San Francisco – September 4, 2026

By Maulde Cuérel, AI & Tech Foresight Program Manager, Swissnex in San Francisco

Where does life begin, where does it end, and how should the years in between be lived? What counts as a good life, or a good death? These questions have united and divided people since the beginning of humanity, and yet they have never been resolved or answered. They remain grey, shaped by context, culture, and belief.

This piece isn’t here to pick a side. It’s here to pique your curiosity: what is being discussed in the Bay Area, what science and technology are making possible, and which ideas are taking hold. As brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), lab-grown neural tissue, health tech, and AI grow more capable, the oldest questions about death, consciousness, what makes us human and what is ethical have returned to centre stage.

To explore these questions, I recently went to Vitalist Bay, a longevity festival organised by the Vitalism Foundation. Notebook in hand, open mind engaged, ready to have my assumptions taken apart.

Lighthaven, Berkeley

The first thing you notice upon arrival is that the car park has been repurposed. There are two mobile DEXA vans parked outside, scanning attendees’ body composition on a rolling schedule.

A few metres away, another van is drawing people’s blood, a full panel included with the ticket, run in partnership with a diagnostics company. Elsewhere, there are continuous gym and mobility assessments, as well as breathwork sessions. This might sound like a lot, but it is nothing out of the ordinary for the average Bay Area longevity enthusiast. I did all of it. Not because I believed each measurement meant something, but because I needed to immerse myself. Maybe that will help me understand what this is all about.

The second thing you notice is who is in the room: Founders in their twenties; researchers in their seventies who have dedicated their lives to their work; members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association (a movement I knew nothing about); libertarians; and people from a dozen countries, all holding very different beliefs about what a human being fundamentally is, and all sitting through each other’s talks.

The organizer, Adam Gries, a co-founder of Vitalism, even compared the event to the Council of Rivendell, the moment in The Lord of the Rings when different communities that dislike each other convene because the threat from Sauron has become undeniable. Adam recalls that someone had told him after the previous edition, that it was the event with the most people who hate each other but nonetheless showed up. I found the comparison amusing and quite accurate.

Coverage of the longevity scene too often gets reduced to “Silicon Valley tech bros trying to live forever”, which I believe is overly simplistic and misses the point. The truth is that roughly 80% of us are on track to die from age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The Vitalism Foundation, the organiser of the conference, frames aging and death not as inevitable facts of life but as humanity’s central solvable problem. The movement argues that ending aging should become civilisation’s top priority, with a concrete first milestone: directing at least 1% of global GDP per year towards this fight. That’s enough, it argues, to unlock an indefinite healthy lifespan for everyone.

To solve the problem of aging and death, vitalism welcomes different options, strategies and any lever, as long as they are reasonable and ethical. Here are a few that were presented at the conference.

The Bodyoid Approach: The Body Without the Mind

Tackling the ethical and supply bottlenecks around human organs, Carsten Charlesworth, a postdoc in Hiro Nakauchi’s lab at Stanford, presented his group’s work on bodyoids: bodies engineered to develop without the neural architecture required for conscious experience.

His framing is clear and concise: “Biology has a consciousness bottleneck. Modern medicine and industry depend on complex living tissues, but today those tissues usually come from beings capable of conscious experience.” We need living bodies for organs and for drug testing.

I admit, I was a little disturbed by that one, especially for people like me who are outside the medical field. Yet, past the quite graphic images on the presentation, I found his presentation extremely interesting.

Charlesworth showed evidence that body development can be separated from conscious experience. At one extreme, amorphous globosus, a developmental abnormality in animals in which the body fails to develop and what emerges from that birth defect is a mass of tissue with some partial organs. At the other, mutant mouse embryos that develop an entire body and survive until birth, minus the brain and the structures required for consciousness. And in humans, brain-dead patients who survive on artificial life support for close to two decades.

The concept of organoids already exists, to some extent, in regenerative medicine: microscopic, single-tissue “mini-organs” grown in a dish. A bodyoid, however, is a whole-body biological system engineered to grow multiple integrated organ networks, except for the neural architecture that creates conscious experience.

From there, where do we draw the ethical guidelines? For Charlesworth, the capacity for consciousness is where he draws the line. He argues that, when drawing ethical boundaries, we often use a mix of intuition and logic. Going further, he argues: “Not only do I think that it would not be unethical to do this, I would argue that there is a moral imperative to develop this technology, as we already live in a world with an enormous amount of suffering from people needing organs, and the organ shortage has produced a black market that harvests organs from people who are trafficked or never consented.”

The Spine-machine Interface Approach to Longevity

Complementing physical organ replacement, Alessandro Maggi, Founder of Ecate outlined bidirectional spinal cord interfaces. Unlike conventional implants that only stimulate the nervous system, these interfaces can both read neural activity and deliver precisely targeted electrical signals. This two-way communication could help bypass damaged pathways between the brain and body, enabling more responsive control of movement while also returning sensory information to the user.

Bioelectronics has 60 years of evidence behind it: pacemakers, defibrillators and deep-brain stimulators. All treat a single organ. His question: “Would it be possible to create an interface that, instead of focusing on one organ, tries to fix a whole body?”

His motivating case is a young patient with metastatic cancer whose organs are failing while the central nervous system remains healthy. The proposal is to isolate the part that is still healthy, keep it alive on a perfusion system that supplies oxygen and nutrients and clears waste, connect it to the world through a bidirectional neural interface and, finally, to a prosthetic body that allows the patient to interact with reality.

Their work focuses on bidirectional neural interfaces. Work has already been, and is currently being, done in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), with examples such as Neuralink, Paradromics and Onward Medical, which originated at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

His move is to shift that interface from the brain to the spinal cord: as he explains the brain is three-dimensional, vast and expensive to sample, whereas spinal white matter is essentially made up of bundled axons.

In animals, Bioelectronics uses probes to decode intended movements, such as leg extension and ankle flexion, with over 80% accuracy. They are now conducting large-animal studies and hope to reach preliminary human experiments within two years.

Do Not Enhance, but Pause: Biostasis for Life Extension

Biostasis (the process of slowing or stopping biological time at the cellular level to preserve living systems, tissues or organisms) along with cryopreservation (the process of using low temperatures to preserve cells, tissues or organs, for future use), were big topics at the conference, with voices from both the science side and the industry side.

The field relies on a crucial concept: preserving biological structure rather than function, under the premise that future medicine can restore function if the physical brain is kept intact. Max More, from Biostasis Technologies, gave an interesting overview. Over the last 40 years the scientific and cultural landscape of the field has matured significantly. In 1986, preservation relied on limited cryoprotective solutions.

This was eventually revolutionized by Dr. Gregory Fahy, who was present at the conference, and his work on vitrification, by using high concentrations of cryoprotective agents, cools tissues into an ice-free, glassy block, preventing structural damage from ice crystals.

Today, Emil Kendziorra, CEO of Tomorrow Bio, treats biostasis as a vital statistical hedge against death, opening his talk with a clear statement: “Not dying requires human cryopreservation.” Because no current drug extends the maximum human lifespan, biostasis acts as a potential bridge between terminal patients and future medicine. Tomorrow Bio, focuses heavily on modern medical logistics. It deploys specialized standby teams of doctors directly to terminal patients.

“If I’m getting cancer tomorrow and the doctors tell me that I have six weeks to live before I die, if I’m getting cremated, there’s no coming back from that. At the very least, the chance here is better.” While Tomorrow Bio is clear that there is currently no guarantee it will work, the company stores its cryopreserved human and pet patients at a secure underground facility in Rafz, Switzerland, operated in partnership with the non-profit European Biostasis Foundation (EBF).

Ovarian Health: A Key to Female Longevity

Dr. Kutluk Oktay, ovarian biologist and Professor Adjunct, Yale School of medicine, who has spent 30 years working on ovarian aging, made a compelling argument: delaying menopause may be one of the most effective longevity interventions available to women. Because women lose the vast majority of their million-egg follicle reserve through non-ovulatory loss by menopause, delaying this depletion could dramatically extend healthspan. Late menopause, after age 55, correlates with lower rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive decline.

For me, the historical point that reframed everything was that menopause as a life stage barely existed two centuries ago, because women largely did not live past it. While lifespans roughly doubled since then, the age of menopause did not move at all. So women now spend close to half of their lives on the other side of a transition that medicine has never learned to postpone.

Dr. Oktay’s solution rests on three complementary strategies: 1) ovarian tissue freezing and later transplantation in order to cryogenically delay menopause, a process already in practice; 2) in vitro growth of primordial follicles from cryopreserved tissue, potentially replacing IVF, expected in one to two years; and 3) the medical delay of menopause using FDA-approved and next-generation drugs, likely within five years.

Women’s health has historically been ignored in biological studies and clinical trials, as well as underfunded and, to some extent, still is today. It was refreshing to see so much attention drawn to the fact that men and women are different biologically, and that those differences matter a great deal when it comes to longevity.

The conference highlighted the importance of women’s health by having multiple speakers on stage, including Laura Minquini, founder of AthenaBio, a science-first ecosystem dedicated to developing and funding women’s health. In this case, they’ve developed the Ovarian Stack, a progressive, biology-first approach to managing a woman’s healthspan, ranging from menopause forecasting and ovarian cryopreservation to ovarian rejuvenation.

So where does life begin, where does it end, and how should the years in between be lived? What counts as a good life or a good death?

To these, we have now added a few more: Where should we draw the ethical boundaries around bodyoids? Is the spinal cord the next frontier for brain-machine interfaces? Should human cryopreservation remain confined to science-fiction books, or should we be getting on the waiting list?

With more than 80 sessions across the longevity field, this article captures only a small part of the conversation. Of what I did see: at times it made me hopeful, at others it left me deeply unsettled, and throughout it left me with many new reflections. Perspectives and beliefs were varied and, at times, conflicting, yet everyone took part, brought together by two things: moonshot thinking and an insatiable curiosity about what might be possible.