Life Extension Policy. Who gets to live longer?

Autocracy: the state serves the ruler

In autocracies, the state—not the market—decides how to push back death. The real question, however, is never whether power will intervene. It is whom that intervention is meant to save.

Russia offers one revealing answer. According to reports by Novaya Gazeta, later picked up by Ukrainian media, the Russian Science Foundation funded 43 projects related to ageing between 2021 and 2025. During the previous 5-year period, it supported only 7. Over that time, funding rose from about 248000 dollars to more than 2 million.

One of those projects focuses on the “regulation of cellular regeneration processes.” Maria Vorontsova leads it, and media outlets have repeatedly identified her as Vladimir Putin’s daughter.

So the pattern becomes hard to miss. In such systems, research does not merely serve medicine. It also serves power.

North Korea: the older logic of succession

North Korea has chosen a more traditional route. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported at the time that Kim Jong Un showed no serious health problems. Public discussion even picked up on claims about his ideal blood pressure.

At the same time, the regime kept preparing the next chapter. Kim’s teenage daughter, Kim Ju-ae, has increasingly appeared as the most likely successor. Intelligence assessments suggested that her visit to China in September 2025 formed part of a broader attempt to complete the regime’s succession narrative.

Here, too, the underlying idea is clear. If the body cannot rule forever, the bloodline must. In that sense, the system seeks a form of political immortality: power outlives the flesh through hereditary continuity.

In both Russia and North Korea, then, efforts to extend life or secure continuity revolve around one person or one dynasty. The state pays. The public follows.

Democracy: the state must care for everyone

Democracies work from a different premise. At least in theory, public institutions cannot openly direct national resources toward preserving the body of a single ruler. Instead, they must justify investment in terms of collective benefit.

That was the logic behind the relaunch of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Longevity Science in the United States in April 2025. Its stated aim was not to help politicians live longer. Rather, it sought to expand the healthy lifespan of the wider population through research on ageing and better prevention.

Europe has moved in a similar direction. In 2025, the WHO European Region adopted the strategy Ageing is Living (2026–2030), which sets out long-term goals for healthier ageing. Among other things, it calls for stronger prevention and for healthcare systems that can respond more intelligently to ageing societies.

The European Commission has also backed concrete projects through Horizon Europe. One example is SmILE, a programme worth about 20 million euro that develops smart implants and digital tools to prevent musculoskeletal disease among older adults.

This marks a very different philosophy. Western democracies do not frame longevity as the privilege of rulers. At least on paper, they treat it as part of a broader public good.

Asia and the politics of longevity

Asia, meanwhile, has hardly stood still.

Singapore launched 2 longevity biotech funds in 2025: Immortal Dragons, worth 40 million USD, and Seveno Capital, worth 70 million USD. China, for its part, established the Sirio Institute for Anti-Aging. Then, in March 2026, it announced a national long-term care insurance system, sometimes described as the country’s “sixth insurance.” After a pilot programme covering 3.3 million people, the government plans to extend it to the entire population by 2028.

Even so, these systems do not all rest on the same political logic. Some aim at national resilience. Others support economic productivity. Still others respond to demographic pressure. Yet they share one important feature: they operate at scale and claim to serve society as a whole rather than the vanity of a single leader.

That distinction matters. A growing economy needs healthy people who can work, care, adapt, and endure.

Private billionaires and longevity capitalism

Still, democracies do not eliminate personal quests for longer life. They simply move them out of government and into the marketplace.

Bryan Johnson, for instance, reportedly spends about 2 million dollars a year on his body through the Blueprint project. Laura Deming, meanwhile, founded The Longevity Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in biotech companies trying to slow, halt, or reverse ageing.

As a result, democracies have produced their own model of life extension. The state may speak the language of public health, but private wealth pursues something more intimate and more ambitious. Those who can afford it finance their own experiments and then try to turn those experiments into businesses. Out of that effort, a distinct form of longevity capitalism has begun to emerge.

Democratic leaders age under pressure

But what happens to politicians themselves?

Here the contrast with autocrats becomes even sharper. Democratic leaders cannot openly use public money to prolong their own lives. If they pursue longevity, they must do it privately—or quietly—or not at all.

More importantly, democracies expose leaders to a different kind of burden. They answer to rivals, voters, scrutiny, and failure. That pressure appears to exact a cost.

A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 compared 279 elected leaders from 17 countries with 261 candidates who had lost elections. The conclusion was striking: those who won power lived, on average, 2.7 years less and faced a 23 percent higher risk of death than their defeated opponents.

Another study, published in 2020 in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development, found that observers also tend to perceive democratic leaders as ageing faster than autocrats. The researchers based that conclusion on facial assessments of 268 leaders, so they measured perception rather than biological decline. Even so, they suggested that the constant stress of public accountability may shape how ageing appears—and perhaps how it unfolds.

Life extension policy does not reach everyone equally

Taken together, these examples reveal a stark divide.

In Russia, the state resists the death of the ruler. In China, it builds systems meant to support the population at large. In democracies, governments do not officially exist to preserve political elites. Leaders must fend for themselves, assuming they have the means.

At the same time, billionaires pour private fortunes into biohacking and anti-ageing ventures. Yet they are not tyrants, and they do not command the machinery of the state. Their power is immense, but it remains different in kind.

Ordinary citizens face a simpler reality. They grow older. They wait. And they hope that the system around them will offer some measure of support, whether they live under an autocrat or a democrat.

That is why life extension policy is never just a matter of science, medicine, or technological ambition. In the end, it reveals something more fundamental: how power defines whose ageing matters, whose body deserves protection, and whose mortality remains a private burden.

Read tthis article in Polish: Władza i długowieczność. Demokraci starzeją się szybciej