Some People Alive Today May Live 1,000 Years, Biologist Says

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON — Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he’s not nuts. This is a no small assertion. Mr. de Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years.

In 2005, an authoritative publication offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that Mr. de Grey’s plan for treating aging as a disease — and curing it — was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.”

Now mere mortals — who may wish to be significantly less mortal — can judge whether Mr. de Grey’s proposals are “science or fantasy,” as the magazine put it. Mr. de Grey’s much-awaited “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime” has just been published.

The judges were formidable for that MIT Technology Review challenge prize. They included Rodney Brooks, then director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft, and J. Craig Venter, who shares credit for first sequencing the human genome.

In the end, they decided no scientist had succeeded in blowing Mr. de Grey out of the water. “At issue is the conflict between the scientific process and the ambiguous status of ideas that have not yet been subjected to that process,” Mr. Myhrvold wrote for the judges.

Well yes, that. Plus the question that has tantalized humans forever. What if the only certainty is taxes?

Dodging death has long been a dream.

Our earliest recorded legend is that of Gilgamesh, who finds and loses the secret of immortality.

The Greek goddess Eos prevails on Zeus to allow her human lover Tithonus to live eternally, forgetting, unfortunately, to ask that he also not become aged and frail. He winds up such a dried husk she turns him into a grasshopper.

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, 44, recently of Britain’s Cambridge University, advocates not myth but “strategies for engineering negligible senescence,” or SENS. It means curing aging.

With adequate funding, Mr. de Grey thinks scientists may, within a decade, triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he believes, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next. He speculates people will start abandoning risky jobs, such as being police officers, or soldiers.

Mr. de Grey’s original academic field is computer science and artificial intelligence. He has become the darling of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who think changing the world is all in a day’s work. Peter Thiel, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal — who sold it in 2002 for $1.5 billion, pocketing $55 million himself — has dropped $3.5 million on Mr. de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation. “I thought he had this rare combination — a serious thinker who had enough courage to break with the crowd,” Mr. Thiel said. “A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible.”

At midday in George Washington University’s Kogan Plaza off H Street NW, you are surrounded by firm, young flesh. Muscular young men saunter by in sandals, T-shirts, and cargo shorts. Young blond women sport clingy, sleeveless tops, oversize sunglasses, and the astounding array of subtle variations available in flip-flops and painted toenails.

Is this the future? you ask Mr. de Grey.

“Yes, it is precisely the future,” he said. “Except without people who look as old as you and me.”

“If we want to hit the high points, no. 1 is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won’t be spending all this unbelievable amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be available to spend on important things like, well, obviously, providing the health care to keep us that way, but that won’t be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can’t afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they’re kids, but also proper adult education and retraining and so on. Another thing that’s going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We’re sorry for old people because they’re going downhill. There will be no real moral or sociological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a periodic thing. You’ll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you’ll be sick of it and you’ll retire on your savings or on a state pension, depending on what the system is. So after 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you’ll want to do something else with your life. You’ll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on.”

The mind reels. Will we want to be married to the same person for a thousand years? Will we need religion anymore? Will the planet fill to overflowing?

But first — why are these questions coming up now? And why are we listening to answers from Mr. de Grey?

Aging consists of seven critical kinds of damage, according to Mr. de Grey. For example, unwholesome goo accumulates in our cells. Our bodies have not evolved means quickly to clean up “intracellular aggregates such as lipofuscin.” However, outside our bodies, microorganisms have eagerly and rapidly evolved to turn this toxic waste into compost. (Mr. de Grey made this connection because he knew two things: Lipofuscin is fluorescent, and graveyards don’t glow in the dark.)

By taking soil samples from an ancient mass grave, Mr. de Grey’s colleagues in short order found the bacteria that digest lipofuscin as easily as enzymes in our stomachs digest a steak. The trick now is getting those lipofuscin-digesting enzymes into our bodies. That has not yet been done. But, Mr. de Grey said, comparable fundamental biotechnology is already in clinical use fighting diseases such as Tay-Sachs. So he sees it as merely an engineering problem. Examples like this make up the 262 pages at the center of “Ending Aging.”

“It’s a repair and maintenance approach to extending the functional life span of a human body,” Mr. de Grey said. “It’s just like maintaining the functional life span of a classic car, or a house. We know — because people do it — that there is no limit to how long you can do that. Once you have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of interventions to get rid of damage and maintain these things, then, they can last indefinitely. The only reason we don’t see that in the human body now is that the panel of interventions we have available to us today is not sufficiently comprehensive.”

By 2005, his ideas had attracted enough attention as to no longer be merely controversial. Mr. de Grey was being pilloried as a full-blown heretic.

“The idea that a research program organized around the SENS agenda will not only retard ageing, but also reverse it — creating young people from old ones and do so within our lifetime, is so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community,” 28 biogerontologists wrote in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization. Their recommendation: more of the patient, basic scientific research that is their stock in trade.

The resulting uproar was followed by the put-up-or-shut-up smack-down in MIT Technology Review. The upshot was intriguing.

“In our judgment, none of the ‘refutations’ succeeded,” Mr. Myhrvold, one of the judges, wrote in an e-mail.

“It was a bit ironic because they were mostly the work of established scientists in mainstream gerontology who sought to brand de Grey as ‘unscientific’ — yet the supposed refutations were themselves quite unscientific. The ‘refutations’ were either ad hominem attacks on de Grey, or arguments that his ideas would never work (which might be right, but that is what experiments are for), or arguments that portions of de Grey’s work rested on other people’s ideas. None of these refute the possibility that he is at least partially correct.”


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