Defying death: The origins of ageing

November 26, 2025·36 min·3 clips

A journalist gets an IV drip in a London clinic, revealing how longevity treatments are moving from elite secrets to mainstream wellness.

A tourniquet tightens. The host is in a bright private clinic in central London while a nurse readies a syringe, swabs an arm, and looks for a vein. The opening is bluntly clinical. The wellness IV drip is saline with vitamins and antioxidants, sold as support for healthier ageing and maybe a longer life. It is familiar stuff: hydration, magnesium, fitness, antioxidants. Then the episode follows that softer wellness pitch into the much bigger longevity business now edging into normal life. The mood shifts when ageing becomes something to repair, not simply something bodies do. De Grey's argument, as the episode presents it, treats ageing like damage that can be reversed if interventions improve fast enough to outrun decline. Immortality slips in almost politely. The claim is framed as adding enough life each year that people never quite run out of road. The tech world heard the appeal. In the early internet era, the idea that ageing could be debugged like a faulty program made sense to people already used to remaking systems. UCL students heard it too. David Jems remembers de Grey telling an audience that some of them might be among the first people to live to a thousand. That kind of promise has sparkle. Jems sets it against the slower, less glamorous caution of ordinary science, where claims about ageing have to earn their keep. The episode does not swoon. It also says de Grey was later ousted from the research institute he founded after sexual harassment claims, which he says were fabricated. The money kept coming. A later longevity conference in the Middle East, backed by a Saudi royal family-linked non-profit, makes the field sound bigger, richer, and more sure of itself than ever.

As heard by us

A sober origin story for longevity hype, from clinic drip to techno-utopian promise.

FT Tech Tonic looks at ageing less as a puzzle than as a business, starting in a London clinic where a wellness IV drip is sold as a path to healthier, maybe longer, life.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story of how a London wellness IV drip and a damage-repair theory helped make ageing look solvable.

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