Tag: Immortality

NYT Interview with Michael Rose

The New York Times’ Claudia Dreifus recently interviewed longevity researcher Michael Rose. In the 1970s Rose managed to extend the average lifespan of fruit flies by forcing them to breed at relatively old ages, thereby providing a selection event for longer life (since only older fruit flies would be able to reproduce in this experiment).

In response to a question from Dreifus, Rose explains why longevity research should embrace an evolutionary biology perspective,

Because the common assumption is that young bodies work and then they fall apart during aging. Young bodies only work because natural selection makes them healthy enough to survive and breed.

As adults get older, natural selection stops caring about them, so we lose its benefits and our health. If you don’t understand this, aging research is an unending riddle that goes around in circles.

The problem, of course, is that fruit flies live very short lives, and extending lifespan this way with other animals is not quite so easy (Rose notes that the increasing age at which women give birth in the West could eventually have the same effect, but that it would take centuries to see any significant effect).

Because of his evolutionary perspective on longevity, it was not surprising to read that Rose believes there is no high end limit on how far human longevity can be extended, but I was surprised to see that Rose expects significant life extension technologies in a relatively short time period,

There’s not going to be one magic bullet where you take one pill or manipulate one gene and get to live to 500. But you could take a first step, and then another so that in 50 years’ time, people take 50 or 60 pills and they live to be 200.

Leaving aside F.D.A. approval, it looks like we are about 5 to 10 years away from therapies that would add years to our present life span. For now, pharmaceuticals will be the primary anti-aging therapy.

After another 10 years or so, the implantation of cultured tissues will become common — especially skin and connective tissues. Reconstructive surgery is certain to become more effective than it is today.

Eventually, we will be able to culture replacement organs from our own cells and repair damage using nanotech machines. All of this will increase life span.

I’d also like the “play cornerback like Deion Sanders” nanomachines, but that’s just me.

Source:

Live Longer With Evolution? Evidence May Lie in Fruit Flies. Claudia Dreifus, New York times, December 6, 2005.

Anonymous Donor Gives $1 Million to Methuselah Mouse Prize

Earlier this month, an anonymous donor gave the Methuselah Mouse Prize a cool $1 million, bringing the total payout for the Methuselah Mouse Prize to more than $3 million.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize is modeled on the X Prize, which set a $10 million prize for the first private craft to make it into space. That prize was famously won by SpaceShipOne.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize is targeted at life extension technologies. There are two ongoing challenges. The first is for extending the life span of the Mus musculus species of mouse, and pays out on a sliding scale based on how many days the mouse in question lives beyond the current record life span.

The second challenge is for peer-reviewed research that extends the life of any species of mice through late onset intervention. According to the Methuselah Mouse Prize web site, “The intervention must have commenced at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the control group.”

Source:

That’s a One with Six Zeros After It. Press Release, The Methuselah Mouse Prize, November 3, 2005.

SpaceShipOne: Soaring Toward Tomorrow . Space.Com, June 30, 2005.

1,000 Years Is Not Enough (But It Is A Start)

The BBC has a speculative article by Cambridge geneticist Dr. Aubrey de Grey claiming that human life spans can be extended to 1,000 years. According to Dr. Grey,

Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today.

I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.

. . .

So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage.

I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.

De Grey is the chairman and CEO of The Methuselah Foundation which seeks to implement his SENS approach in mice first and offers the Methuselah Prize(s) — an X Prize-style reward for researchers involved in aging research in mice.

It offers the Longevity Prize, for researchers who produce mice that live longer (the prize is based on how much longer the new mice live compared to the old record), and the Rejuvenation Prize for successful reversal of the effects of aging in mice who have passed their mean life expectancy.

In other words, forget building a better mousetrap and focus on building a better mouse.

Of course even 1,000 years is not nearly enough, but it would be a nice start.

Source:

‘We will be able to live to 1,000’. The BBC, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, December 3, 2004.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

I’ve been meaning to post a link to Ronald Bailey’s excellent survey of life extension technologies and controversies, Forever Young for several months now. Okay, there — I finally did it.

Bailey does a nice job of covering the long-running battle between longevity optimists and pessimists, including the $500 million bet between demographer Jay Olshansky and biologist Steven Austad. The two set up a trust fund with $150 that has to pay the loser or his heirs $500 million in 2150 depending on whether or not there is anyone alive then who is at least 150 years old — Olshansky is betting against the possibility.

But as Bailey points out, demographers have a long history of making inaccurate predictions about future longevity. He cites, for example, demographer Louis Dublin’s 1928 prediction that average life expectancy in the United States would never rise above 64.75 years. Today, of course, average life expectancy exceeds that figure by almost 12 years.

The longest living person whose age can be verified, of course, was Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122. So assuming that’s the upper bound for life expectancy without any upcoming radical life extension therapies, Austad looks like he’s got a pretty good chance of winning his bet.

Bailey also surveys the current status of life extension research from the results of calorie restriction to vitamin supplements, hormone replacement therapy, and the possibility of nanomedical technique to repair damage to our bodies and thereby extend our lives.

And Bailey also does his usual nice job of skewering the critics who think that an average human life span of 150 years would be a bad thing. Leon Kass, who unfortunately is one of the folks the Bush administration keeps calling on for bioethical advice, believes that people who lived very long life spans or were even effectively immortal barring accidents, murder, etc. would no longer be truly human (and unlike the Extropians, he considers that a very bad thing).

I, of course, agree completely Bailey who ends his long article by writing,

“A dramatic increase in lifespan is inevitable,” Aubrey de Grey said in the British Sunday Times two years ago. “We understand aging at the molecular level sufficiently to not just imagine interventions to retard aging, but enough that we can describe them. It’s an engineering project now, not a scientific one. We just don’t know how long it will take.”

To which I say: Hurry up! The 22nd century looks too interesting to miss.

Source:

Forever Young. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 2002.

Could Stem Cell Transplants Extend Human Life?

Researchers at the University of Kentucky report an intriguing finding in mice that one day might offer a way to extend human life spans.

The researchers examined bone marrow stem cells from several different strains of genetically modified mice. The researchers bred the mice, examining which mice had bone marrow stem cells that were the best at resisting cell damage. In this way they were able to identify that part of the mouse genome responsible for the strongest stem cells.

That turned out to be a specific gene on a chromose that had previously been lnked to longevity in mice.

The next step for the researchers will be to create genetically modified strains of mice that have extremely strong stem cells in order to see if it increases their longevity. Researcher Gary van Zant told the BBC, “We hope to show that by making stem cells more hardy we can extend the life span (of mice).”

If they do indeed find further evidence for a connection between strong stem cells and longevity, then this finding might have applications in extending human life span.

Source:

Cell transplants ‘could lengthen lives’. The BBC, July 19, 2002.

Francis Fukuyama vs. Longevity

I suspect most people would think that medical efforts to prolong life are generally good — provided, of course that such life is of a high quality (no one wants to spend the last years of their life incapacitated and depdnent on machines for survival). But there are, in fact, a number of philosophers/political thinkers who do not think extending life is such a good idea.

In a profile for the New York Times, Nicholas Wade mentions Francis Fukuyama’s fears of science, including research into longevity. Fukuyama’s basic objection to extending the human lifespan is that nobody has ever done it before, so therefore it would probably be destabilizing. Wade writes,

Major increases in human longevity could also be disruptive, he fears, because “life extension will wreak havoc with most existing age-graded hierarchies,” postponing social change in countries with aging dictators and thwarting innovation in others.

In a similar vein, Fukuyama warns about genetic research because curing humans of genetic disease might lead to some change in human nature.

As Glenn Reynolds pointed out, this is the epitome of the extreme conservative position that Virginia Postrel termed “statism” in her excellent book, The Future and Its Enemies.

Human beings have spent the last few millenia expanding the boundaries of what we are and what we can become. The last thing we should do is call a halt to that simply to preserve what we have now. For better or worse, what is really fundamental to human nature is asking “what if …?” and there is little chance of suppressing that curiousity even if we tried.

Source:

A Dim View of a ‘Posthuman Future’. Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, April 2, 2002.