Live Beyond · Warsaw, November 2026
Three years ago, one clinic. This November, a whole week.
When my son and I set out on our quest in 2023, Poland had one longevity clinic. This November, Warsaw holds two longevity events in one week, one of them in the National Stadium. Here is who is coming, and why it matters.
When my son Alek and I set out in August 2023 to find out how to live longer and better, Poland had one place that called itself a longevity clinic: Joanna Bensz’s Longevity Center in Warsaw. It was just starting. Beyond it, there was almost nothing.
Three years later, doctors across Poland want to be part of the longevity movement. And in the last week of November, Warsaw hosts not one longevity event, but two.
One week, two events
On 24 and 25 November, the Warsaw Longevity Forum meets at the DoubleTree by Hilton. Its program board is chaired by Prof. Marek Postuła, and it brings medicine, economics and technology into one room, under the patronage of the Ministry of Health and two other ministries. Andrea Maier is one of its keynote speakers.
Three days later, on 28 and 29 November, the ELEVATE Health & Longevity Summit fills PGE Narodowy, the National Stadium, as Poland’s largest longevity event. It was founded by Michał Wieczorek. In May he came to Life Summit Berlin to see Olivia Lesslar and me on stage, and invited us both to Warsaw. I will speak at ELEVATE with Olivia and with Raiany Romanni-Klein.
Poland is going global
Joanna has not stayed in Warsaw either. Every year she and the International Institute of Longevity bring longevity clinics and doctors from all over the world together at the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics, held at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. The fourth edition is this October. A Polish initiative now brings the whole field to one table, and that is a great thing to see.
Poland is not alone
What is happening in Warsaw is happening in other places too. Singapore opened a longevity clinic inside a public hospital in 2023, the first of its kind in public healthcare, with Andrea Maier’s research behind it. Abu Dhabi licensed a healthy-longevity medicine center in November 2024. In Saudi Arabia, the Hevolution Foundation has granted over $400 million to research on ageing and brought 3,000 people to Riyadh for its summit.
Longevity is no longer a Silicon Valley story. It is becoming part of how countries look after their people. I hope Poland’s health system starts moving the same way, toward longevity medicine, and that it reaches everyone, not only the wealthy and those who already take care of their health. Andrea said it better than I can, when we first met her in Dublin:
— Andrea Maier, Dublin, August 2023“I am really advocating, not fighting, but advocating for a framework that it can be implemented in the end into normal hospital systems or into the healthcare systems, because I think that’s what we need to democratize health in the end.”
The people coming to Warsaw
Dr Olivia Lesslar is what I call a mind, heart and body doctor. Her field is psychoneuroimmunology, how the mind, the nervous system and the immune system talk to each other, and she works with Hollywood names such as Chris Hemsworth. We met on the first day of a conference in Singapore in February 2024 and ended up talking for hours by the hotel pool. Now she is becoming the medical director of Live Beyond, and we are very proud of that. We were on stage together at Life Summit Berlin, and in November we will be together again at ELEVATE, to share the science, the breakthroughs and the most important answers with Poland and the world. In Singapore she told us about the work that fascinates her:
“The fact that we can modulate, manipulate our physiology with how we think, who we surround ourselves with, how we feel, that is fascinating work, work that can make a difference to patients today, right now.”
Raiany Romanni-Klein works on the ethics and economics of human longevity. She leads the Florens Institute and helped design the Healthspan XPRIZE. We met her in Boston, at the Biomarkers of Aging conference in November 2024. She answers the questions people new to longevity ask most, above all how it will change the world, and Alek came with questions of his own. In May she joined us on stage at Life Summit Berlin, live from Boston on the big screen. This is the line of hers I use in my talks:
“If I had a magic wand and if I could delete one bias from human civilization, it would be this idea that what is natural is morally superior to what is unnatural.”
Prof. Andrea Maier is one of the leading professors bringing science and the clinic together, at the National University of Singapore and at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a speaker at the field’s top conferences all over the world. We first met her at the Longevity Summit in Dublin in 2023, then in Singapore, where she invited us to speak. In Warsaw she opens the Forum as a keynote speaker.
What I will talk about
My talk at ELEVATE grows out of the one in Berlin: the Longevity Map and our quest, how longevity is growing, and how it can grow faster if we all support it. What you can already do today, and what is coming. And why longevity always has to be tied to joy: not only lifespan and healthspan, but joyspan.
Come and meet us
ELEVATE Health & Longevity Summit · 28–29 November 2026 · PGE Narodowy, Warsaw · elevatesummit.pl
If you are in Warsaw on 28 or 29 November, come and say hello. If you can’t come, the Longevity Map is free.
Where each quotation comes from. Olivia Lesslar, Singapore, February 2024. Raiany Romanni-Klein, Boston, November 2024. Andrea Maier, Dublin, August 2023.