The Race to Live Forever
To look at Aubrey de Grey is like looking at Father Time himself. Both have long beards and tall, wiry frames. They share slim and pronounced facial features, and each appears to preside over the passing of time.
The difference is de Grey isn’t the personification of time itself, despite the physical similarities. However, he is attempting to slow it down with respect to the aging process. In fact, the biomedical gerontologist wants to eliminate the link between age and death entirely.
Age As an Illness
Much like malaria, an illness that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, aging is a treatable medical problem, says de Grey. But the latter kills many more people, about 100,000 a day worldwide, and there is no cure — at least not yet.
Since 2000, de Grey’s been working on an approach called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, often shortened to SENS. Applying the principles of regenerative medicine, it aims to repair damage as it occurs to reverse age-related decline.
In numerous lives talks, interviews, and reports, de Grey describes aging as an accumulation of damage in the body caused by metabolism, the very process that keeps living organisms alive. This damage eventually leads to pathology or functional decline.
However, the two mainstream approaches to combating the process fall short. The geriatrician will step in once pathology in a person becomes apparent. The gerontologist, on the other hand, intervenes earlier by trying to slow down the rate of damage before it manifests in disease.
Unfortunately, by the time they both begin it’s already too late, say de Grey. The damage that’s occurred before treatment can’t be reversed with the first method. Metabolism is also so poorly understood that attempting to alter the system will likely have no effect or create more harm than good.
Finding the Fountain of Youth
To push the needed SENS advances in fields like stem cell research and tissue engineering, de Grey and Dave Gobel began the Methuselah Foundation in 2003, naming it after an archetype of longevity — a man from the Jewish Bible who lived to 969 years old.
To date, it’s donated more then $4 million in funding and launched several competitions. One of its most popular competitions is the 2003 Methuselah Mouse Prize (MPrize), which consists of two awards. The first for the research team that broke the record for the longest-living mouse and the second for the team that created the most successful rejuvenation strategy for aged mice. Mice were chosen because of their genetic similarity to humans and their short life spans make it easier to monitor results.
In 2013, the foundation created its second prize series called New Organ. In the face of a global organ shortage, it aims to accelerate the development of bioengineered body parts starting with the liver. It will award $1 million to the first team that produces a replacement liver in a large animal that lives for 90 days after transplant.
Longevity Escape Velocity
Yet the medical community must move past animal testing and on to humans to extend our lives. It’s a race against the clock for the right therapies to be developed so they can be given to people young and healthy enough to benefit from them, says de Grey.
While the self-proclaimed crusader against aging predicts people alive today can live to 1,000, the solutions won’t come in the form of one incredible cure. But therapies will continually evolve, allowing scientists to determine and fix what 200-year-olds would die off before people reach that age.
He sums it up with the theory of longevity escape velocity, a point where humans can remain in a youthful state of health indefinitely. If adequate life extension therapies arrive when you are 50, it’s possible you can make it into the quadruple digits as you may stay alive long enough for advances to build and build on themselves. For octogenarians, it may be too late as their bodies may have already passed the point of no return.
These breakthroughs are likely decades away, says de Grey, which could make it possible for humans to live, literally, forever.
Image sources: SHARE Conference, Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published as part of the “Health Technology and the Future” series on Beacon Reader.
Originally published at TechAble World.
