Kai Mills called cryopreservation and body-part replacement the “immortality industry”

Kai Mills called cryopreservation and body-part replacement the “immortality industry”

On July 30, Kai Mills responded to Bryan Johnson and called his strategy the “immortality industrial complex.” He said it included cryopreservation and body-part replacement, while reducing Johnson’s regimen to olive oil, sleep scores, and attempts to reverse aging.

“I’m building the immortality industrial complex: cryopreservation, replacement. Only one of these paths can save you.”

Mills proposes judging a longevity strategy by a simple question: what can it offer someone whose body has already failed? Cryopreservation aims to preserve the body or brain at a very low temperature after legal death, in the hope that future medicine will be able to restore it. By replacement, Mills means restoring lost body parts with cells, tissues, organs, prostheses, and external devices. The authors of an article in Aging Cell use the same term for replacing cells, tissues, organs, and physiological systems with biological or synthetic alternatives.

Mills’s portrayal of Johnson’s program is deliberately crude. On July 24, Johnson wrote that Immortals combines nutrition, drugs, and biomarker measurement with cellular models, organoids, and the selection of personalized therapies. His program already includes both maintaining the current body and attempting more radical repairs.

The disagreement between Mills and Johnson concerns which engineering work should take priority. Johnson is assembling methods intended to keep a functioning body healthy for longer and repair its failures. Mills places the emphasis on infrastructure designed either to preserve a person after legal death or to replace whatever has stopped working.