how we’ll live for a thousand years. maybe.
Earlier this week, The Times published a rather bizarre article about research designed to stop and reverse aging through advanced biotech research. It’s not that the article made any really outlandish claims itself but that it jumped around between optimistic promises for future life extension tools and bold predictions, and a very pragmatic set of reality checks which take into consideration the immense complexity of the technologies involved. Reading it was somewhat like watching the writer play a tennis match against herself, not quite sure which way she should go and what angle to take on the story. Should she be a curious skeptic or cheer these ideas and promise that one day we’ll really have an honest to goodness fountain of youth at our disposal?
It’s true that there are a lot of people working on keeping us feeling younger and more able while granting us longer lives. And it’s also true that they have billions of dollars in research grants to study virtually everything that can be used to repair our bodies as they age and break down. At the same time, the claim that we’re on the verge of thousand year lifespans made by Aubrey de Grey seems a bit too optimistic to be true because it would require a major reengineering of how our bodies work. The maximum theoretical human lifespan is an all too short 125 years and we can expect the last 50 to 60 of those to give us limited mobility and a barrage of health problems caused by the deterioration of our organs and tissues. To make it worth our while to live for a millennium, our bodies would need to constantly regenerate themselves, something for which they just didn’t evolve and requiring dramatic feats of genetic engineering to pull off.
Needless to say, articles like this are much better than The Daily Galaxy’s pervasive bits on transhumanism which not only get the science wrong but sometimes don’t even pay attention to what the research they cite is actually investigating. However, when it comes to life extension techniques, we’re still waiting for a treatment shown to truly increase lifespans. In that regard, pieces about our impending immortality or ability to live for at least a few hundred extra years seem like obligatory attempts at crowd pleasing. If I were the editor, I’d wait for at least one product in Stage III clinical trials before trying to trumpet the Fountain of Youth horn again…
Actually, the point of de Grey’s proposals is that they don’t require a major reworking of the body’s mechanisms. Instead the intention is repair and restoration – but don’t change the way things work. This is, however, a minority view in biogerontology. The mainstream is very much on the boat of changing the workings of metabolism with the goal of slowing down the accumulation of damage, but there’s no real reason to believe that this will be any faster or produce better results than de Grey’s proposals.
You can find a more in-depth look at these two opposing strategies for dealing with age-related degeneration – and the consequences of following one path over the other – here:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-debate-that-will-determine-how-long-we-all-live.php
Reason above makes good points.
If you are interested in this, I suggest you watch De Grey’s talk at TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html
and read his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066
There is also more to be found at the SENS.org foundation.
Michael and Reason,
It’s not that I think that De Grey is necessarily wrong, it’s just that he’s vague on details and his focus on the kind of damage accumulated in our bodies over the year does imply that we would need to rework how our basic mechanisms function. If damage is a by-process of metabolism, we’ll need to either alter our metabolism or become dependent on a very strict regimen of future anti-aging treatments.
Obviously the second way would be more preferable to pharma companies because if you want to live a long life, you’ll have to buy their products. But naturally altering how we age would be a more permanent and efficient solution, something we could maybe even pass on and enter into the gene pool for our offspring.
The time line itself bothers me a little too. de Gray doesn’t know when we’ll actually be working away at these treatments so he’s not sure when he can start the trials. It may take a century just to get the operation on track because to see if the damage remains consistent and consistently controllable rather than increase exponentially when the test subjects begin living abnormally long lives, requires time. So while we may one day have a 1,000 year old human, saying that we’re very close to it seems a little too soon and too hopeful when we don’t have a life extension treatment in human trials yet.
note: The direct link to the TED speech doesn’t work for some reason. Here’s a link to his talk in 2007 on YouTube.