In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered the keynote address at a posh conference titled Modern Medical Technologies: Tomorrow's Challenges Ahead Of Time.
"We have created this forum for the discussion of promising solutions that are only now appearing and being tested, but that will very soon fundamentally change…people's lives," the 71-year-old Putin said, pausing several times to clear his throat.
The centerpiece of Putin's speech was the announcement of Russia's 14th "national project," an undertaking called New Health-Saving Technologies. The national projects are multilateral government-led initiatives aimed at improving key areas such as demography, education, agriculture, and health care that were introduced by Putin in 2005 and regularly feature in his campaigns for noncompetitive elections.
On May 16, little more than a week after Putin's fifth presidential inauguration, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova officially presented the new project and announced it would begin in 2025. Golikova stressed that Russia's "demographic trends" have created new "challenges for health care" that, in turn, can help develop "advanced avenues of medical technology."
She specifically mentioned technologies aimed at slowing the aging of cells, neurotechnologies, and "other avenues for increasing lifespans." A key aspect of the new initiative will be working on "biomedical technologies of the future for active and healthy aging," the state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
The focus on slowing aging and increasing longevity attracted the attention of many in medical circles.
The new national project reflects "the whims of an aging Politburo," a specialist at one Moscow hospital said.*
"Everyone ages, including politicians," he said. "Anti-aging therapies are very popular, and the conditions for introducing new technologies are favorable."
A new investigation by Systema, RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit, and the exiled Russian-language media outlet Meduza examines Putin's new national priority project and takes a look at some of the ideas and key players.
'They Wanted The Answers Yesterday'
The budget for the new national project has not been announced. According to the RIA Novosti summary, the project aims to "save 175,000 lives" by 2030. Another target established for the project is that "the share of cases of medical treatment using new medical technologies and innovative medical products" should reach 10 percent within five years.
In early June, the Health Ministry's Department of Science and Health-Care Innovation sent a letter to leading Russian research institutes asking for quick grant proposals in the following areas: developing medical products aimed at reducing the burden of cellular aging, developing new neurotechnologies and related medical products aimed at detecting and treating cognitive and sensory impairments, developing methods of directing the immune system based on its role in the aging process, and developing new medical technologies based on bioprinting.
Bioprinting uses living cells, proteins, and other raw materials to produce human tissues to treat injuries and disease.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Systema and Meduza, was confirmed by two doctors working at medical research centers and an employee of an academic institute. They expressed surprise at the urgency of the request.
"We were asked to immediately send all our ideas," one of the doctors said. "The letter arrived today, say, and they wanted the answers yesterday."
"To be honest, it is the first time in my life that I've seen something like this," he continued. "Usually for a national project or any federal program there are a series of meetings with various specialists, and everything is discussed publicly."
The other doctor said he was "blown away" by the letter.
"Looks like no we have no one to treat but our 'old stumps,'" he said, referring to the aging leadership circle who have ruled during Putin's 25 years as president or prime minister. "Right now [with the war in Ukraine going on], we are supposed to stop everything else. The cynicism is incomprehensible."
The sources Systema and Meduza spoke with said they had not yet responded to the Health Ministry's call for proposals.
"Modern research like what they mention in this national project is pretty expensive," a source connected to the Kremlin said. "They demand a lot of money and resources. Developing new therapies costs billions, which no national project can afford these days."
"I don't think they are going to get anything well considered so quickly," a source in the pharmaceuticals industry said.
'A Servant Person'
One Kremlin-connected source told Systema and Meduza that the genesis of the new national project was "an obsession magnified by lobbying."
"This is Mikhail Kovalchuk, who raves about eternal life and the 'Russian genome,'" the source said. "He ran to the president."
Kovalchuk, 77, is a physicist and the older brother of billionaire businessman Yury Kovalchuk, who has been described as "Putin's personal banker" and who has been closely tied to Putin since the latter was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Mikhail Kovalchuk is the president of the Kurchatov Institute, a nuclear research facility in Moscow, and has been a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2000. Last year he was named president of Moscow's Polytechnical Museum.
Three sources familiar with the evolution of the new national project also named Kovalchuk as the possible initiator of the idea. Kovalchuk is already in charge of the federal genetics program, in which Putin's unacknowledged elder daughter, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova, plays a prominent role.
In an outlandish speech in 2015, Kovalchuk accused "foreign elites" of attempting to hijack "the evolutionary process" to create "a servant person."
Those people, he said, would have "limited consciousness," their reproduction would be "managed," and they would be fed on "cheap feed…from genetically modified organisms." He provided no evidence to support the bizarre claims.
Russian media have reported often that Putin believes such ideas. "You can already imagine, and not just theoretically, that man can create people with a given set of characteristics," Putin said in 2017. "It could be a mathematical genius or a brilliant musician. Or it could be a soldier, a person who can fight without fear or a sense of compassion, regret, or pain."
'By Any And All Means'
In October of the same year, Putin claimed that foreigners were "systematically and professionally" gathering Russian citizens' "biomaterial."
"Why are they doing this?" he asked.
In 2009, Kovalchuk's institute carried out a project to "decipher the Russian genome."
He has repeatedly spoken out about the desirability of living a long and productive life. His thinking on the topic has been influenced by Konstantin Skryabin, who worked under Kovalchuk at the Kurchatov Institute on the Russian genome project.
"We [scientists] love to discuss the problem of human immortality," Skryabin told RFE/RL's Russian Service in 2019.
Putin's latest national project on New Health-Saving Technologies would appear to be a result of such discussions, several experts questioned by Systema and Meduza agreed after reading the Health Ministry's letter.
"The big boss has set the task," a researcher at a Moscow research center said. "And the bureaucrats have undertaken to achieve it by any and all means."
