One Man’s Longevity Obsession Now Includes Fountain-of-Youth Injections

The therapy hasn’t been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, which is in some ways the point here. Minicircle—backed by the venture capital billionaire Peter Thiel, OpenAI Inc. co-founder Sam Altman and other technologists—is an experiment on an experiment. The company is based in Austin but works out of Roatán because Honduras granted the island considerable regulatory freedom when it comes to technological and scientific ventures. Minicircle more or less just needed to buy some insurance and get the patients’ acknowledgment that they knew they were heading into the great unknown. “It’s really about expediency,” says co-founder Walter Patterson, who’s also the chief scientific officer. “We are gearing up for a trial in the United States, and we are going through the FDA. But, keep in mind, it’s prohibitively expensive in terms of both time and money. We’re here in Honduras because we can essentially do things quicker.”