Note from the Editor: At 124 years old, Phil Van Treuren became the oldest person to climb Mount Everest when he reached the peak alone on June 30th, 2023. We’ve re-published his famous Twitter post from base camp (with permission) as part of our “Stoic Achievements” series.
Reaching base camp today means I’m close to accomplishing a goal I’ve had for many decades.
I realize that much of my success in life has had to do with luck: the first [black and white] pic is me in 1917, right after I was accepted at Cornell for biochemistry. That bit of good fortune got me a deferment from fighting in a war that many of my friends didn’t survive.
Luck visited again a decade later, when a soil sample I collected in Tristan da Cunha allowed my team to synthesize a long-chain molecule that showed great potential for anti-aging applications. (Ironically, I nearly died of malaria on that very trip.)
Because of that discovery — and several more — the stock market crash wasn’t nearly as hard on me as it was on most of the country. (The second [black and white] photo was taken in 1935, when I became president of Nova Pharmaceuticals.)
When the U.S. entered World War II, I was too old to be drafted into service (lucky again!). After selling my shares in Nova, I joined Stanford as a professor of chemistry and microbiology (third [black and white] pic).
By that time, I had already been self-administering the drug we synthesized at Nova for more than a decade. Although it seemed to keep me healthy, I had no idea that the molecule had started to slow my body’s biological aging process to a crawl.
If you told me as a Cornell student that I’d be climbing Mount Everest at 124 years of age, I would have thought you were crazy!
I’m so very grateful for the many opportunities I’ve had in my life. I don’t know if the time I have left will be measured in months, decades or centuries . . . but I plan to keep living each day as though it’s my last.
(Oh, by the way: my next goal is to walk on the moon, and I’m not in any hurry to get there.)