Liz Parrish vs. science: The lucrative business of serving the mega-rich who seek eternal youth

Everyone loves a good story and Liz Parrish knows hers has all the necessary ingredients to qualify. It features a sick little boy and a devoted mother, evil scientists conspiring against humanity, illegal genetic experiments and a secret business catering to the mega-rich, who travel out into international waters in search of eternal youth. She spins this yarn with the fluidity of a TED Talk presenter and the charisma of a Hollywood star, with the confidence and terminology of a geneticist. She is none of those things, but she seems like she could be. Some call her anti-establishment and others, a fraud. Scientists who work in the field are critical of her claims. She continues on despite these critiques, saying that she’s only looking to tell her story. “The media has really distorted it,” she says. And so, she fixes her eyes on her interviewer, takes a sip of coffee, and starts from the beginning.

In 2011, Parrish was a middle-aged U.S. housewife with two kids and an odd interest in genetics. She began to study science in college, but dropped out. The experience led her to get involved in an organization that defended the use of stem cells in medicine. It was the era in which President George W. Bush had frozen public funding for this kind of research due to its ethical implications.

In 2013, one of Parrish’s children was diagnosed with type one diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the pancreas stops producing insulin. That changed everything, she explains. She says that the first time she took her kid to the doctor, the experience was not a good one. Parrish didn’t ask about insulin pens, blood glucose meters or diets. She interrogated the doctor about the possibility of turning to experimental gene therapy, which didn’t go over well. “He made me feel horrible for asking, as if I was a bad person. But meanwhile, there were children who were dying,” she says, overwhelmed by emotion. “They were treating my questions like an attack on the system, and had no answers for me.” And so, she decided to look for herself.

Parrish explains that she became a scientist to find a cure for her son. She lacked any degree in medicine or biology, but says she has gone to many conferences and has educated herself. She founded her tech health company Bioviva to raise funds and research gene therapies that fight health conditions related to aging. She recruited genetic experts who are well-known in the field, like George Church, who is a professor at Harvard and MIT. When she realized she’d arrived at the limit of scientific knowledge, she decided to enter unexplored territory. Instead of continuing with experiments on mice, she would try them out on humans.

Indeed, she decided to test them on herself — seven times, for which she had to travel first to Colombia, and then into international waters to escape legal restrictions that have been imposed in the majority of the Western world. “Someone had to do it,” she justifies this decision when asked. “And if someone had to die, I prefer being the one to run that risk.” Parrish didn’t die, but the treatment did have a side effect that she understood and willingly accepted: epigenetic rejuvenation. Like a Marvel character, the science entrepreneur took a risk to become the first human who, instead of aging, would rejuvenate. According to Parrish, as measured by telomeres, one of the 12 biomarkers with which aging is tracked, she has been rejuvenated by more than 30 years. She’s the first, but not the only, woman to undertake the process, she says.

Parrish holds that her business only advises clients who are on this path, and that it is financially sustainable thanks to donations and private investment. When asked whether more are following in her footsteps and trying this illegal cocktail, she replies in the affirmative. “Within medical tourism, people are selling gene therapies. There are many people who have undergone the same therapy as me,” she says. The interest that her case has generated has given rise to a small but lucrative industry that assists the mega-rich who, like her, are interested in ingesting an illegal genetic cocktail in search of eternal youth. In recent years, countries like Panama and Honduras have changed their laws to allow for this kind of gene therapy and have become the site of this small but multi-million-dollar industry.

At 53 years old, Parrish does look much younger than her age. Not a single wrinkle appears on her face as she speaks, and her cheekbones are as round as peaches. She says she has never had plastic surgery, but that her story is really not about aesthetics. She wants to be young forever — which isn’t necessarily the same as looking like she’s young. Still, a cursory review of her media coverage from recent months reveals that much of it does focus on her youthful appearance. In modern tales of eternal youth, from The Portrait of Dorian Grey to the more recent The Substance, how you look is at least as important as one’s health. That same ordering of priorities seems to be the case in real life. Appearance plays a big role in all of this, Parrish reluctantly admits. Her looks are her business’ calling card.

Everyone loves a good story, but Parrish’s is so good that many scientists doubt its veracity. They question her lack of ethics and adherence to the law. They point to the fact that these results have not be published in any serious scientific journal (and can’t be, due to their legal violations) and as such, are invalid. In any case, her story has led to much debate in the sector. It’s also a good tool in the explanation of how the slow process of scientific advancement works, as well as the business of longevity, legal regulation of experiments, and our obsession with beauty and being eternally young.

Dangerous shortcuts

Parrish explained how her business works in a presentation at the Longevity World Forum in Alicante, which EL PAÍS attended. Also in the audience was Salvador Macip, director of health science studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a professor at the UK’s University of Leicester. “It was a brilliant talk from the point of view of marketing,” says Macip, who leads a cancer and aging research laboratory. “And you have to recognize that it’s based on the valid scientific work that her company is doing,” he ventures. “But on the other hand, they’re working with an urgency that has led them to rush and to try to leap over all scientific logic. Science is slow; to get results we need time. Parrish wants to be young, not for her grandchildren to be. And that causes her to take dangerous shortcuts. We still don’t understand how this technology works.”

The entrepreneur’s discourse does feature a kind of reverse denialism. It runs contrary to Covid anti-vaccine arguments. The individuals who espouse that rhetoric say the vaccine is an experimental pharmaceutical that was approved too quickly, with a speed that was explained using wild conspiracy theories. Parrish is at the other extreme of this continuum. She says that “researchers only want to research where they have interests, where the business is.” She talks about the money this research generates, but won’t specify how much is made by her own company, about which she will only give generic answers. She says that the treatment she underwent should be available to everyone and that “in reality, delaying it is nearly a form of murder.” She repeats an assertion that 36 million people die each year from a lack of access to gene therapies numerous times throughout a 40-minute interview. She does not explain where this number comes from. “In the case of the denialists as well as in this one, there is a lack of knowledge about how scientific timelines work,” says Macip, though he, as well as nearly all experts in his field, acknowledges that gene therapy isn’t progressing as quickly as it should.

Gene therapy is a technique that utilizes genetics to treat or prevent illness. They are usually performed by injecting a harmless virus with a spool of normal human DNA to replace an abnormal one possessed by the patient. It is a way of correcting biological errors that may be contained in the genetic instruction book with which each person is born.

In the beginning, gene therapies were set to revolutionize medicine, but in the 1990s, they were blamed for the deaths of several cancer patients and work on them came to a standstill. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in them thanks to their use in technologies like CRISPR. But their utilization is far from widespread. Their price tag (from $100,000 to several million dollars), uncertainty as to their efficiency, and certain pharmaceutical strategies have hindered their arrival on the market. Gene therapies are both big news and a cautionary tale. “At Bioviva, they are pushing to advance in this field,” explains Macip. “They are obtaining private funding and recruiting many experts.” He believes that is a good thing, because it can give an economic boost to a promising field. “It’s going to benefit everyone, all the diseases that can be treated with gene therapy, not just aging.”

Telomeres and patents

The problem is that Parrish doesn’t utilize this technology to correct the errors of the genetic instructional manual, but rather to rewrite it, change the plot, and make herself younger. That’s why her efforts are directed towards telomeres. “Telomeres are the ends of the chromosomes,” says Macip, the points of the X. Many geneticists liken them to the plastic coating at the end of shoelaces that prevent them from fraying. Telomeres protect our chromosomes in the same way, but can wear down with age as cells divide. “There are many studies that show that shorter telomeres are associated with aging, that they function like a cellular clock.” When a stranger challenges us to guess how old they are, we look at their face and hands. But if we had a microscope, it would be much more efficient to look at their telomeres. But they’re not the only marker of aging. “There are 12 other known biomarkers,” says Macip. “And surely, there may be more.”

Parrish has tried seven gene therapies. Some of them are legal and have been tested on people, such as one designed to block a protein that limits muscle growth. But the therapy that has attracted the most attention is the one that may increase the body’s production of an enzyme called telomerase, which replenishes those protective layers at the ends of our DNA. That one has led Parrish to claim that her 53-year-old telomeres are as long as those of a 25-year-old, even though, when measured by other biomarkers, she is still aging.

This therapy has proven effective on mice, as Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) researchers demonstrated a few years ago. The team was led by its director, geneticist María Blasco. The experiment managed to extend the rodents’ lives by up to 24%. The Spanish researcher has been a major inspiration for Parrish’s work, but Blasco doesn’t necessarily see that as a compliment. “We don’t have any relationship [with Bioviva] beyond warning them not to infringe on our patents, given that this technology has been patented by the CNIO,” she says in an email exchange. Blanco says that the goal of telomerase therapy “is not to delay aging and extend people’s lives, but to be able to treat degenerative diseases associated with aging. The goal is to cure diseases.”

A central problem when it comes to research into potential cures for aging is that aging is not a disease that can be cured. “Clinical trials can be carried out with cancer patients, because there may be possible side effects, but the alternative is not good either,” says Macip. “But with a healthy population, giving them a drug that can cause something — it is not ethical.” The expert says that the most advanced therapy at the moment geared towards theoretically extending life expectancy has side effects such as the drastic reduction of platelets. In addition, he says, experiments on mice can yield findings in two or three years, the average life expectancy of rodents. That’s not the case with humans. No matter what Parrish says, the veracity of findings will only be verifiable many years from now.

These are some of the primary causes of friction between Bioviva and the scientific community. Parrish’s critics say that it’s unethical to meddle with life’s most basic and inevitable process, that the stakes are too high and evidence, to say the least, dubious. Parrish, for her part, argues that it would be unethical not to do so, and has constructed a romantic and quixotic version of her crusade. The history of science is full of geniuses who pushed at the limits of ethics in defiance of their colleagues’ consensus. Edward Jenner inoculated a healthy eight-year-old boy with cowpox in order to give him immunity to the smallpox epidemic. The experiment, much criticized at the time, worked and led to the invention of vaccines. Jonas Salk injected an experimental polio therapy into his own wife and three children. That also worked, and led to the disease’s eradication. It is easy to draw a parallel between these accounts and the story of Parrish, a selfless mother who raised millions of dollars and stood up to the scientific community’s consensus. But her tale has its dark sides and obvious commercial interests. Jenner and Salk have gone down in medical history, but their cases are the exceptions to the rule. For each historic story like theirs, there are thousands of charlatans, sell-outs and well-meaning kamikaze pilots who gambled everything on a hunch, and lost.

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