Modern Methuselahs
If we’re not prepared for death then we better look for alternatives — whether they come from the genes of a nematode worm or by merging with nanotechnology permanently.
Words James Cartwright
Illustration Caio Orio
As a layperson approaching the subject of prolonged life and potential immortality, the waters are very murky. With a little research the two names most commonly encountered are Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil. The former has variously been referred to as “foolish,” “naive” and a peddler of “dangerous snake oil”, the latter coined the term ‘transhumanism’ and believes in a time when humans will merge seamlessly with technology, bringing about an era of digital immortality.
Kurzweil advocates the future existence of nanobots; blood cell-sized mechanical structures that will repair us at a molecular level, protecting us physically but also enhancing us mentally by expanding cognitive function. By 2045, he suggests, technological advancement will snowball, meaning technological symbiosis — our biological fusion with robotics — will fast become reality.
Oddly Kurzweil’s reception has been much more favourable than de Grey’s; Forbes and The Wall Street Journal dubbing him a “restless genius” and “the ultimate thinking machine.” He’s since been employed by Google. Both have received ample airtime and column inches for their theories, because both seem to be offering humanity the chance to live forever.
“Ageing,” says de Grey, “is not a mystery. People think it’s something that’s profoundly misunderstood, but that’s nonsense! It is just the accumulation of damage. It’s a fact of physics, not just biology, that any machine with moving parts is going to do itself damage as a side-effect of its normal operation, and any machine is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage before it starts showing signs of impaired performance. Eventually that impairment does start to emerge, and that’s what we see in old age.”
So how do we counter it? De Grey proposes attacking what he identifies as the seven signs of ageing; chromosome mutation, mitochondrial mutation, intracellular aggregates (waste inside cells), extracellular aggregates (waste outside cells), cellular loss, cell senescence (when cells no longer divide) and extracellular protein crosslinks. “All of these things have been major topics of gerontological research and discussion since the early 1980s, and 30 years is an awful long time not to discover something new. It gives reason for quite strong confidence that this is an exhaustive list and that we don’t have to worry about category number eight having been overlooked.
“The most practical way to prevent the natural wear and tear of the body to a point that causes disease and disability is by repairing that damage periodically — you might think of it as preventative maintenance. The simple approaches that people have explored in the past don’t work so well on long-lived species as they do on the kind of short-lived species that have historically been studied in the laboratory.” Most established scientists disagree.
As de Grey’s star has risen and his notoriety increased, he has attracted vociferous criticism from the gerontological community. In 2005 the MIT Technology Review published an open letter from University of Michigan Professor Richard Miller, that savaged de Grey’s theories and invited him to take up a more fruitful area of study: flying pigs. Though entertaining and impassioned, what Miller failed to achieve in his riposte was a scientific critique of de Grey’s supposedly unscientific research, and concrete reasons for laypeople to question his legitimacy — Miller’s main issue seemed to be that de Grey had never set foot in a research lab. As a result de Grey’s popularity rocketed.
A decade later de Grey has his own lab — funded with inherited wealth and the sponsorship of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel — and thinks he’s seeing results. “There’s a great deal of excitement right now about the removal of toxic cells — cells that have, for various reasons, gotten into a state where they are secreting nasty stuff and are generally damaging their environment. The body tries to get rid of these cells but sometimes it doesn’t succeed in doing so. There has been great progress in showing that one can get rid of those cells in other ways, and that the body benefits as a result.
“We’re also interested in getting rid of molecular waste products by introducing new genes into the body that will incur enzymes to break them down. Again we’re making good progress there. We’ve shown very convincing proof of concept that we can eliminate the major toxic molecule that drives the progression of atherosclerosis — that’s going incredibly well and is something we think we can cure.”
“Ageing is not a mystery. People think it’s something that’s profoundly misunderstood, but that’s nonsense!”
None of de Grey’s research is ready for clinical trial, meaning debates about his theories are still a case of public slanging matches, though many of his critics no longer do him the service of engaging in debate at all. His work causes particular offence among biologists and gerontologists, whose firm policy is not to debate with him in real life, online or in print. He is, they say, an immortalist — an entirely different profession altogether.
Frustrating though this silence may be, it points to a struggle that all age-related research is facing; funding. De Grey and his acolytes represent a potential threat to what meagre finances exists, simply by virtue of his media savvy and mastery of spin. “As for any public health pandemic that will hit future generations much worse than our own, funding inertia is high,” says Assistant Professor of Genetics and Complex Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health, William Mair. “Progress towards a re-thinking of our biomedical strategies for ageing is frustratingly slow. Given how fast our demographics are changing, a reprioritising of funding for ageing research seems essential.
“I think people are fooling themselves when they say they have accepted death.”
“In the 1980’s the US commissioned the design of new F22 fighter jets, ordering 187 to come into service in 2005. The cost was an estimated $412 million each. By comparison, the 2015 annual budget of the National Institute of Ageing cost less than three F22s. That’s all the US Government research funding for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, social and behavioural research on elderly care, geriatrics and the basic science of ageing.”
Of course Mair isn’t proposing further funding for de Grey’s work, but for the many respected, peer-reviewed gerontologists worldwide who are making strides in ageing research. Mair’s particular field of research hinges on “the study of molecular and cellular mechanisms by which animals modulate the rate at which they age in response to changes in nutrition and the environment,” exploring age as a single, treatable condition.
“Although ageing has long been appreciated as a risk factor for disease, modern medicine has largely ignored it as a therapeutic target,” says Mair. “Ageing seemed simply too complex a phenotype to study, the result of multiple genetic and environmental factors too intricate to untangle.This paradigm was irreversibly shifted in the late 20th century by elegant experiments at the University of Colorado, which identified single gene mutations that could dramatically prolong lifespan of nematode worms by 100%. Critically these mutations were not the genetic equivalent of public health, adding 30 days of decrepit suffering. Instead, 30 day old long-lived mutants looked like three day old normal animals; the mutation slowed their intrinsic ageing rate.
“Striking as this result was, it doesn’t end there. Nobody’s goal is to make worms live longer and healthier lives. But in the last 15 years we have seen the same mutation that slows ageing in worms do the same for fruit flies and mice, and show up in the genomes of human centenarians, giving birth to a new eld; the genetics of ageing. Its premise is that, unlike chronological age which is immutable, physiological age is malleable, and mechanisms that modulate it can be exploited to reduce overall disease risk.”
The genetics of ageing may be the best shot we have at living longer, healthier lives, but it remains in competition with a substantial number of counterproductive voices — like our “restless genius” Kurzweil, the science behind whose prognosis is even more far-fetched than de Grey’s. What is clear from the numerous contradictory voices all clamouring for attention is that longevity is a subject uniquely captivating to mankind. It is Kurzweil who summarises this phenomenon best: “I think people are fooling themselves when they say they have accepted death.”
To explore the subject of ageing we teamed up with The Powerful Now, an IDEO + SYPartners initiative poised to creatively redefine ageing as a path of continual growth instead of decline. Together we wanted to explore the ways in which health, money, work and communities will exist in our future, and initiate discussions to find radical new solutions.
This article is taken from Weapons of Reason’s third issue: The New Old. Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
