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Read more When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn’t put much time into the problem but suspects it is “very solvable” and that when scientists discover why we age, it’s going to be something “obvious.”
Not long after, the Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair jumped into the conversation on X to strongly agree with the world’s richest man. “Aging has a relatively simple explanation and is apparently reversible,” wrote Sinclair. “Clinical Trials begin shortly.”
“ER-100?” Musk asked.
“Yes” replied Sinclair.
ER-100 turns out to be the code name of a treatment created by Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup that Sinclair cofounded and which he confirmed today has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers.
The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called “reprogramming” that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech.
The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off.
“Reprogramming is like the AI of the bio world. It’s the thing everyone is funding,” says Karl Pfleger, an investor who backs a smaller UK startup, Shift Bioscience. He says Sinclair’s company has recently been seeking additional funds to keep advancing its treatment.
Reprogramming is so powerful that it sometimes creates risks, even causing cancer in lab animals, but the version of the technique being advanced by Life Biosciences passed initial safety tests in animals.
But it’s still very complex. The trial will initially test the treatment on about a dozen patients with glaucoma, a condition where high pressure inside the eye damages the optic nerve. In the tests, viruses carrying three powerful reprogramming genes will be injected into one eye of each patient, according to a description of the study first posted in December.
To help make sure the process doesn’t go too far, the reprogramming genes will be under the control of a special genetic switch that turns them on only while the patients take a low dose of the antibiotic doxycycline. Initially, they will take the antibiotic for about two months while the effects are monitored.
Executives at the company have said for months that a trial could begin this year, sometimes characterizing it as a starting bell for a new era of age reversal. “It’s an incredibly big deal for us as an industry,” Michael Ringel, chief operating officer at Life Biosciences, said at an event this fall. “It’ll be the first time in human history, in the millennia of human history, of looking for something that rejuvenates … So watch this space.”
The technology is based on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery, 20 years ago, that introducing a few potent genes into a cell will cause it to turn back into a stem cell, just like those found in an early embryo that develop into the different specialized cell types. These genes, known as Yamanaka factors, have been likened to a “factory reset” button for cells.
But they’re dangerous, too. When turned on in a living animal, they can cause an eruption of tumors.
That is what led scientists to a new idea, termed “partial” or “transient” reprogramming. The idea is to limit exposure to the potent genes—or use only a subset of them—in the hope of making cells act younger without giving them complete amnesia about what their role in the body is.
In 2020, Sinclair claimed that such partial reprogramming could restore vision to mice after their optic nerves were smashed, saying there was even evidence that the nerves regrew. His report appeared on the cover of the influential journal Nature alongside the headline “Turning Back Time.”
Not all scientists agree that reprogramming really counts as age reversal. But Sinclair has doubled down. He’s been advancing the theory that the gradual loss of correct epigenetic information in our cells is, in fact, the ultimate cause of aging—just the kind of root cause that Musk was alluding to.
“Elon does seem to be paying attention to the field and [is] seemingly in sync with [my theory],” Sinclair said in an email.
Reprogramming isn’t the first longevity fix championed by Sinclair, who’s written best-selling books and commands stratospheric fees on the longevity lecture circuit. Previously, he touted the longevity benefits of molecules called sirtuins as well as resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine. But some critics say he greatly exaggerates scientific progress, pushback that culminated in a 2024 Wall Street Journal story that dubbed him a “reverse-aging guru” whose companies “have not panned out.”
Life Biosciences has been among those struggling companies. Initially formed in 2017, it at first had a strategy of launching subsidiaries, each intended to pursue one aspect of the aging problem. But after these made limited progress, in 2021 it hired a new CEO, Jerry McLaughlin, who has refocused its efforts on Sinclair’s mouse vision results and the push toward a human trial.
The company has discussed the possibility of reprogramming other organs, including the brain. And Ringel, like Sinclair, entertains the idea that someday even whole-body rejuvenation might be feasible. But for now, it’s better to think of the study as a proof of concept that’s still far from a fountain of youth. “The optimistic case is this solves some blindness for certain people and catalyzes work in other indications,” says Pfleger, the investor. “It’s not like your doctor will be writing a prescription for a pill that will rejuvenate you.”
Life’s treatment also relies on an antibiotic switching mechanism that, while often used in lab animals, hasn’t been tried in humans before. Since the switch is built from gene components taken from E. coli and the herpes virus, it’s possible that it could cause an immune reaction in humans, scientists say.
“I was always thinking that for widespread use you might need a different system,” says Noah Davidsohn, who helped Sinclair implement the technique and is now chief scientist at a different company, Rejuvenate Bio. And Life’s choice of reprogramming factors—it’s picked three, which go by the acronym OSK—may also be risky. They are expected to turn on hundreds of other genes, and in some circumstances the combination can cause cells to revert to a very primitive, stem-cell-like state.
Other companies studying reprogramming say their focus is on researching which genes to use, in order to achieve time reversal without unwanted side effects. New Limit, which has been carrying out an extensive search for such genes, says it won’t be ready for a human study for two years. At Shift, experiments on animals are only beginning now.
“Are their factors the best version of rejuvenation? We don’t think they are. I think they are working with what they’ve got,” Daniel Ives, the CEO of Shift, says of Life Biosciences. “But I think they’re way ahead of anybody else in terms of getting into humans. They have found a route forward in the eye, which is a nice self-contained system. If it goes wrong, you’ve still got one left.”
OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers.
The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up their work in much the same way that chatbots are now embedded into popular programming editors. It’s vibe coding, but for science.
Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes that analogy himself. “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering,” he said at a press briefing yesterday. “We’re starting to see that same kind of inflection.”
OpenAI claims that around 1.3 million scientists around the world submit more than 8 million queries a week to ChatGPT on advanced topics in science and math. “That tells us that AI is moving from curiosity to core workflow for scientists,” Weil said.
Prism is a response to that user behavior. It can also be seen as a bid to lock in more scientists to OpenAI’s products in a marketplace full of rival chatbots.
“I mostly use GPT-5 for writing code,” says Roland Dunbrack, a professor of biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who is not connected to OpenAI. “Occasionally, I ask LLMs a scientific question, basically hoping it can find information in the literature faster than I can. It used to hallucinate references but does not seem to do that very much anymore.”
Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, says GPT-5 has already become an important tool in his work. “It sometimes helps polish the text of papers, catching mathematical typos or bugs, and provides generally useful feedback,” he says. “It is extremely helpful for quick summarization of research articles, making interaction with the scientific literature smoother.”
By combining a chatbot with an everyday piece of software, Prism follows a trend set by products such as OpenAI’s Atlas, which embeds ChatGPT in a web browser, as well as LLM-powered office tools from firms such as Microsoft and Google DeepMind.
Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the company’s best model yet for mathematical and scientific problem-solving, into an editor for writing documents in LaTeX, a common coding language that scientists use for formatting scientific papers.
A ChatGPT chat box sits at the bottom of the screen, below a view of the article being written. Scientists can call on ChatGPT for anything they want. It can help them draft the text, summarize related articles, manage their citations, turn photos of whiteboard scribbles into equations or diagrams, or talk through hypotheses or mathematical proofs.
It’s clear that Prism could be a huge time saver. It’s also clear that a lot of people may be disappointed, especially after weeks of high-profile social media chatter from researchers at the firm about how good GPT-5 is at solving math problems. Science is drowning in AI slop: Won’t this just make it worse? Where is OpenAI’s fully automated AI scientist? And when will GPT-5 make a stunning new discovery?
That’s not the mission, says Weil. He would love to see GPT-5 make a discovery. But he doesn’t think that’s what will have the biggest impact on science, at least not in the near term.
“I think more powerfully—and with 100% probability—there’s going to be 10,000 advances in science that maybe wouldn’t have happened or wouldn’t have happened as quickly, and AI will have been a contributor to that,” Weil told MIT Technology Review in an exclusive interview this week. “It won’t be this shining beacon—it will just be an incremental, compounding acceleration.”
Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited or no access to the internet, largely because they live in remote places. But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other high-altitude platforms for internet delivery.
Even with nearly 10,000 active Starlink satellites in orbit and the OneWeb constellation of 650 satellites, solid internet coverage is not a given across vast swathes of the planet.
One of the most prominent efforts to plug the connectivity gap was Google X’s Loon project. Launched in 2011, it aimed to deliver access using high-altitude balloons stationed above predetermined spots on Earth. But the project faced literal headwinds—the Loons kept drifting away and new ones had to be released constantly, making the venture economically unfeasible.
Although Google shuttered the high-profile Loon in 2021, work on other kinds of high-altitude platform stations (HAPS) has continued behind the scenes. Now, several companies claim they have solved Loon’s problems with different designs—in particular, steerable airships and fixed-wing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)—and are getting ready to prove the tech’s internet beaming potential starting this year, in tests above Japan and Indonesia.
Regulators, too, seem to be thinking seriously about HAPS. In mid-December, for example, the US Federal Aviation Administration released a 50-page document outlining how large numbers of HAPS could be integrated into American airspace. According to the US Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey (ACS) data, some 8 million US households (4.5% of the population) still live completely offline, and HAPS proponents think the technology might get them connected more cheaply than alternatives.
Despite the optimism of the companies involved, though, some analysts remain cautious.
“The HAPS market has been really slow and challenging to develop,” says Dallas Kasaboski, a space industry analyst at the consultancy Analysis Mason. After all, Kasaboski says, the approach has struggled before: “A few companies were very interested in it, very ambitious about it, and then it just didn’t happen.”
Beaming down connections
Hovering in the thin air at altitudes above 12 miles, HAPS have a unique vantage point to beam down low-latency, high-speed connectivity directly to smartphone users in places too remote and too sparsely populated to justify the cost of laying fiber-optic cables or building ground-based cellular base stations.
“Mobile network operators have some commitment to provide coverage, but they frequently prefer to pay a fine than cover these remote areas,” says Pierre-Antoine Aubourg, chief technology officer of Aalto HAPS, a spinoff from the European aerospace manufacturer Airbus. “With HAPS, we make this remote connectivity case profitable.”
Aalto HAPS has built a solar-powered UAV with a 25-meter wingspan that has conducted many long-duration test flights in recent years. In April 2025 the craft, called Zephyr, broke a HAPS record by staying afloat for 67 consecutive days. The first months of 2026 will be busy for the company, according to Aubourg; Zephyr will do a test run over southern Japan to trial connectivity delivery to residents of some of the country’s smallest and most poorly connected inhabited islands.
AALTO
Because of its unique geography, Japan is a perfect test bed for HAPS. Many of the country’s roughly 430 inhabited islands are remote, mountainous, and sparsely populated, making them too costly to connect with terrestrial cell towers. Aalto HAPS is partnering with Japan’s largest mobile network operators, NTT DOCOMO and the telecom satellite operator Space Compass, which want to use Zephyr as part of next-generation telecommunication infrastructure.
“Non-terrestrial networks have the potential to transform Japan’s communications ecosystem, addressing access to connectivity in hard-to-reach areas while supporting our country’s response to emergencies,” Shigehiro Hori, co-CEO of Space Compass, said in a statement.
Zephyr, Aubourg explains, will function like another cell tower in the NTT DOCOMO network, only it will be located well above the planet instead of on its surface. It will beam high-speed 5G connectivity to smartphone users without the need for the specialized terminals that are usually required to receive satellite internet. “For the user on the ground, there is no difference when they switch from the terrestrial network to the HAPS network,” Aubourg says. “It’s exactly the same frequency and the same network.”
New Mexico–based Sceye, which has developed a solar-powered helium-filled airship, is also eyeing Japan for pre-commercial trials of its stratospheric connectivity service this year. The firm, which extensively tested its slick 65-meter-long vehicle in 2025, is working with the Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank. Just like NTT DOCOMO, Softbank is betting on HAPS to take its networks to another level.
Mikkel Frandsen, Sceye’s founder and CEO, says that his firm succeeded where Loon failed by betting on the advantages offered by the more controllable airship shape, intelligent avionics, and innovative batteries that can power an electric fan to keep the aircraft in place.
“Google’s Loon was groundbreaking, but they used a balloon form factor, and despite advanced algorithms—and the ability to change altitude to find desired wind directions and wind speeds—Loon’s system relied on favorable winds to stay over a target area, resulting in unpredictable station-seeking performance,” Frandsen says. “This required a large amount of balloons in the air to have relative certainty that one would stay over the area of operation, which was financially unviable.”
He adds that Sceye’s airship can “point into the wind” and more effectively maintain its position.
“We have significant surface area, providing enough physical space to lift 250-plus kilograms and host solar panels and batteries,” he says, “allowing Sceye to maintain power through day-night cycles, and therefore staying over an area of operation while maintaining altitude.”
The persistent digital divide
Satellite internet currently comes at a price tag that can be too high for people in developing countries, says Kasaboski. For example, Starlink subscriptions start at $10 per month in Africa, but millions of people in these regions are surviving on a mere $2 a day.
Frandsen and Aubourg both claim that HAPS can connect the world’s unconnected more cheaply. Because satellites in low Earth orbit circle the planet at very high speeds, they quickly disappear from a ground terminal’s view, meaning large quantities of those satellites are needed to provide continuous coverage. HAPS can hover, affording a constant view of a region, and more HAPS can be launched to meet higher demand.
“If you want to deliver connectivity with a low-Earth-orbit constellation into one place, you still need a complete constellation,” says Aubourg. “We can deliver connectivity with one aircraft to one location. And then we can tailor much more the size of the fleet according to the market coverage that we need.”
Starlink gets a lot of attention, but satellite internet has some major drawbacks, says Frandsen. A big one is that its bandwidth gets diluted once the number of users in an area grows.
In a recent interview, Starlink cofounder Elon Musk compared the Starlink beams to a flashlight. Given the distance at which those satellites orbit the planet, the cone is wide, covering a large area. That’s okay when users are few and far between, but it can become a problem with higher densities of users.
For example, Ukrainian defense technologists have said that Starlink bandwidth can drop on the front line to a mere 10 megabits per second, compared with the peak offering of 220 Mbps when drones and ground robots are in heavy use. Users in Indonesia, which like Japan is an island nation, also began reporting problems with Starlink shortly after the service was introduced in the country in 2024. Again, bandwidth declined as the number of subscribers grew.
In fact, Frandsen says, Starlink’s performance is less than optimal once the number of users exceeds one person per square kilometer. And that can happen almost anywhere—even relatively isolated island communities can have hundreds or thousands of residents in a small area. “There is a relationship between the altitude and the population you can serve,” Frandsen says. “You can’t bring space closer to the surface of the planet. So the telco companies want to use the stratosphere so that they can get out to more rural populations than they could otherwise serve.” Starlink did not respond to our queries about these challenges.
Cheaper and faster
Sceye and Aalto HAPS see their stratospheric vehicles as part of integrated telecom networks that include both terrestrial cell towers and satellites. But they’re far from the only game in town.
World Mobile, a telecommunications company headquartered in London, thinks its hydrogen-powered high-altitude UAV can compete directly with satellite mega-constellations. The company acquired the HAPS developer Stratospheric Platforms last year. This year, it plans to flight-test an innovative phased array antenna, which it claims will be able to deliver bandwidth of 200 megabits per second (enough to enable ultra-HD video streaming to 500,000 users at the same time over an area of 15,000 square kilometers—equivalent to the coverage of more than 500 terrestrial cell towers, the company says).
Last year, World Mobile also signed a partnership with the Indonesian telecom operator Protelindo to build a prototype Stratomast aircraft, with tests scheduled to begin in late 2027.
Richard Deakin, CEO of World Mobile’s HAPS division World Mobile Stratospheric, says that just nine Stratomasts could supply Scotland’s 5.5 million residents with high-speed internet connectivity at a cost of £40 million ($54 million) per year. That’s equivalent to about 60 pence (80 cents) per person per month, he says. Starlink subscriptions in the UK, of which Scotland is a part, come at £75 ($100) per month.
A troubled past
Companies working on HAPS also extol the convenience of prompt deployments in areas struck by war or natural disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, after which Loon played an important role. And they say that HAPS could make it possible for smaller nations to obtain complete control over their celestial internet-beaming infrastructure rather than relying on mega-constellations controlled by larger nations, a major boon at a time of rising geopolitical tensions and crumbling political alliances.
Analysts, however, remain cautious, projecting a HAPS market totaling a modest $1.9 billion by 2033. The satellite internet industry, on the other hand, is expected to be worth $33.44 billion by 2030, according to some estimates.
The use of HAPS for internet delivery to remote locations has been explored since the 1990s, about as long as the concept of low-Earth-orbit mega-constellations. The seemingly more cost-effective stratospheric technology, however, lost to the space fleets thanks to the falling cost of space launches and ambitious investment by Musk’s SpaceX.
Google wasn’t the only tech giant to explore the HAPS idea. Facebook also had a project, called Aquila, that was discontinued after it too faced technical difficulties. Although the current cohort of HAPS makers claim they have solved the challenges that killed their predecessors, Kasaboski warns that they’re playing a different game: catching up with now-established internet-beaming mega constellations. By the end of this year, it’ll be much clearer whether they stand a good chance of doing so.