The Life Extension Foundation (LEF) is a nonprofit organization that sells supplements and vitamins. Its claimed goals are to extend the healthy human lifespan by discovering scientific methods to control aging and eradicate disease. It is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It was founded by Saul Kent and William Faloon in 1980.[1][2]

In 1987, the FDA raided the Life Extension Foundation's warehouse, and charged Kent and Faloon with 27 counts, including that of distributing unapproved drugs, in later dropped charges. In response Kent and Faloon opened the FDA Holocaust Museum, a one-room museum that contains "books and articles about life extension" and comparisons between the FDA and the Nazis.[3]

In May 2013, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the Life Extension Foundations tax-exempt status, retroactive to 2006.[4] Forbes reported that "The IRS problem with the Foundation is [...] an entirely worldly one: it asserts the membership organizations operations seem to be too entwined with the for-profit Life Extension Buyers Club."[5] LEF filed a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment on August 7, 2013, in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the IRS' allegations.[6]The case is pending.[7] Its most recent tax filing at the time stated that it had assets of over $25 million and netted more than $3 million on revenue of more than $18 million that year.[5]

The Foundation claims that its primary purpose is to fund research and disseminate information on life extension, preventive medicine, anti-aging and optimal health as well as sports performance, with a focus on hormonal and nutritional supplementation, deriving much of its income from the sale of vitamins and supplements.[8]

In the late 1990s, it sold "antiaging nostrums like DHEA and melatonin," whose "antiaging benefits" mainstream researchers asserted were "dubious or nonexistent".[1]

More recently, it has been involved in providing $5 million in funding to the Stasis Foundation,[5] an organization which aims to build a "Timeship" which would aid in the "cryopreservation of patients, organs, the DNA of humans and endangered species," but had been threatened with the loss of nonprofit status due to the lack of construction up to the year 2011.[9] In 2016, the Stasis Foundation claimed to have begun work on the Timeship.[10]

The Life Extension Foundation also donated $3.5 million to 21st Century Medicine, a for-profit company that specializes in living systems preservation technology[5] that was founded by Kent.[1]

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Life Extension Foundation - Wikipedia