David Hirlav on Longevity: "The War for 200-Year Lifespans Has Begun"

In recent remarks, David Hirlav argued that longevity science, like much of modern scientific research, has drifted away from its original objective. While investment and technical capability have expanded, he says, research agendas increasingly favor incremental improvements over transformational outcomes.

David Hirlav is an American entrepreneur and investor whose work spans technology, AI-driven systems, and health-first ventures, providing the practical backdrop for his critique of modern research models. At a summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Hirlav expanded on this view. When asked about research funding and institutional incentives, he describes how short-term validation cycles shape scientific priorities and restrict the scope of what research is willing to attempt. Hirlav's perspective is backed by more than a decade of building and scaling privately held companies across Europe, Asia, and the United States, operating at the intersection of technology, automation, and applied science.

Longevity science is often portrayed as being on the verge of a breakthrough, supported by unprecedented funding and public attention. Yet its central promise, the possibility of dramatically extending human lifespan, remains largely neglected. "Longevity Research tries to turn adjusting screws on how comfortable we age," David Hirlav says. "It has yet avoided the task of extending lives." Hirlav argues this pattern extends beyond longevity and reflects how modern science approaches ambitious questions more generally.

Why Current Longevity Science Is Stagnating

Recent advances across multiple areas of biomedical and computational research have produced tangible improvements in health and clinical capability, reflecting genuine scientific progress."Nevertheless we are drifting away from what longevity and science itself was originally meant to solve." Hirlav argues that much of today's scientific progress is shaped by economic structure rather than technical limitation. Born in the United States in 1991 and raised in Germany with early business experience in China from 2014–2015, Hirlav was exposed to differing institutional and economic systems, an experience that shaped his views on how structures influence outcomes.

He points to prominent longevity organizations as examples. Calico, founded in 2013 and now backed by Alphabet Inc., conducts research into the biology of aging and age-related diseases, and Altos Labs, launched in 2022 with approximately $3 billion in private funding, has publicly stated goals of developing therapies that address fundamental aspects of aging. While scientifically rigorous, Hirlav argues their work remains constrained by the same incentive structures that govern the broader biotech ecosystem.

Research governed by venture, private, or corporate capital is typically both capital-constrained and time-constrained, expected to demonstrate progress toward defined, validation-oriented, and monetizable outcomes within short time horizons, which steers agendas toward products that can be developed, valued, and deployed predictably. Radical improvements in human lifespan do not fit this logic and rarely align with conventional valuation frameworks, leading even well-funded initiatives to optimize within existing scientific boundaries rather than pursue structural breakthroughs. Public funding performs no better: it disperses limited resources across countless small projects, enforces consensus-driven decision making, and almost inevitably produces incremental, low-impact outcomes rather than focused, transformative progress.

Hirlav views the rise of extreme personal optimization as another reflection of these limitations, citing figures such as Bryan Johnson as illustrative examples that, while drawing attention to aging as a measurable process, results remain scientifically useless.

Getting Science Back on Course

Hirlav grounds his argument in historical precedent. Figures such as Einstein, Tesla, and Newton operated in environments that tolerated intellectual risk and long time horizons. Large-scale efforts like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program consumed vast resources for years without immediate commercial return. "Breakthroughs happen when leadership commits to a goal before knowing how it will be achieved," Hirlav argues. What is missing today, in his view, is, besides capital and focus, the willingness for leaders to organize science around objectives that extend beyond near-term validation. Alongside his business activities, Hirlav has increasingly focused on ventures that place human health and long-term performance at the center of technological development.

The New Frontier of Scientific Research

This is where Hirlav's plan with the recently initiated Tiger Nation project diverges from prevailing models. Scientific research in a meaningful way, he argues, is not primarily a question of funding volume or technical sophistication. It is a question of unified decision authority over research direction and time horizon at the top, a principle he believes applies to ambitious scientific exploration more broadly. Hirlav does not argue against profit. He argues against short-term-profit-driven governance as the primary decision framework for research whose payoff lies decades ahead.

"Radical longevity and serious scientific exploration demand the opposite approach. If you want outcomes that take decades, you cannot govern them with incentives designed for quarters. They require leadership willing to explore deeper into fundamental science," Hirlav says. Tiger Nation is structured as a founder-led model in which scientific direction is set decisively rather than by committee consensus. The objective is not to build a diversified portfolio of projects, but to focus resources on a singular, long-term mission.

David Hirlav has consistently demonstrated an ability to identify structural limitations and pursue alternative approaches rather than follow established pathways. When finishing his BBA from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, one of the country's leading institutions for economics and business administration, Hirlav qualified for a national graduate recruitment program by MLP that selected top-performing students across Germany, offering direct entry into senior corporate career tracks. Founding his first company at the age of 24, he chose not to pursue a traditional corporate path, opting instead to build independent ventures shaped by his own operational ideas and long-term objectives.

Following the expansion of his international business activities, David Hirlav has increasingly focused his long-term efforts in the United States on initiatives aimed at reorganizing scientific decision-making in ways he believes will bring radical and world-changing science research back into the realm of the achievable.