Kremlin scientists ordered to unlock secrets of eternal life

Health ministry tells research institutes to report on their efforts to tackle cognitive and sensory disorders, cellular ageing and osteoporosis, as well as boosting immune systems.

Physical distancing: Vladimir Putin meets French President Emmanuel Macron during the Covid pandemic. Picture: AFP

Russian scientists have been ­ordered to come up with anti-­ageing remedies by an official close to President Vladimir Putin, who is said to be obsessed with eternal life.

Putin will be 72 next month and most of his top officials are about the same age.

The average life expectancy for men in Russia is 67.

The Russian health ministry has told research institutes to report as soon as possible on their efforts to tackle cognitive and sensory disorders, cellular ageing and osteoporosis, as well as boosting immune systems.

“We were asked to urgently send all our developments, and the letter arrived, let’s say, today, but everything had to be sent yesterday,” one researcher said, according to the Meduza website.

The ministry also expressed interest in 3D bioprinting, a new technology that scientists hope will one day allow doctors to “print” organs and tissue on ­demand.

The anti-ageing research is thought to involve Mikhail Kovalchuk, 77, one of Putin’s close friends. He is the head of the Kurchatov nuclear research institute and a leading member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He also oversees a state-backed program on research into genetics that involves Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist.

“Kovalchuk is crazy about eternal life ... and he ran to the President with the idea,” a Kremlin source said. An employee at the national medical research centre added: “The big boss set the task and officials rushed to implement it in every possible way.”

Professor Kovalchuk has suggested that Western countries are developing biological weapons that would affect only ethnic Russians, and has accused the US of creating an artificial “sub-species of service people” who have limited self-awareness.

Putin is said to share many of Professor Kovalchuk’s beliefs in conspiracy theories. Yury Kovalchuk, Professor Kovalchuk’s younger brother, is a media and finance tycoon who is known as Putin’s personal banker. He is believed to have encouraged the President to invade Ukraine.

The order to develop remedies to combat ageing even as hundreds of thousands of young and middle-aged Russians are dying or are being seriously injured in Ukraine was described as “cynicism” by one researcher who, referring to Putin and his circle, added: “As if we have no one to put back on their feet but these boneheads.”

There have been rumours for years that Putin is suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even cancer, but there are no indications he is seriously ill.

Despite enjoying top-quality healthcare, he is said to take regular baths in a liquid made from the blood of the severed antlers of Siberian red deer. Bathers believe that the extract has rejuvenating powers and can perform wonders for male potency. The antlers are sawn from living deer once a year.

In January one of Russia’s top researchers into longevity, Vladimir Khavinson, died in St Petersburg at the age of 77. His rejuvenating drugs are thought to have been used by Soviet-era leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and more recently by Valentina Matviyenko, the head of Russia’s upper house of parliament, and Alina Kabaeva, Putin’s rumoured lover.

It is unclear whether Putin has taken them. Critics say there is no evidence they are effective.

Russian state-backed researchers are not the only ones searching for ways to prolong the human lifespan: Dmitry Itskov, a Russian multimillionaire, has funded a scientific project that aims by 2035 to transfer an individual’s consciousness into an artificial carrier, expanding human life indefinitely.

THE TIMES