SCIENTISTS have embarked on a quest to eliminate ageing and extend healthy lifespan indefinitely. This post from The Guardian encapsulates the recent work being done for extending “healthspan,” the years that are free of frailty and disease.
Fixing the “problem” of aging is the mission of Silicon Valley, where billions is pouring into biotech firms working to ‘hack the code’ of life – despite concerns about the social implications…
In Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, hedge fund manager Joon Yun is doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation. According to US social security data, he says, the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1percent. If we could keep that risk constant throughout life instead of it rising due to age-related disease, the average person would – statistically speaking – live 1,000 years. Yun finds the prospect tantalizing and even believable. Late last year he launched a $1m prize challenging scientists to “hack the code of life” and push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years (the longest known/confirmed lifespan was 122 years).
Yun believes it is possible to “solve ageing” and get people to live, healthily, more or less indefinitely. His Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which 15 scientific teams have so far entered, will be awarded in the first instance for restoring vitality and extending lifespan in mice by 50 percent. But Yun has deep pockets and expects to put up more money for progressively greater feats. He says this is a moral rather than personal quest. Growing numbers of loved ones lost to age-related disease and suffering extended periods of decrepitude, which is costing economies, trouble our lives and society. Yun has an impressive list of nearly 50 advisers, including scientists from some of America’s top universities.
Yun’s quest – a modern version of the age-old dream of tapping the fountain of youth – is emblematic of the current enthusiasm to disrupt death sweeping Silicon Valley. Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives”. Though much mystery surrounds the new biotech company, it seems to be looking in part to develop age-defying drugs. In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people. “Calico has the money to do almost anything it wants,” says Tom Johnson, an earlier pioneer of the field now at the University of Colorado who was the first to find a genetic effect on longevity in a worm.
In March 2014, pioneering American biologist and technologist Craig Venter—along with the tech entrepreneur founder of the X Prize Foundation, Peter Diamandis – announced a new company called Human Longevity Inc. It isn’t aimed at developing anti-ageing drugs or competing with Calico, says Venter. But it plans to create a giant database of 1 million human genome sequences by 2020, including from supercentenarians. Venter says that data should shed important new light on what makes for a longer, healthier life, and expects others working on life extension to use his database. “Our approach can help Calico immensely and if their approach is successful it can help me live longer,” explains Venter. “We hope to be the reference center at the middle of everything.”
In an office not far from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, with a beard reaching almost to his navel, Aubrey de Grey is enjoying the new buzz about defeating ageing. For more than a decade, he has been on a crusade to inspire the world to embark on a scientific quest to eliminate ageing and extend healthy lifespan indefinitely (he is on the Palo Alto Longevity Prize board). It is a difficult job because he considers the world to be in a “pro-ageing trance”, happy to accept that ageing is unavoidable, when the reality is that it’s simply a “medical problem” that science can solve. Just as a vintage car can be kept in good condition indefinitely with periodic preventative maintenance, so there is no reason why, in principle, the same can’t be true of the human body, thinks de Grey. We are, after all, biological machines, he says.
His claims about the possibilities (he has said the first person who will live to 1,000 years is probably already alive), and some unconventional and unproven ideas about the science behind ageing, have long made de Grey unpopular with mainstream academics studying ageing. But the appearance of Calico and others suggests the world might be coming around to his side, he says. “There is an increasing number of people realising that the concept of anti-agein g medicine that actually works is going to be the biggest industry that ever existed by some huge margin and that it just might be foreseeable.”
Since 2009, de Grey has been chief scientific officer at his own charity, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (Sens) Research Foundation. Including an annual contribution (about $600,000 a year) from Peter Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and money from his own inheritance, he funds about $5m of research annually. Some is done in-house, the rest sponsored at outside institutions. (Even his critics say he funds some good science.)
De Grey isn’t the only one who sees a new flowering of anti-ageing research. “Radical life extension isn’t consigned to the realm of cranks and science fiction writers any more,” says David Masci, a researcher at the Pew Research Centre, who recently wrote a report on the topic looking at the scientific and ethical dimensions of radical life extension. “Serious people are doing research in this area and serious thinkers are thinking about this.”
Although funding pledges have been low compared to early hopes, billionaires—not just from the technology industry—have long supported research into the biology of ageing. Yet it has mostly been aimed at extending “healthspan,” the years in which you are free of frailty or disease, rather than lifespan, although an obvious effect is that it would also be extended (healthy people, after all, live longer).
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6 comments
These are exciting times. And the rise of AI in the 20’s and 30’s will only accelerate the research. I’m really excited about the future!
Me too! That’s what I’ve been telling everyone! We need to spread the word! The faster we do, the sooner these therapies will become available
Did you guys think about how this would cause tons of overpopulation? Did you think that maybe it’s a good thing to die?
No, not really. Overpopulation is caused by poor countries having crappy living standards, and almost no education or birth control. Fix that, and overpopulation won’t be a problem. Even without fixing it, science has shown the human population will stay below 9 billion, and even decrease slightly.
First of all, let’s see how much space on Earth we actually take up. In 2012, for the project “Per Square Mile” by Tim de Chant the project team produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people. The city limits changed drastically depending on which real city it was modeled after and what the population density there was, but still we can get an idea, what share of our beautiful planet is really inhabited and how much spare space we still have.
https://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
Now let’s see how fast the population is growing, and try to predict, when we may start having problems with space for living. In fact, it may never happen, because socioeconomic development and birthrate are actually going in opposite directions. The higher the number of people (especially women) who are educated and involved in the wealth production process, the lower the birthrate.
Since the 1960s, both birthrate and population growth have been gradually falling. It will probably lead to complete arrest somewhere near 2100. Here is a chart from the United Nations Population Prospects 2015 edition, showing the corresponding statistics.
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2015_Volume-II-Demographic-Profiles.pdf
The Continuous red line represents a medium variant projection and we see it slowly turning into a straight horizontal line. If this projection is correct, in the next 80 years all humanity concentrated in a single city with a population density similar to New York would occupy, at most, another three additional states.
In the meantime that the break through is being awaited, how do we live longer, healthy and better looking? The present default fountain of youth until such time that it is superseded is “EXERCISE”.