The Immortalists

Directed by Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado. Structure Films: 2014.

Many people want to live forever; few devote their lives to the goal. The Immortalists, a documentary film by Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado, tracks two men obsessed with 'curing' ageing. Although their goals are identical, the pair could not be more mismatched. Aubrey de Grey, a geneticist trained at the University of Cambridge, UK, sports a scraggly, chest-length beard and flits around research facilities in Mountain View, California, part-funded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. He regularly pops open a beer at ten in the morning. Bill Andrews, previously a director of molecular biology at biotech company Geron, is a well-trimmed teetotaller who struggles to keep the lights on at Sierra Sciences, a company he founded in Reno, Nevada.

The first half of the film consists of extended clips of de Grey and Andrews outlining their visions for stalling biological time. Andrews has put his faith in finding small molecules to boost levels of telomerase, the enzyme that restores the fraying ends of chromosomes and declines with age. De Grey has a flamboyant seven-pronged strategy that involves identifying new enzymes and inserting them into a person's body through genetic engineering to create cells that clear out molecular debris. Eventually, the enzymes will be replaced by nanotechnology. Chalkboard-style animated graphics illustrate their key points; the nanobots are particularly cute.

Bill Andrews (left) and Aubrey de Grey have conflicting views on how to delay ageing Credit: Myleen Hollero

The explanations are framed as straightforward instruction, with no indication of how far they are from the scientific mainstream. This deficiency is eventually relieved by the appearance of Leonard Hayflick, the octogenarian cell biologist who convinced a once-sceptical scientific community that ageing has a molecular basis. Although he praises Andrews' and de Grey's enthusiasm, Hayflick gently torpedoes their hypotheses. “Reversing ageing is like reversing gravity,” he says.

It is left to neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, former head of the UK Medical Research Council, to ask whether the world would be better off if people routinely lived to 1,000. (At a San Francisco screening of the film, the audience hissed when Blakemore cited “flaky Californian expectations” to explain de Grey's success in establishing a lab in Silicon Valley.)

The film steers so clear of lionizing or lambasting that it misses the opportunity to show how mainstream scientists are attempting to delay ageing. For example, the Buck Institute of Research on Aging, also in the San Francisco Bay area, might have provided a useful counterweight to demonstrate ongoing work to pick apart molecular mechanisms and evaluate ways to stall ageing, as would trials that are testing the capacity of drugs such as rapamycin to extend life in pet dogs or reduce age-related maladies in humans.

The Immortalists layers the visionaries' quest for unlimited life with their encounters with mortality.

What The Immortalists does extremely well is to layer the visionaries' quest for unlimited life with their encounters with mortality. Both shoulder the challenges of caring for ageing parents as they strive to produce boundless youth in a far-off future. The film also revels in its subjects' extra-scientific eccentricities. Andrews' occasionally life-threatening penchant for mountain-top marathons is unexpected — as is the overextended footage of de Grey and his wife, geneticist Adelaide Carpenter, enjoying a roadside picnic in the nude to demonstrate their still-erotic relationship.

Carpenter, whom de Grey credits with spurring his scientific pursuits, has one of the most telling lines in the film. Being a scientist means being able see what is there, and to not see what is not there, she avows; meanwhile, the movie cuts to footage of expensive scientific equipment, investments made possible less by rational evaluation than by fervent hope. It is the filmmakers who allow the audience to heed Carpenter's advice. By following their subjects across several years and countries, they show The Immortalists from many angles, displaying warts, grit and an impossible dream.