The International Longevity Alliance will march in Madrid from the Royal Academy of Medicine to City Hall, bringing the call to classify aging as a medical target to the streets
The International Longevity Alliance will march in Madrid from the Royal Academy of Medicine to City Hall, bringing the call to classify aging as a medical target to the streets
On October 1, International Longevity Day, a column will march from the three-century-old Royal National Academy of Medicine of Spain through Puerta del Sol and the Congress of Deputies to City Hall, the Palacio de Cibeles. At four stops along the route, participants will read aloud the 2023 Madrid Declaration for Longevity. The march coincides with the International Longevity Summit, and both events are led by the same person: José Cordeiro, chair of the summit's organizing committee.
On September 18, Longevity.Technology covered the march. The route connects three forms of authority over the question of aging: academic medicine, parliament, and municipal government. The organizers use this structure to move the geroscience argument from a conversation among scientists into political territory, toward formal recognition of aging as a medical target and public funding for the effort.
The declaration was written in 2023 and has not been revised since. It notes that germ cells, cancer cells, and certain species of hydra and jellyfish are biologically immortal, and it cites the 2012 Nobel Prize awarded to the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that a mature cell can be reprogrammed to a stem-cell state. From this the declaration draws its central thesis: rejuvenation of the organism is already a question of timing. The founder of the LEV Foundation, Aubrey de Grey, puts it more sharply in a 2011 quote preserved in the document:
"The first person who will live to 150 has already been born"
Harvard biologist David Sinclair adds the thesis that underpins the political part of the demand:
"Aging is a disease, the most common one, and it must be treated aggressively"
José Cordeiro is an MIT-trained engineer and a prominent transhumanist. In 2018 he published "The Death of Death," a bestseller translated into eight languages, arguing that with sufficient funding death could become optional by 2045. The book's title nearly echoes the declaration's closing line. Cordeiro calls the event "the largest public march for longevity in history" but adds: "This is only the beginning." He explains the purpose: "We are not marching to celebrate old age as it exists today. We are marching to end the diseases that make old age something people fear."
The organizers justify the choice of city with Eurostat data: life expectancy at birth in the Community of Madrid rose from 84.3 years in 2014 to 85.7 years in 2024, and Spain remains one of the longest-lived countries in Europe. International Longevity Day has existed since 2013, when the activist Ilia Stambler established it alongside the newly founded International Longevity Alliance. For thirteen years the day was marked with local lectures and petitions in Italy, Brazil, and Pakistan.
Madrid itself pushed the movement toward a street march: the city hosts the International Longevity Summit for the second consecutive year, and starting this year the Royal Academy of Medicine serves as its venue. The participant list has grown year over year, giving the tradition critical mass for the first time.
Longevity.Technology observes that for most of its history, the longevity movement has been talking to itself: at conferences, in laboratories, and more recently with investors. The Madrid march takes that same conversation to the streets. In April, Andrey Panferov of Fund Longevity already named this gap: cancer has a diagnosis, a patient organization, and a budget line, while a person dying of aging has only a birthday. The Madrid column is one more step by the same field toward building that kind of political machinery.