John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever
And he's Promising $3 billion to make it so
February 2004
By Brian Alexander
The genie gives you three wishes, so of course you ask for money. Next you ask for wisdom to help you do something worthwhile with all that cash. Finally, you'd like time enough to pursue a project that ensures your legacy.
He founded the University of Phoenix. He also cloned a pet cat. His latest iconoclastic quest: Research, develop, and sell the new science of longevity.
In 1994, John Sperling rubbed the lamp, and his company went public. The IPO of the Apollo Group, parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, netted him almost half a billion dollars. Three years later, Sperling read a newspaper account speculating that a gene responsible for dramatically extending the lifespans of worms could also be found in humans. Sperling, then 77, wanted to know more. So, with a billionaire's logic, he hired his cardiologist to make a thorough search of the science of longevity. The doctor reported that some startling findings were beginning to trickle out of academic labs, but that nobody was translating those results into human applications. Right then, Sperling decided how to spend his new windfall.
For the past seven years, Sperling has quietly assembled an unorthodox team of researchers poised to use all relevant technology - including, ultimately, therapeutic cloning, stem cell medicine, and genetic engineering - to alleviate human suffering and the fear of death. Sperling oversees the effort by doling out funds from his own fortune.
Counting the stock he owns in the Apollo Group companies, that fortune is fast approaching $3 billion, most of which he says he plans to donate to research when he dies. If he follows through, Sperling will have created the single biggest private program to enhance human biology. Used to create an endowment, Sperling's money would generate at least $150 million a year - forever.
Yet that money has made Sperling an easy mark for critics: He's been portrayed as the Howard Hughes of biotech. Sperling was the mystery man behind the Missyplicity Project, in which a team from Texas A&M University tried and failed to clone his dog Missy ("How Much Is That Doggy in the Vitro?" Wired 8.03). But when the Missyplicity team did eventually manage to clone a house cat - named Cc: for Copy Cat - Nature Biotechnology, the field's journal of record, huffed that "Cc: was not created to advance medical knowledge or provide fundamental biological insights. She was created because there is a market among certain rich cat owners for resurrected animal companions." Sperling maintains that Missyplicity was merely "what Aristotle called the 'efficient cause.' We learned an enormous amount."
Either way, Missyplicity is a footnote to John Sperling's grand plan.
The anti-aging movement attracts all sorts of philanthropists interested in life extension and transhumanism. But Sperling gives different. While others are messianic about immortality, Sperling remains a pragmatist. He wants to see results now - and if those results are base hits rather than home runs, so be it. He's told his staff that everything he funds should have a scientific or economic payoff within five years.
Even a stepwise approach needs some seed money, and so far Sperling has planted more than $50 million. His first move was to form Kronos Group, a for-profit medical practice catering to the wealthy. The Kronos clinic opened in 1998 in an upscale Scottsdale, Arizona, shopping mall. At the clinic, which looks more like a luxury boutique hotel than a medical facility, patients pay $4,500 to undergo a battery of specialized diagnostic tests.
Kronos is a one-stop shop. Blood drawn from patients in Scottsdale is sent to a Kronos lab in Phoenix, where it is churned and analyzed by scientists looking for sex hormone-binding globulin, liver aspartate aminotransferase, ceruloplasmin, and other biomarkers so obscure most doctors have never heard of them. Based on the results, Kronos doctors lay out drug, dietary, and exercise plans. Then patients can buy the drugs and supplements from a Kronos-owned pharmacy.
Kronos is validating Sperling's vision of making progress pay for itself. In its first full year of operation, Kronos grossed $2.5 million. Five years later, in 2003, the five-year total was an estimated $37 million, with a base of 8,000 patients. According to CEO Jonathan Thatcher, Kronos is on the verge of turning a profit.
Originally, the Kronos concept was "anti-aging" medicine, but the clinic has since dropped all references to anti-aging and life extension - concepts suspect as snake oil to many doctors - in favor of a new mantra: "optimal health." The phrase is deliberately vague, and Thatcher ties himself in knots trying to explain it. "We're on the edge, not the fringe," he says of the "Kronos Way." "We're trying desperately to keep one foot in the mainstream. You can't be just on the fringe and make a difference."
Kronos is the first step in Sperling's march to longevity. Thatcher, who's become one of Sperling's half-dozen key advisers, says, "We're realistic enough to understand that you have to take the goal apart and reconstruct it brick by brick. What are the bricks right here at our feet? What are the ones 10 feet away? What's over the horizon? But always the overarching thing is to complete the picture."
To do that, Sperling formed a holding company called Exeter Life Sciences in 2001, installed Thatcher as president, and began to acquire biotech companies. In addition to Kronos Group, Exeter now includes Arcadia Biosciences, an agricultural biotech company, and its sister firm, Seaphire, which aims to create salt-tolerant crops.
Exeter's most intriguing maneuvers are in the fields of stem cells, cloning, and what has become known as "regenerative medicine." It almost bought PPL, the company that created Dolly the sheep, but the deal fell through. In 2001, Exeter formed Viagen from the ashes of GenomicFX, a defunct animal genetics company in Austin, Texas. And just last June, Viagen bought Prolinia, a livestock cloning firm headed by Steve Stice, a pioneer researcher in animal cloning and human embryonic stem cells at the University of Georgia. The Prolinia purchase is a perfect example of the Sperling philosophy. The company came with an immediate and practical source of income: a research agreement with Smithfield Foods, the world's largest swine breeder, to improve the genetics of its herds. Right now, there's money in farm animals. But the roll-up also creates a facility that could someday apply genetic, cloning, and stem cell technologies to the high-paying customers that patronize the Kronos clinics. "The next real market is for biological therapeutics," says Thatcher. "We will move into humans."
But not before doing some more basic research, which by definition doesn't make money. So Sperling created a nonprofit to handle his research needs. Kronos Longevity Research Institute focuses on human aging. Sperling has tapped Richard Cutler, a longtime researcher from the National Institute on Aging, and another NIA scientist named Mitch Harman, an expert on hormones, to lead it and organize collaborations with academic labs around the country.
Some of the institute's research sounds almost prosaic. It's studying estrogen replacement therapy in women; it's trying to prove the effectiveness of an early cancer-detection test called antimalignin antibody serum. It's working to establish lab methods to assess oxidative stress - the effect of free radicals - in human aging.
These are just more of Thatcher's bricks. "In research, we will be radical," he claims, and to back that up, he points to Cutler's plan to engineer a long-lived supermouse that could help illuminate the aging-related genes in people.
Few other old-line institutions are willing to fund such work. "I got approved for $1 million per year to investigate longevity genes," Cutler tells me. "I have never been able to get that type of money from the government, not in 17, 18 years. It was too far out."
For Cutler, Sperling's willingness to spend is the fulfillment of a dream. "We've never had a Manhattan Project whose aim and direction was to go after this thing called aging, because there's this thinking that it's bad to really interfere and increase lifespan."
Sperling has no such qualms and doubts the market will, either. "I think any one of these companies could become a billion-dollar company," he argues, referring to the Exeter portfolio. "And all of them together will be worth at least $500 million." He says the $50 million he has spent so far amounts to the first few drops in a coming torrent. "I'm a billionaire. Fifty million is not a lot of money."
The first thing Sperling did with his IPO windfall was start a war against the war on drugs. Allied with financier George Soros and insurance tycoon Peter Lewis, Sperling backed initiatives to legalize marijuana for patients with a prescription from their doctor, first in Arizona and California, then in seven other states, including Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon. The antidrug establishment condemned him, but voters gave the idea a thumbs-up.
Tweaking the entrenched power structure was pure Sperling, a man whose life makes Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches tales sound anemic. It began, no kidding, in a log cabin in the Missouri Ozarks. His mother was a Bible-quoting fundamentalist Christian, his father a feckless sometime railroad employee who beat his son and drank heavily. Sperling recalls just one childhood bright spot: his father's death. Sperling still remembers it as the happiest day of his life. He rolled around in the grass giggling when he heard the news.
After his father died, Sperling and his mother moved to Oregon, where he barely managed to graduate from high school in 1939 and then joined the merchant marine to escape the Depression. While sailing around the world he met other men, educated men, who also had been forced by economic distress to sign up, and they introduced him to the world of books. Sperling began to read voraciously, and the more he traveled, the more intellectually curious he became.
The GI Bill got him to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he specialized in English history, philosophy, and economics, won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, and there earned a PhD. He started his sideline in troublemaking as a San Jose State University professor, helping to organize a teachers union and a local branch of the ACLU. He mentored students protesting corporate harm to the environment by arranging for the burial of a Ford Maverick.
But his most radical act was to take $26,000 of his own money and start a for-profit educational center called the Institute for Professional Development, a place where adults could go to complete a college education or expand their career horizons. In 1976, it was renamed the University of Phoenix.
The new university defied mainstream academia. Not only was it meant to earn a profit, but it gave average working adults an opportunity to reinvent themselves through education without having to enroll in a traditional four-year university. Despite hostility from college accrediting agencies and allegations it was a "diploma mill," the University of Phoenix grew.
As did Sperling's wealth. Thanks to an end of year run-up in its stock price, he personally owns more than $2.8 billion in shares, and more voting stock is held in a trust he controls.
John Sperling doesn't look like a billionaire. The man who answers the door appears more like an accountant or a doctor. His hair, graying at the sides, is combed back. He's dressed casually in a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, slacks, and metal-rimmed glasses. He's short and looks a decade younger than his 82 years.
Sperling's Exeter inner circle is here, preparing dinner at his Italianate mansion in Phoenix. Thatcher is slicing red peppers in the huge kitchen. Kronos' vice president of R&D, Christopher Heward, is here, as is Terri Hedegaard, a Phoenix exec and longtime friend, and Kate Kindred, Sperling's personal assistant and caretaker of his properties. As Hedegaard pours the wine and Thatcher continues to cook, Sperling sits down at the kitchen table. This youthful posse, most about half his age, clearly look up to the old man with affection. Sentences tend to start with "John," as in "John's vision is " and "John set the goals " and "John decides " They kibitz about politics, religion, pot - Sperling took part in the postwar sex and dope scene swirling in Berkeley - and when the subject of his Ozarks youth comes up, Sperling, a lifelong Democrat, needles Heward, a member of the Libertarian Party. "Talk about primitive!" Sperling says of his childhood. "They had a lot of Libertarians down there!"
Everybody laughs. Sperling gets younger by the minute.
The scene doesn't exactly suggest a revolution, but that's what it is. Sperling is freelancing biology on an unprecedented scale. He doesn't answer to a government agency or a board of directors - just his own bank account. He's free to say whatever he chooses.
"I am 100 percent for human enhancement!" Sperling says. "The more you can get the better! What do we want? To improve the quality of human life to maximize happiness, right?" According to Thatcher and others, Exeter will eventually try to develop cell therapies for regenerative medicine, possibly pursue therapeutic cloning technology on human cells, and maybe, someday, experiment with genetic engineering. It's too early to tell where the science will lead, but Sperling is keeping his options open.
One thing seems certain: Further research into life extension is going to earn Sperling a bunch of enemies, especially in the Bush administration. He says he doesn't seek confrontation, but he's happy to take on the Bush White House, especially on issues like therapeutic cloning and stem cells. "It became a philosophical construct with George Bush's election," Sperling says. "He decided to impose a fundamentalist Christian ethic on the scientific community." Sperling renounced any belief in God as a teenager, and now nothing steams him more than what he sees as religious-based oppression. So if the president - or anyone else - wants a fight, so be it.
The others nod. "As John said to me," Hedegaard recalls, "why fund popular causes? There's a lot of money for the popular causes. It's the unpopular ones that don't get funding."
Sperling is hardly a naive utopian. Contrary to the easy cliché, he's not a rich old guy gunning for immortality. He does not expect to reap much personal benefit from the science he's funding. "It will not help me at 82," he says, laughing. "I might eke out another six months or so" - and here the younger people around the dinner table object loudly - "so we're not talking about me." Then he nods to his acolytes. "Maybe these folks, at 40, or maybe not. As Chris says, it may take a century to solve this problem."
Meanwhile, he's enjoying the adventure. "I am spending my money on exactly what I want to do." And what he doesn't spend now, he tells me as we sip a nice merlot at the dinner table, he'll put into a foundation. "These three people," he says, pointing to Heward, Thatcher, and Hedegaard, "will all be part of the board of directors of the foundation. They'll have a huge pot of money to spend on good causes. I want to leave them $3 billion."
"We're going to pursue the goal," he says. "That will be my legacy."
The three of them laugh a little uncomfortably. I'm not sure if it's the huge figure, or if they're just beginning to grasp the magnitude of Sperling's last wish.
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