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Russian scientists are studying aging in more than 7,000 primates as part of a state-backed effort to find out whether human life can be extended, Mikhail Kovalchuk, the head of the Kurchatov Institute and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, said at the Kurchatov Genomic Forum in Moscow on Tuesday.
The institute’s breeding facilities hold more than 7,000 monkeys of 22 species, and researchers are examining animals aged 18 to over 30, carrying out biochemical, structural, vascular and brain analyses to track what happens to the body as it grows old. Kovalchuk described the group of older monkeys, aged between 20 and 30, as “unique.”
The institute has also built a bank of blood samples from long-lived primates together with the Petrovsky Russian Research Center of Surgery. Konstantin Kotenko, the surgery center’s director, said at the same forum that scientists will use the bank to study the mechanisms of aging, and Kovalchuk said research on monkeys would lay the groundwork for extending healthy human life.
Kovalchuk has headed the Kurchatov Institute, one of Russia’s largest state research centers, since 2005, first as director and later as president. He is a close friend of Putin and his informal adviser on science, including genetics. His brother, the billionaire banker Yuri Kovalchuk, is also a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle.
Putin, who turned 74 last month, has long been interested in the subject. In September 2025, during a visit to Beijing, a hot mic caught him telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that biotechnology could allow human organs to be continually transplanted so that people could live younger and younger and even achieve immortality. Xi replied that it was predicted people could live to 150 by the end of the century.
The Kremlin has put state money behind the effort. Russia’s 2027–2029 budget includes almost 18 billion rubles for longevity research, and the government has set targets of raising life expectancy from 74.2 years to 78 by 2030 and 81 by 2036. The work sits inside two national projects launched in 2025, “New Technologies for Preserving Health” and “Long and Active Life,” which together are planned to receive more than 2 trillion rubles.
Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist, is also deeply involved in the genetics and longevity programs. At a forum at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo last month, she described the attempt to push beyond the natural boundaries of human life as an effort to “cheat God or nature,” while acknowledging that scientific progress on that second stage remained modest.
The research is likely to draw questions over the ethics of experimenting on thousands of primates, even as its supporters point to the prospect of medical breakthroughs and healthier aging.