The End of Aging? Experts Point to Dangers

In his non-fiction Amazon bestseller, Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey, champions recent progress in genetics and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals that hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging and substantially slow down the aging process.

Aubrey de Grey is convinced that he has formulated the theoretical means by which human beings might live thousands of years -- indefinitely, in fact.

Unlike Francis Bacon, de Grey has never stationed himself at a laboratory bench to attempt a single hands-on experiment, at least not in human biology. He is a computer scientist who has taught himself natural science, and has set himself toward the goal of transforming the basis of what it means to be human.

Dr. de Grey, who holds a rare University of Cambridge degree on this basis of publications rather than classwork, believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely is now within reach —technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future—is now within reach.

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, similar to the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. And, as with machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime.

By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

The most realistic way to combat aging, de Gray suggests, is to rejuvenate the body at the molecular and cellular level, removing accumulated damage and restoring us to a biologically younger state. Comprehensive rejuvenation therapies can feasibly postpone age-related frailty and disease indefinitely, greatly extending our lives while eliminating, rather than lengthening, the period of late-life frailty and debilitation.

"The real issue," de Grey writes, "surely, was not which metabolic processes cause aging damage in the body, but the damage itself. Forty-year-olds have fewer healthy years to look forward to than twenty-year-olds because of differences in their molecular and cellular composition, not because of the mechanisms that gave rise to those differences. How far could I narrow down the field of candidate causes of aging by focusing on the molecular damage itself?"

Removing the causes of aging-related deaths will also eliminate all the suffering that aging inflicts on most people in the last years of their lives. Aging kills 100,000 people a day. Social concerns about the effects of defeating aging are legitimate but don’t outweigh the merits of saving so many lives and alleviating so much suffering.

"There are mutations in our chromosomes, of course, which cause cancer," de Grey muses. "There is glycation, the warping of proteins by glucose. There are the various kinds of junk that accumulate outside the cell (“extracellular aggregates”): beta-amyloid, the lesser-known transthyretin, and possibly other substances of the same general sort. There is also the unwholesome goo that builds up within the cell (“intracellular aggregates”), such as lipofuscin. There’s cellular senescence, the “aging” of individual cells, which puts them into a state of arrested growth and causes them to produce chemical signals dangerous to their neighbors. And there’s the depletion of the stem cell pools essential to healing and maintenance of tissue.

"And of course, there are mitochondrial mutations, which seem to disrupt cellular biochemistry by increasing oxidative stress. I had for a few years felt optimistic that scientists could solve this problem by copying mitochondrial DNA from its vulnerable spot at “ground zero,” within the free-radical generating mitochondria, into the bomb shelter of the cell nucleus, where damage to DNA is vastly rarer.

"Now, if only we had solutions like that for all of this other stuff, I mused, we could forget about the “butterfly effect” of interfering with basic metabolic processes, and just take the damage ITSELF out of the picture."

De Grey's call to action, writes Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, "is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future.” An opinion darkly countered by Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell: “Seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause.”

De Grey has formulated a wide-ranging plan for the comprehensive and eventually indefinite postponement of age-related physical and mental decline, named SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is the organizer of an ongoing series of conferences and workshops that focus on the key biomedical research relevant to SENS, and he also oversees the Methuselah Foundation’s growing sponsorship of SENS research worldwide.

"For decades," de grey summarized, "my colleagues and I had been earnestly investigating aging in the same way that historians might “investigate” World War I: as an almost hopelessly complex historical tragedy about which everyone could theorize and argue, but about which nothing could fundamentally be done. Perhaps inhibited by the deeply ingrained belief that aging was “natural” and “inevitable,” biogerontologists had set themselves apart from the rest of the biomedical community by allowing themselves to be overawed by the complexity of the phenomenon that they were observing.

"To intervene in aging, I realized, didn’t require a complete understanding of all the myriad interacting processes that contribute to aging damage. To design therapies, all you have to understand is aging damage itself: the molecular and cellular lesions that impair the structure and function of the body’s tissues. Once I realized that simple truth, it became clear that we are far closer to real solutions to treating aging as a biomedical problem, amenable to therapy and healing, than it might otherwise seem."

Leon Kass, the former head of Bush's Council on Bioethics, insists that “the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual”. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Garrison, New York-based Hastings Centre, agrees: “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”

Maybe they’re right, but then why do we as humans strive so hard to prolong our lives in the first place? Maybe growing old, getting sick and dying is just a natural, inevitable part of the circle of life, and we may as well accept it.

"But it's not inevitable, that's the point," de Grey says. "At the moment, we're stuck with this awful fatalism that we're all going to get old and sick and die painful deaths. There are a 100,000 people dying each day from age-related diseases. We can stop this carnage. It's simply a matter of deciding that's what we should be doing."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Comments

I would wonder how Kass feels about other kinds of research to prevent and cure disease? (which is also 'life extending,' after all)

It's not as if 'normal aging' is this mysterious thing we can safely wall off over here, and swear we'll never touch, yet have no problem with doing research on 'age-related' diseases which are, after all, that which *really* kills us ('old age' hasn't been put on death certificates as the cause since the 1950's...some *specific* thing[s] stop working first and that's the official cause[s]).

Fix enough 'age related' diseases and you unavoidably *do* dig into 'normal aging.'

Cancer, for example, is 'age-related' in that the probability of getting some form of it increases with age. Controlling *runaway* cell growth and development can't help but tell us how to affect (and improve) *normal* cell growth and development.

Cross-linking of tissues (a large part of skin wrinkling and arterial disease) is considered a part of 'normal aging,' but because it happens to diabetics more readily than the rest of us because high blood sugar levels encourage cross-linking, it's considered fair game for research to help them...but cross-link inhibitors and breakers can benefit anyone else.

There are many other examples. Where does Leon Kass draw the line? It isn't as sharp as many people seem to think...

(And I have no problem with out-and-out 'anti aging' research, anyway. Go to any 'retirement home' [or dementia ward] for a while, and tell me you want what you see to inevitability to happen to yourself and others you care about...)

Posted by: Frank Glover | June 17, 2009 at 07:55 AM

Immortality is the end of evolution.

Posted by: Christian Rioux | June 17, 2009 at 06:42 PM

"Immortality is the end of evolution."

Nah. Technology in general and genetic engineering in particular, was/will be the end of (human) evolution.

We don't allow the 'unfit' (whatever that may mean) to die and we'll soon know how change/alter/fix whatever it is that makes them 'unfit.' (also with technologies created for other purposes) Our 'evolution' is coming into our own hands, for better or worse. You don't have to invoke life extension for that...

(Nor is any serious researcher talking unconditional 'immortality.' People *will* still die of other things, just as they do today.)

Posted by: Frank Glover | June 18, 2009 at 12:02 AM

Great news! However, If we all live x hundreds (or more) years longer than we do now, and assuming the birth rate remains consistent, WHERE are we all going to live?

Posted by: Brian63 | June 18, 2009 at 05:21 AM

A planet or even a Solar System full of virtually immortal humans ?

I think we'd become stagnant & bored / boring to the point where we'd want to OFF ourselves.

I can picture enhanced longevity with benefits such as lack of dementia or serious memory loss or really marked physical decline. That could be accomplished via enhancement of neuro - transmitters, vitamins & vitamin therapy, amino acids, application of gene / hormone therapy, & even bionics & electronic implants & augmentation, yes. BUT ---- Once again,

Immortality might begin to lose a LOT of its appeal after the 1st 10 to 20,000 years or so, seriously.

Posted by: EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville | June 18, 2009 at 05:06 PM

"We would become SO BORED!"

Wow, people are just so incredibly unimaginative, or incredibly ADHD.

When you're 50, are you bored? 70? Bored yet? Does sex bore you after the first 10 or 20 years of having it? (It doesn't most people.) Sick of TV yet? Or video games? Or reading? Or drawing? Or playing chess? Or football? Or your favorite genre of music? If being alive and doing the things you like bores you, you have a mental health issue.

There's always going to be things to do, most of them the same things you did yesterday and the day before and the year before and the decade before that you're still doing because you still aren't bored with them. The idea that we'll live long enough to do everything we think we can imagine only showcases that we can imagine very little.

If it ever does become an actual problem, human inventiveness will certainly find a way to solve the problem without offing ourselves.

Posted by: Raven Daegmorgan | June 19, 2009 at 12:59 AM

A quotation comes to me from Socrates, & I think I've got it right -

" The unchallenged life is not worth living ". I'll go back & Google it to see if that's correct.

If we did become " immortal ", I would hope to God that there would still be changes & challenges to keep a population of " immortals " from becoming stagnant & suffering from terminal ennui. Research or Google " Larry Niven ", & " Louis Wu ". The Louis Wu character was centuries old, potentially immortal, & he had to fight boredom. His immortality / longevity forced him, at one point, to sticking a socket in his skull to stimulate his pleasure centers to the point where he became addicted.

Potential immortality might mean a stagnant human race in the future. There are worse things than death.....

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Posted by: chat sohbet | June 21, 2009 at 07:16 AM

Do Kass and Callahan favor legislation or other actions to prevent people from living longer? If the answer is yes, then they are morally identical to mass murderers.

And nobody can prove that we WILL be bored after a thousand years. It is only a possibility. How many people commit suicide due to boredom?

Posted by: NGN | June 22, 2009 at 03:34 PM