The TOA Guide To Slowing Down Ageing
Forget face yoga. Dump that expensive wrinkle cream down the sink (at least according to the dermatologists interviewed here, it probably doesn’t do much anyway). The march of time is a bitch and no matter whatever anti-ageing method is currently being hawked to you, chances are, it won’t do a damn thing. We’re all headed to the same destination: becoming really cute corpses.
Or are we? Silicon Valley, a place that brought you $1000 laptops with keyboards which allegedly self-destruct due to “a piece of dust”, may now have solved the problem of ageing. Makes sense! We spoke to SENS Research Foundation’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer Aubrey de Grey, Ambrosia’s Jesse Karmazin and The Death of Death co-author José Luis Cordeiro for their theories on how to slow down the ageing process.
Aubrey de Grey
De Grey is uniquely qualified to address the subject of ageing as the Chief Science Officer and co-founder of SENS Research Foundation, a non-profit organization whose focus is on developing rejuvenation biotech. The TOA 2017 speaker believes that “Ageing is simply the accumulation of self inflicted damage.” And no, “self-inflicted damage” doesn’t refer to, like, eating your third tub of Ben n’ Jerrys of the day (understandable, summer is a lot), but unavoidable processes that keep you alive. For example, breathing which de Grey cites as an example of creating damage, since “this chemical process evolved 2 billion years ago and it makes free radicals, at a low level, but it happens and it’s always going to happen that way. Free radicals are dangerous toxic molecules that damage DNA, so breathing is bad for you.”
Since holding your breath feels like it might actually speed up your demise, what’s an age-conscious person to do? Stay hopeful, for a start. The SENS foundation’s Chief Science Officer argues that maintaining a person’s body is effectively like maintaining a car. If ageing is just about damage, “What we can do instead is counteract ageing by reversing the accumulation of damage by repairing the damage. We can keep the level of damage below the point that is bad for us, the body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of damage without any significant impact, that’s why ageing doesn’t have any physiological consequences until middle age or later. So all we need to do is keep the overall level of damage we’re carrying around below that threshold level.”
The prognosis looks pretty sunny for when we can expect this: de Grey believes there’s a 50 percent chance that we’ll have access to this within the next 20 years. And eye-roll not, this will probably not be a treatment that only millionaires can afford. The biological gerontologist argues that “these treatments will be made available to everybody who’s old enough to need them irrespective of their ability to pay.” Yes, even in cutthroat hyper-capitalist countries like (bleep). “The reason for this is that therapies like this will pay for themselves economically, even ignoring the humanitarian imperative. If you can keep your chronologically elderly workforce biologically young, you’re going to be a far more prosperous society. Any country which did not make these advances available universally would be bankrupt very soon.”
Phew. Never dying: one less thing to worry about!
Jesse Karmazin
Karmazin is the founder of Ambrosia, a company which claims to slow down the ageing process via plasma transfusions from young people. You read that right: the treatment is inspired by parabiosis (which according to Nature, is a “surgical technique that unites the vasculature of two living animals”) and involves injecting an older person with blood plasma from blood bank donors aged between 16–25. And if you’re prone to ageing-related anxiety, relax, you don’t even need to be particularly old to get the treatment: the company has had patients as young as 31.
Some media outlets have made fun of this vampiric anti-ageing treatment, which makes sense — after all, this was already a Silicon Valley plotline (see above). But Karmazin alludes to the studies from Stanford, Stanford again, Berkley, USSF and Cornell conducted on mice that suggest that parabiosis or parabiosis-inspired treatments could fight ageing and age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s, heart disease and diabetes. These studies led him to found his company: “It just sort of occurred to me that a blood transfusion might be able to do the same thing in humans”.
He claims that “People feel great right away, as soon as the first treatment, they notice significant improvements,” which is good news considering that every treatment costs $8,000. He argues “It really reverses ageing. So people look younger, they might have more hair, their skin looks younger, their hearts are pumping better, the memory is improved, they have more energy, they’re sleeping better.”
Of course, it’s worth stating that Ambrosia has critics. Stanford neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray conducted a 2014 study on injecting plasma into old mice which seemed to improve their learning abilities. Despite this, he still told the definitively-titled Science back in 2016 that “there’s “no clinical evidence” to support Ambrosia’s claims. And the company’s lack of a placebo treatment in the initial trials also attracted criticism that as such, “the insights it can publish will be limited”. This didn’t seem to bother Karmazin, who argues that given “ that we used bloodwork before and after the treatment, people can’t wish their bloodwork to improve, so we feel our results are solid.”
So if you’ve got a spare $8,000 lying around, why not give it a try?
José Luis Cordeiro
Cordeiro is one of the organisers of RAAD (Revolution Against Ageing And Death) and the co-author of La Muerte De La Muerte (“the death of death”). Perhaps less auspiciously, he’s also a Teaching Fellow at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, an institution Bloomberg reported was descending into chaos back in February. And yes, much as the bulk of his career implies, he’s also a death atheist who tells TOA that he doesn’t plan on dying. “In fact, I plan on being younger than today, because I believe we’ll develop the technology for rejuvenation.”
He argues that we can already see immortality in nature — he cites the example of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who passed away due to cancer in 1951. A doctor took a piece of her tumor and her cells never died. Smithsonian Mag describes this as “the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture.” Cordeiro also lists the example of stem cells, which are “biologically immortal.” As such, he argues it’s not a question of if we develop technology to become immortal but when and states he believes in “the disruption of medicine and biology through technology.” The Venuzuelan argues he’s not alone in this, signalling to the many tech companies (“Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and IBM”) who “are all going into medicine” as proof that this development is inevitable. He predicts that we will have developed the technology not just to slow down, but to reverse ageing by 2045. He also believes that by 2029 we’ll have reached “ longevity escape velocity” which singularityhub.com defines as “the point at which, for every year that you’re alive, science is able to extend your life for more than a year.”
But what technology will slow down the march of time? Perhaps it’s worth looking to BioViva CEO Liz Parrish, the American woman Cordeiro connected with the right people in Columbia to start “two treatments which are illegal in Europe and America because there are so many regulations there.” Parrish has undergone telomerase gene therapy and used a myostatin inhibitor and according to Cordeiro, her bloodwork shows that “her blood cells have been rejuvenated by five years.”
This sounds great — until you read around the subject and find The Guardian lists a whole bunch of scientists who are deeply sceptical of the treatment. So does he use similar anti-ageing treatments himself? Cordeiro hedges the question. “These are still very experimental rejuvenation treatments that are illegal in most countries. I do expect to be alive in the next 20–30 years to rejuvenate myself but in the meantime we have to use the things that are legal, public, available.” That’ll be a no, then. Still, he does suggest that up until that point, we’d be best off following the guidelines institution Forever Healthy lists in their Personal Longevity Strategy, which after a quick peruse, look like a very detailed way of giving common sense advice: build muscle, avoid processed food and soft drinks, get enough sleep and maintain a positive attitude…
Much of what’s listed here may sound a bit nuts. This said, Cordeiro makes an excellent point. Silicon Valley probably isn’t pouring money into anti-ageing technology just because they’re really philanthropic individuals, but because they expect a return on investment. Ultimately, the most convincing argument we have that we’re close to a breakthrough in slowing down ageing is the sheer number of tech giants trying to dominate the field.
But until we reach that point? Unless you’ve got a sufficiently epic amount of money to either purchase the blood plasma treatment or invest in de Grey’s SENS foundation it sounds like you’ll be restricted to all the usual advice. Exercise, eat better, think positive…and repeat. Oh, and cross your fingers that you make it until 2029.
Written by Sophie Atkinson/image by Rosalba Porpora
This month’s theme is SPEED. We can’t stop thinking about autonomous vehicles, how we’ll navigate the cities of tomorrow and how drones will change the delivery process forever.
