The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley

The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about the human quest for longevity and the elusive ‘cure’ for getting older, it focuses largely upon the transferral of blood plasma from healthy young people to reluctantly ageing people, or, as anyone with good sense might put it, the desperate descent from vanity to vampirism.

I was on the verge of switching over to something more anodyne when a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur began talking about being injected with plasma from his 17-year-old son. Bryan Johnson, who sold his company to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, does not even sound as if he is trying to shock when he explains: ‘I of course have the best intentions for my son for his health and wellness, but I have never paid as close attention to what he’s eating than prior to this plasma phase, because that’s going into my body, so he was a proxy for my own existence.’

I could not tune out at this point; nor when Johnson went on to reveal that he had given some of his own blood plasma to his elderly father. If ever there is a basis for a new Francis Ford Coppola film, I thought, here it is. Since the programme was recorded, Johnson has tweeted that he is discontinuing his own treatment, with ‘no benefits detected’.

The presenter of the ten-part series, Aleks Krotoski, a technology reporter and psychologist, pre-empts her listeners’ reaction at almost every turn but somehow manages to avoid sounding too squeamish. Most of the people she is concerned with are Silicon Valley hotshots who view death as just another hurdle that might be overcome with the right investment and data.