling technologies desirable options,” the researchers wrote. Factors to consider There are numerous factors to consider when adopting liquid cooling technologies, according to Microsoft’s researchers. First, they advise performing a full environmental, health, and safety analysis, and end-to-end life cycle impact analysis. “Analyzing the full data center ecosystem to include systems interactions across software, chip, server, rack, tank, and cooling fluids allows decision makers to understand where savings in environmental impacts can be made,” they wrote. It is also important to engage with fluid vendors and regulators early, to understand chemical composition, disposal methods, and compliance risks. And associated socioeconomic, community, and business impacts are equally critical to assess. More specific environmental considerations include ozone depletion and global warming potential; the researchers emphasized that operators should only use fluids with low to zero ozone depletion potential (ODP) values, and not hydrofluorocarbons or carbon dioxide. It is also critical to analyze a fluid’s viscosity (thickness or stickiness), flammability, and overall volatility. And operators should only use fluids with minimal bioaccumulation (the buildup of chemicals in lifeforms, typically in fish) and terrestrial and aquatic toxicity. Finally, once up and running, data center operators should monitor server lifespan and failure rates, tracking performance uptime and adjusting IT refresh rates accordingly.

Cisco unveils prototype quantum networking chip

Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said. “We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said. For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said. The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers. The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco. The challenges for quantum data center network fabric

Zyxel launches 100GbE switch for enterprise networks

Port specifications include: 48 SFP28 ports supporting dual-rate 10GbE/25GbE connectivity 8 QSFP28 ports supporting 100GbE connections Console port for direct management access Layer 3 routing capabilities include static routing with support for access control lists (ACLs) and VLAN segmentation. The switch implements IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging, port isolation, and port mirroring for traffic analysis. For link aggregation, the switch supports IEEE 802.3ad for increased throughput and redundancy between switches or servers. Target applications and use cases The CX4800-56F targets multiple deployment scenarios where high-capacity backbone connectivity and flexible port configurations are required. “This will be for service providers initially or large deployments where they need a high capacity backbone to deliver a primarily 10G access layer to the end point,” explains Nguyen. “Now with Wi-Fi 7, more 10G/25G capable POE switches are being powered up and need interconnectivity without the bottleneck. We see this for data centers, campus, MDU (Multi-Dwelling Unit) buildings or community deployments.” Management is handled through Zyxel’s NebulaFlex Pro technology, which supports both standalone configuration and cloud management via the Nebula Control Center (NCC). The switch includes a one-year professional pack license providing IGMP technology and network analytics features. The SFP28 ports maintain backward compatibility between 10G and 25G standards, enabling phased migration paths for organizations transitioning between these speeds.

Engineers rush to master new skills for AI-driven data centers

According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%. Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications. Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations. “Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.” These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says. AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds. The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary. The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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