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Most doctors would also find the practice morally reprehensible, particularly during a chronic shortage of organ donations for the treatment of disease.

But there are new technologies that could one day skirt this problem. The head of Russia’s Kurchatov nuclear research institute and a close Putin ally, Mikhail Kovalchuk, who’s reportedly “crazy about eternal life”, has ordered health officials to investigate 3D bioprinting, according to the London Times.

This technology uses living cells, scaffolding gels and biomolecules instead of ink to “print” functional body tissues and organs. Patients’ own cells could be used to create a replacement kidney or heart, ruling out the need to source donated organs and take immunosuppressant drugs.

The technology is young but developing quickly.

“In terms of making 3D-printed organs from cells of your own body, we can make little replicas or avatars of individual organs, but only in their very embryonic and rudimentary forms,” Currie said. “We can’t make a scaled functional organ in a dish yet.”

Clinical trials are testing 3D-printed pancreatic islets, the clusters of cells that produce insulin, which doctors could one day transplant into patients and eliminate the need for insulin injections.

“So there are burgeoning efforts to do this, but transplants of whole organs is really not on the horizon in any time in the immediate future. Certainly not in the lifetime of these dictators,” Currie said.

Xenotransplantation, however, in which human organs are grown in genetically modified pigs, is closer to clinical reality. In a trial under way in the US, kidneys grown within pigs will be transplanted into 50 people with end-stage renal disease.

Many scientists say pig-derived organs could become available for some patients within five to 10 years.

But even if genetically modified pigs could yield an endless supply of hearts, kidneys, lungs, stomachs and livers for immortality-seeking autocrats, there’s one organ that will continue ageing and can’t be replaced: the brain.

“Interestingly, we can make organoids of neural cells which have brainwave patterns that can approximate that of newborn infants,” Currie said.

“But they in no way represent fully functional brain tissue. That’s in the realms of science fiction. In terms of building an organ, we’re on the first two to three steps of a 150-step ladder.”

Currie has made global breakthroughs in borrowing a molecule from fish that triggers human muscle to regenerate. The finding could one day lead to treatments for sarcopenia, the natural wasting of muscle as we age. “We could probably incrementally increase lifespan in the next decade” with such discoveries, he said.

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But the 150th birthday envisaged by Putin is unlikely to eventuate. Recent research has shown the maximum human lifespan may be 150, but at the current rate of how our lifespans are improving, we won’t get there for centuries.

Scientists have thrown our best lifespan-extending therapies at lab rats and can barely extend their lives by 15 to 20 per cent. There is no proven way humans could get anywhere close to 150, let alone immortality. Even dictators cannot overpower death.

“I always wondered what those people talked about when they met each other, but now I know they talk about their own mortality,” Currie said. “And when you have so much power, what else would you think about?”