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How to really live forever

No 'pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die' stories here...
 

"Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up"
-  Wilson Mizner

Can ageing be stopped?

Gerontologists consider the maximum lifespan for humans to be about 120 years. But with rising evidence for a genetic "death programme," which in principle could be amended, some researchers are starting to believe the limit could be extended. The author is a science writer, specialising in biology and medicine.

by Philip Hunter
Prospect Magazine
Jan 07

Old age hardly exists in wild animals. Accident, illness or predation usually kill long before the potential lifespan has been reached. Humans, though, especially in the developed world, are pushing in ever larger numbers towards the maximum lifespan, thought by most gerontologists to be around 120. (The world longevity record is held by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days.)

In Britain in 1901, life expectancy at birth was 49 for women and 45 for men. By 2002, this had risen to 81 and 76 respectively. This rapid increase in longevity has created hopes among gerontologists not just of an extended "quality of lifespan" well into the nineties, but of lifting the 120-year limit.

Optimists and pessimists on ageing

Ageing science has been divided between optimists and pessimists ever since the first modern theories emerged in the mid-19th century. Pessimists argue that ageing, following the second law of thermodynamics, is caused by the same inevitable decay that afflicts machines and inanimate objects. They accept that biology has evolved repair mechanisms to mitigate the damage, but insist that these merely delay death long enough to ensure the reproductive survival of the organism.

The optimists point out that all animals have immortal reproductive cells ("germlines"), and argue that ageing and longevity are genetically determined through programmes that can in principle be amended. They argue that biology has the tools to cope with wear and tear almost indefinitely, if only there were an evolutionary route to get there.

Right now the optimists are in the ascendant, bolstered by recent experiments that have extended the life expectancy of mice from around two years to three, with some reports of up to five. Such progress is unlikely in humans, for whom evolution has already boosted maximum lifespan well beyond comparably sized mammals—including great apes—but the work sheds valuable light on some of the mechanisms involved. The recent progress in mice was made by the application of the discovery, dating back to the 1930s, that lifespan could be increased dramatically in almost all animals by a diet low in calories but comprising all vital nutrients. This remains the one proven strategy for boosting life expectancy and slowing down ageing across a wide range of species. (On this basis, occasional fasting, as practised in some religions, might well extend human lifespan.)

Ageing is also closely linked to growth. Small members of mammalian species tend to live longer, as has been observed in dogs, mice and horses. It seems that retarded growth is associated with an overall slowdown in the processes that lead to ageing. It should certainly delay the process of cellular senescence, or apoptosis, the point at which cells stop dividing. Each time a cell divides, the DNA of the daughter cells is usually slightly shorter than the DNA of the parent, as a result of deficiencies in the copying process. Evolution has added disposable buffers called telomeres to the DNA to allow for some shortening. However, after a certain number of divisions, these buffers are spent, after which further copying eats into the active DNA sequence. Put simply, some cells can only divide a certain number of times before they die, and so if the time intervals between divisions are increased by slower growth, this aspect of ageing will be delayed.

It turns out that a low-calorie diet is not the only way to extend the lifespan of a mouse. The same effect can be obtained on a diet with normal calories but reduced protein. Moreover, it seems that it is not the protein that matters, but one specific component: the amino acid methionine. The finding is surprising because methionine is one of the nine essential amino acids. A diet totally deficient in methionine would kill a mouse in a few weeks. Yet the optimum level for longevity seems to be lower than is taken in a normal diet.

It is not known exactly how methionine restriction extends lifespan, but the answer could be linked to the oxidative or free radical theory of ageing. This states that the primary cause of ageing lies in the toxic by-products of energy metabolism within our mitochondria (the sub-units of the cell that produce energy). These by-products—chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide—oxidise parts of nearby cellular components, in particular proteins and DNA. The process is akin to the rusting of metals upon exposure to air. Many of these toxic, oxidising substances are called free radicals because they are electrically neutral and therefore stable, but also highly reactive because they have an unpaired electron seeking a mate from any neighbouring molecule.

Methionine happens to be the amino acid most prone to losing electrons through oxidation, and so perhaps in some way restricting it within the diet persuades the organism to use another amino acid where possible, thus reducing its overall susceptibility to oxidation. Whether this is true or not, a recent Spanish study found that methionine restriction definitely decreases oxidative damage to crucial mitochondrial DNA and proteins.

Is there a death programme?

But even this may not be the final answer to the methionine riddle, for some researchers argue that free radicals are merely mediators of ageing rather than the underlying cause, with their role ultimately controlled by genes orchestrating a "death programme."

There is some evidence that free radicals are manipulated by death programmes in those animals where ageing kicks in suddenly. One of the best studied examples is the salmon, many varieties of which appear to age suddenly and die aged about three, after one glorious orgy of reproduction. Free radicals increase rapidly during this period, but the fact that they seem to be held at bay until the salmon has done its reproducing suggests that there is an underlying programme at work. Perhaps the effect of methionine restriction might be to "edit" such an ageing programme in mammals, postponing its instructions.

Not all gerontologists agree with the death programme theory. Tom Kirkwood, one of the leading figures in the field, argues that the sudden post-reproductive death of the Atlantic salmon is not evidence of programmed ageing but the natural consequence of an extreme evolutionary phenomenon called "semelparity," meaning having all your offspring at once. The argument is that semelparous organisms invest all their life energy in a single reproductive event, after which there is no point being able to resist ageing.

But a finding in 2005 appears to have swung the argument decisively in favour of an ageing programme. A study at the Russian Academy of Sciences found that salmon can live much longer and continue reproducing when infected by pearl mussel larvae. In some cases, infection by this parasite extends life fourfold, to 13 years. It seems that the parasite has evolved a mechanism to avert the salmon's abrupt death so it can continue providing shelter and food for the parasite's development and reproduction. For a parasite dependent on the survival of its host, this is a sensible strategy. While the mechanism for this effect is not yet fully understood, it seems that the larvae produce a small protein that helps to mop up free radicals.

The study more or less confirms the existence of some form of death programme. If there were no programme, the salmon's abrupt death after reproduction could only be the inevitable result of wear and tear, in which case there would be limited scope for the mussel larvae to intervene. The fact that the larvae can increase the salmon's lifespan by such a huge factor by release of particular compounds indicates that there must normally be some mechanism hastening the ageing process.

This raises the question of why the salmon has evolved this type of ageing programme. One explanation is that it reproduces in rivers where food is scarce, and that therefore it is in the interests of the species for individuals to die and cease competing for resources once their reproductive energies are spent. The dead parents may even provide food for the fish upon which their young feed.

Immortal animals

But other questions remain. Although ageing is kept slow in the salmon until reproduction occurs, it still takes place. As in many animals, including humans, the ageing process starts at birth, but is kept in check until reproductive life is over. So can ageing ever be stopped altogether? At first sight this might seem unlikely, but all animals have immortal germlines—sequences of sex cells, like the sperm or ova—and we do not pass on the artefacts of ageing to our offspring. Evolution brought this about because any animal whose offspring were born old would soon become extinct. Immortal reproductive cells are kept separate from the body's somatic cells, which only need to survive one reproductive generation.

So the question arises: has any animal exploited the immortality of its germline to resist ageing indefinitely? The answer is yes. A few examples have been found among simpler organisms, one of the best studied being the hydra, a small freshwater animal up to 20mm long. Hydra appear to be able to regenerate endlessly with none of the recognised signs of ageing. This is possible because their bodies are permeated by germ cells whose primary purpose is to form buds that break off to yield offspring. These germ cells also create new tissue within the body, which in effect is the offspring of itself, constantly forming new cells to replace old ones. The line between reproduction and regeneration is blurred.

Although higher animals lack such regenerative powers, there are plenty of examples of individual organs being replaced in this way. Some sharks replace their teeth several times over their lifespan in order to continue feeding and to prolong their reproductive lives.

So why has evolution not used regeneration more ambitiously to extend reproductive lifespan? The answer lies in the high risk of death by accident or predation. In an animal such as the mouse, death by misadventure becomes almost inevitable after a few years, so there is little selective pressure in favour of long-lived individuals. Instead, evolution selects those organisms that are highly reproductive during their short lives.

But the equation changes abruptly for animals that have evolved the power of flight. When predators can be left on the ground, it becomes reproductively advantageous to live significantly longer. This is almost certainly why flying birds and bats live between four and ten times longer than non-flying mammals and birds of the same size. Flight itself, with its huge energy demands, may also have led to the development of efficient respiration and metabolism that, as a side-effect, reduces the production of damaging free radicals.

Research on birds and bats is shedding light on the genes involved in extending maximum lifespan as well as the biochemical mechanisms that bring it about. Along with research in non-flying mammals such as mice, this is helping to identify candidates for intervening in the ageing process. In particular, there is growing hope that aspects of ageing can be tackled by targeting specific metabolic pathways with therapies that mediate hormonal or other factors known to be involved. Work in mice over the last three years has also shown that lifespan can be extended by directing antioxidants specifically at mitochondria.

It has also been shown, in some animals, that the effects of calorie or protein restriction can be obtained via drugs without actually dieting. The effects of diet on ageing appear to operate particularly through the production of insulin and related enzymes with their role in growth and maintenance of correct blood glucose levels. The primary metabolic pathway involved, IGF-1, is known to be involved in ageing, and decreasing the activity of the protein receptor involved in IGF-1 has been shown to extend lifespan in mice. The case is still unproven for humans, but a number of studies are assessing whether there is reduced insulin signalling in long-lived people.

Human ageing has a separate dimension that becomes ever more relevant as people live longer. In animals, the various ageing processes seem to progress in tandem. For humans, there is evidence that ageing of the brain is partly uncoupled from the other organs. The evidence for this comes from observations of people suffering from premature ageing conditions, such as Werner's syndrome.

The implication is that if it becomes possible to extend human lifespan, it cannot be assumed that mental deterioration will automatically be postponed. So it is important to continue the distinct study of brain ageing, including factors such as accumulation of tangled protein, or plaques, associated with some forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's.

Extending lifespan and quality of life

Ageing in humans, as in other mammals, appears to be a co-ordinated process orchestrated by a relatively small number of genes. If this is the case, then it makes sense to tackle many age-related diseases through this genetic core rather than treating each one as a separate case—with the possible exception of some brain conditions.

There is potential for humans to mimic the biologically immortal hydra, by exploiting our stem cells in the regeneration of organs damaged by age-related diseases. The ability of adult stem cells, which remain in the body throughout life, to regenerate heart muscle cells has already been demonstrated in mice. Organs regenerated this way would in effect be brand new, and "younger" than all the other tissues and organs. Such regeneration might not immediately boost life's span, but should greatly improve its quality in old age.

Indeed, for humans the principal target should be quality of lifespan rather than absolute longevity. For now at least, few of us want to live beyond 120, but we would like to continue enjoying the good life for as long as possible within that ultimate span.

The age revolution: How to live to be 150

Experts believe that the first person to live half way through their second century has already been born. Jeremy Laurance reports on the stunning breakthroughs that science promises, while Sarah Harris outlines 10 ways to extend your life

Monday 8, January 2007
Belfast Telegraph

For today's centenarians, living to be 100 is an achievement marked by a message from the Queen. Within two generations it could be as routine as collecting a bus pass.

The first person to live to 150 may already have been born, according to some scientists. Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled over the past 200 years and recent research suggests it has yet to reach a peak.

What will the world be like when people live long enough to see their great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren? Extending life by adding extra years of sickness and growing frailty holds little appeal. Increased longevity is one of the modern world's great successes, but long life without health is an empty prize. The aim is for humans to die young - as late as possible.

It is eight years since Jeanne Calment died peacefully in a nursing home in Arles, southern France in 1998. She was aged 122 years, five months and 14 days - and no one has yet challenged her title as the oldest person with an authenticated birth record to have lived. She attributed her longevity to a diet rich in olive oil, regular glasses of port and her ability to " keep smiling".

Destiny undoubtedly played a part, too. If you want to grow old, choose your parents carefully. The genetic determinants of long life are gradually being unravelled, In recent years at least 10 gene mutations have been identified that extend the lifespan of mice by up to half. The good news is that these super-geriatric mice are no more frail or sickly than their younger brethren.

In humans, several genetic variants have been linked with longevity. They include a family of genes dubbed the Sirtuins, which one Italian study found occurred more commonly in centenarian men than in the general population. Researchers at Harvard Medical School in the US, convinced they have discovered a "longevity gene", are now studying whether adding an extra copy of the gene extends the lives of mice. The long term aim is to find a way of manipulating the genes to add an extra decade or two to the human lifespan.

Other gene variants affect the production of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor (IGF), both of which increase metabolism - organisms with higher metabolism tend to die sooner. Blocking receptors for growth hormone and IGF, so slowing metabolism, provide possible targets for anti-ageing drugs.

Also promising, but still far from yielding concrete results, are telomeres, which are present in every cell. Telomeres shorten with every cell division, like a burning fuse; when they can shorten no more, the cell dies. Inhibiting the enzyme telomerase to prevent the shortening of the telomeres in effect extends the lifespan of the cell, and, as we are comprised of millions of cells, could extend life.

Ageing cannot be reversed but it may, perhaps, be delayed. The emergence of the extremely old population has only happened in the past 50 years and is chiefly due to improvements in the health, lifestyle and environment of the elderly that started in the 1950s - how we eat and drink, where we live, what we do.

Ageing is an irresistible target for snake oil salesmen and the pharmaceutical industry. Several hundred medical compounds that can boost memory and learning ability are being investigated. Research teams are examining genes for Alzheimer's disease, mechanisms that cause cells to age and die, and brain interfaces that promise to pump new life into aged or diseased limbs. The aim here is to add life to years, as well as years to life, but ageing itself is taking over as the new target for therapeutic innovation.

One promising avenue of research is to increase the resistance of cells to the stresses caused by free radicals, unstable molecules that disrupt cellular processes. There is no evidence that the sort of anti-ageing compounds sold over the internet containing anti-oxidants that promise to tackle free radicals actually slow ageing. However, delivering antioxidant enzymes direct to the cell has been shown in mice to extend lifespan by 20 per cent - pointing the way to future research.

But the optimism comes with a warning - that the consistent increase in life expectancy we have enjoyed for the past 200 years could be about to go into reverse. Some Jeremiahs in the scientific community claim ours could be the first generation in which parents outlive their children. The greatest enemy of extending life further is growing obesity, they say. Its effects could rapidly approach and exceed those of heart disease and cancer. Calculations by US scientists suggest that life expectancy would already be up to a year longer but for obesity. As Jeannne Calment indicated, wisely if unexcitingly, on her 122nd birthday, those who live moderately live long.

Ten things you can do to help increase your life expectancy

Exercise regularly

Keeping fit is the elixir of youth. Even 30 minutes of regular gentle exercise three times per week, such as walking or swimming, can add years to your life expectancy.

Aerobic exercise preserves the heart, lungs and brain, elevates your mood, can help ward off breast and colon cancer and prevent atrophy of the muscles and bones.

Gareth Jones of the Canadian Centre for Activity and Ageing in London, found that for an over-50 who has never taken part in physical activity a brisk 30-minute walk three times a week can "basically reverse your physiological age by about 10 years." Not exercising can knock off five years.

A 1986 study at Stanford University found that death rates fell in direct proportion to the number of calories burned weekly.

Live dangerously

Mild sunburn, a glass of wine and some low-level radiation sounds like a recipe for disaster, but many researchers believe that small doses of " stressors" can reverse the ageing process.

While this "hormeosis", is not a licence to lie on a hot beach all day swigging vodka, mild exposure to certain harmful agents can trigger the body's natural repair mechanisms. The body is tricked into producing particular DNA-repair enzymes and heat shock proteins to fix the damage that has been caused. Sometimes the body's repair mechanisms overcompensate, treating unrelated damage - "rejuvenating" as well as repairing it. Hormeosis could stretch the average healthy life span to 90.

Live in a good area

It is not only how you live, but where you live that matters - and the residents of Okinawa in Japan seem to know the secret. These Japanese islands are home to the world's largest population of centenarians.

At 103, the daily routine of resident Seiryu Toguchi included stretching exercises, a diet of whole grain rice and vegetables, gardening and playing his three-stringed instrument, the sanshin.

The clean-living Seventh Day Adventists of Utah also do pretty well, living on average eight years longer than their fellow Americans.

Worst off are those living in poor, polluted urban areas such as Glasgow, where residents of the poorest suburbs have a life expectancy of only 54. Overcrowding, dirt and noise all contribute to high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, which reduce lifespan.

Be very successful

The more rich, privileged, successful and educated you are, the longer you will live. The Whitehall Studies, 1967-77, examined the health of male civil servants between the ages of 20 and 64, and found that men in the lowest-paid positions had a mortality rate three times higher than those at the top level.

The study proved that the more important a task a person is asked to perform, the longer they are likely to live; that the person at the top with the big office, shouting orders will have a more relaxed and pleasurable existence than his frustrated underlings. And it's not only civil servants: Canadian researchers found that Oscar-winners live longer than other actors because of am increased sense of self-worth and confidence.

And if you can't manage an Oscar, then only one extra year in education could increase your life expectancy by a year and a half.

Eat the right foods

Certain foods delay the ageing process and may increase life expectancy. Green leafy vegetables such as spinach and broccoli are rich in antioxidants and beta-carotene. Diets high in fruit, vegetables, fibre and omega-3 oils, and low in fat may prevent high blood pressure and heart disease.

In their low-fat diet of fruit, vegetables and rice, the long-living people of Okinawa also consume more soy than anyone on earth, and soy is linked to low cancer rates. Eating cooked tomato daily can slash your risk of heart disease by 30 per cent, found research at Harvard.

Challenge yourself

An active mind is as important as an active body. Studies show that you can boost your immune system and delay the onset of conditions from depression to dementia by keeping your brain engaged and stimulated.

Leonard Poon, director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Center found that people who reach three figures tend to have a high level of cognition, demonstrating skill in everyday problem-solving and learning. And Marian Diamond of the University of California, Berkley, found that rodents who were given problems to solve and toys to play with, lived 50 per cent longer.

Enjoy your life

Good relationships are the key to longevity. Social contact staves off depression, stress and boosts the development of the brain and immune system.

Most research shows that people with family, friends, partners or pets, live longer than those who don't. Marriage is also a good idea if you want to meet the 100-mark, adding an average of seven years to the life of a man, and two to a woman.

Indulgence, too, can be good for you. Chocolate can enhance endorphin levels and acts as a natural antidepressant, wine contains natural anti-oxidants, and laughing is good for your immunity.

Find God - or friends

It's official: having religion pays off - and not just in the after-life.

Nearly 1,000 studies have indicated that those who go to a place of worship are healthier than their faithless counterparts - and live an average seven years longer. One in 10 of the nuns of the convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Minnesota have managed to reach their 100th birthday. But atheists should not despair: experts believe that a sense of community, and of belief in something larger than yourself, are vital ingredients in a long and happy life.

Jeff Levin, author of God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connection, argues that a place of worship provides a social network and a source of comfort to the ageing, ill and needy.

Reduce your calories

One hundred years of hunger is what you can look forward to if you follow the Calorie Restriction philosophy. Practitioners of CR believe that by reducing your calorie intake (by between 10 and 60 per cent) you can extend life expectancy by lowering your metabolism and the production of harmful free radicals. It sounds like torture, but there is research to suggest that it works.

One study reported that participants who ate 25 per cent less for three months had lower levels of insulin in their blood, a reduced body temperature and less DNA damage. Brian Delaney, president of the California-based Calorie Restriction Society, is aiming to live to 122, and with a diet of barely 1,800 calories per day (2,500 is the normal for men).

Get your health checked

To last a century, stay ahead of life-threatening illnesses. It is possible with regular blood tests to detect the first signs of prostate cancer, one of the commonest causes of cancer deaths in men over 85.

If you're between 60 and 69 you can have free bowel cancer screening, cervical screening for women aged 24 to 64, and mammograms for women aged 50 to 70. Figures show that 95 per cent of women who had invasive breast cancer detected by screening are alive five years later.

2050 - and immortality is within our grasp

Britain's leading thinker on the future offers an extraordinary vision of life in the next 45 years

David Smith, technology correspondent
Sunday May 22, 2005
Observer

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich.

These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT.

'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'

Pearson, 44, has formed his mind-boggling vision of the future after graduating in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, spending four years working in missile design and the past 20 years working in optical networks, broadband network evolution and cybernetics in BT's laboratories. He admits his prophecies are both 'very exciting' and 'very scary'.

He believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.'

The world's fastest computer, IBM's BlueGene, can perform 70.72 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) and is accelerating all the time. But anyone who believes in the uniqueness of consciousness or the soul will find Pearson's next suggestion hard to swallow. 'We're already looking at how you might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious. There are quite a lot of us now who believe it's entirely feasible.

'We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis. Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020.'

He continued: 'It would definitely have emotions - that's one of the primary reasons for doing it. If I'm on an aeroplane I want the computer to be more terrified of crashing than I am so it does everything to stay in the air until it's supposed to be on the ground.

'You can also start automating an awful lots of jobs. Instead of phoning up a call centre and getting a machine that says, "Type 1 for this and 2 for that and 3 for the other," if you had machine personalities you could have any number of call staff, so you can be dealt with without ever waiting in a queue at a call centre again.'

Pearson, from Whitehaven in Cumbria, collaborates on technology with some developers and keeps a watching brief on advances around the world. He concedes the need to debate the implications of progress. 'You need a completely global debate. Whether we should be building machines as smart as people is a really big one. Whether we should be allowed to modify bacteria to assemble electronic circuitry and make themselves smart is already being researched.

'We can already use DNA, for example, to make electronic circuits so it's possible to think of a smart yoghurt some time after 2020 or 2025, where the yoghurt has got a whole stack of electronics in every single bacterium. You could have a conversation with your strawberry yogurt before you eat it.'

In the shorter term, Pearson identifies the next phase of progress as 'ambient intelligence': chips with everything. He explained: 'For example, if you have a pollen count sensor in your car you take some antihistamine before you get out. Chips will come small enough that you can start impregnating them into the skin. We're talking about video tattoos as very, very thin sheets of polymer that you just literally stick on to the skin and they stay there for several days. You could even build in cellphones and connect it to the network, use it as a video phone and download videos or receive emails.'

Philips, the electronics giant, is developing the world's first rollable display which is just a millimetre thick and has a 12.5cm screen which can be wrapped around the arm. It expects to start production within two years.

The next age, he predicts, will be that of 'simplicity' in around 2013-2015. 'This is where the IT has actually become mature enough that people will be able to drive it without having to go on a training course.

'Forget this notion that you have to have one single chip in the computer which does everything. Why not just get a stack of little self-organising chips in a box and they'll hook up and do it themselves. It won't be able to get any viruses because most of the operating system will be stored in hardware which the hackers can't write to. If your machine starts going wrong, you just push a button and it's reset to the factory setting.'

Pearson's third age is 'virtual worlds' in around 2020. 'We will spend a lot of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer generated environments to socialise and do business in. When technology gives you a life-size 3D image and the links to your nervous system allow you to shake hands, it's like being in the other person's office. It's impossible to believe that won't be the normal way of communicating.
Hang in There: The 25-Year Wait for Immortality

"I think it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely" -- Aubrey de Grey

Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century.

By Ker Than
Special to LiveScience
11 April 2005

By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can’t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives, or opt for an older look if they get bored. Of course, everyone will be required to go in for age rejuvenation therapy once every decade or so, but that will be a small price to pay for near-immortality.

This may sound like science fiction, but Aubrey de Grey thinks this could be our reality in as little as 25 years. Other scientists caution that it is far from clear whether and for how long science can stall the inevitable.

  De Grey, a Cambridge University researcher, heads the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) project, in which he has defined seven causes of aging, all of which he thinks can be dealt with. (Senescence is scientific jargon for aging.)

  De Grey also runs the Methuselah Mouse prize for breakthroughs in extended aging in mice. The purse of the M Prize, as it is called, recently grew beyond $1 million.

LiveScience recently spoke with de Gray about his idea of living longer, and perhaps forever.

LiveScience: What is your definition of aging?

Aubrey de Grey: The definition that I like is not very good if you want to cover all species, but it’s pretty good if you want to do something about it. I define aging as the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us.

Is your goal to just extend the human lifespan substantially or to enable us to live forever?

I don’t see any inherent limit to how long it would be desirable to live. If life is fun at the moment, because one is healthy and youthful, both mentally and hysically, then one is not likely to want to die in the next year or two. And if a year or two down the road, life is still fun because one is still youthful and so on, then the same will apply, and I can’t see a time when that would cease to be true.

When did you first come up with idea for your SENS project?

Well, I’ve always considered aging to be undesirable, but I didn’t begin to consider that I could make a contribution until about ten years ago. I suppose the major breakthrough was when I came up with the scheme that I now describe as SENS, and that happened about four years ago.

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7 Deadly SENS

Nuclear Mutations/Epimutations
These are changes to the DNA, the molecule that contains our genetic information, or to proteins which bind to the DNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer.

Mitochondrial Mutations
Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. They contain their own genetic material, and mutations to their DNA can affect a cell’s ability to function properly.

Intracellular Junk
Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those proteins which can’t be digested simply accumulate as junk inside our cells.

Extracellular Junk
Harmful junk protein can also accumulate outside of our cells. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.

Cell Loss
Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can only be replaced very slowly.

Cell Senescence
This is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide. They may also do other things that they’re not supposed to, like secreting proteins that could be harmful.

Extracellular Crosslinks:
  Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems.
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What happened was that I was gradually learning a lot of biology because my wife is a biologist. I was originally trained as a computer scientist, and I regarded aging as obviously undesirable but not my problem, that someone else would be working on it.

  But the more biology I learned, the more I also learned about biologist and about the attitudes toward working on the biology of aging that biologists tended to have, and basically, I wasn’t very impressed. I found that rather few biologists were interested in the problem at all, and I thought, "Well, that isn’t very good,", so I thought I’d see what I could do.

Your background is in computer science. How does that qualify you to spearhead a project on aging?

My background is enormously beneficial. There are really very important differences between the type of creativity involved in being a basic scientist and being an engineer. It means that I’m able to think in very different ways and come up with approaches to things that are different from the way a basic scientist might think.

Could you give me an example of when your background has proven useful?

Well, I suppose that the whole SENS project is one big example. What I’ve done there is I’ve identified a set of things to fix, a set of aspects of aging that we have some respectable chance to repair, and I’ve realized that if we can do all of these things reasonably well, then we’re done.

  Basically, we’ll have made the age related problems that we suffer from these days no longer an inevitable consequence of being alive. What I’ve done is basically factored out all the complicated details of how metabolism causes these things in the first place. It will be many decades before we understand the way cells and organs work well enough to be able to describe in detail the mechanism of how these problems actually occur.

  But my way of thinking is that we don’t need to know the details of how they happen. So long as we know what these things are that do happen, we can figure out ways to fix them. This is counter to the ways that scientists think, because scientists are interested in knowledge for its own sake, whereas I’m interested in knowledge as a means to an end.

Could you give me a timeline for how you envision your project succeeding?

The first part of the project is to get really impressive results in mice. The reason that’s important is because mice are sufficiently furry and people can identify with them. If we get really impressive results in mice, then people will believe that it’s possible to do it in humans, whereas if you double the lifespan of a fruit fly, people aren’t going to be terribly interested.

Now, what I want to do in mice is not only develop interventions which extend their healthy lifespan by a substantial amount, but moreover, to do so when the mouse is already in middle age. This is very important, because if you do things to the mouse’s genes before the mouse is even conceived, then people who are alive can’t really identify with that.

  I reckon it will be about 10 years before we can achieve the degree of life extension with late onset interventions that will be necessary to prove to society’s satisfaction that this is feasible. It could be longer, but I think that so long as the funding is there, then it should be about 10 years.

  Step two will involve translating that technology to humans. And because that’s further in the future, it’s much more speculative about how long that’s going to take. But I think we have a fifty-fifty chance of doing it within about 15 years from the point where we get results with the mice. So 25 years from now.

What do you think about the idea that with so much life at stake, people would be less willing to take risks?

  I used to be more pessimistic about this than I am now. Five or six years ago I wrote a book in which I predicted that driving would be outlawed because it would be too dangerous to other people, but now I think that what’s actually going to happen is that we’ll just throw money at the problem. Rather than simply avoiding activities that are risky, we’ll make them less risky through technology. For example, it’s perfectly possible already to build cars that are much safer than those which most people currently drive, and it’s also possible to build cars that are safer for pedestrians—with auto sensors and auto braking to stop from hitting a kid running out in the road and things like that.

It’s just a matter of priorities. When there isn’t that many years of life to lose, the priority isn’t there to spend the money. It’s all a matter of weighing out the probabilities.

Once the technology is available, nearly everyone is going to want it. Of course, there’s going to be a minority of people who think it’s better to live more naturally in some way or other. We have parallels like that in society today, like the Amish for example.

Some would say that death is a part of life. What would be your response to those people?

Death will still be a part of life when we haven’t got aging anymore. If you mean that some people would say that aging is a part of life—well, that’s certainly true, but a couple hundred years ago tuberculosis was a part of life, and we didn’t have much hesitation in making that no longer a part of life when we found out how.

What do you say to critics who think that this money could be better spent towards curing diseases like cancer?

This is a very important point. Because we’re going be in a situation where we can extend lifespans indefinitely, this argument doesn’t work. If it were a case of simply having a prospect of extending our healthy lives by 20 or 30 years, then one could legitimately argue that this would be money more ethically spent on extending the lifespan of people who have a below average lifespan. But when we’re talking about extending lifespans indefinitely, I don’t think that really works. The other thing to bear in mind, is that it’s not an either or thing. The reasons why people in Africa for example, have a low life expectancy is 
not just because of medical care, but also because of political problems.

What kind of life will the immortal or nearly-immortal lead? Will they have to be on a special diet, or have constant organ transplants?

Like any technology, when it first starts off, it will be a bit shaky, a bit risky, it will be very laborious and expensive and so on, but there will be enormous market pressures that will result in progressive refinement and improvement to the technology so that it not only becomes more effective, it becomes more convenient and so on. This will be an example of that.

In a very general sort of sense, one could probably think in terms of having to go in for a refresh every 10 years or so. Exactly what would be involved in that will change over the years. It might start off as lets say a month in the hospital, and 10 years down the road, that will turn into a day in the hospital.

A good parallel is vaccines. For example, when we take a holiday in Africa or Southeast Asia or whatever, we get a shot to make sure that we don’t get malaria. And that’s all we have to do, and when we get there we can eat Mc Donald’s as much as one likes.

So you think it’ll one day be as easy as getting a vaccine?

Yes, that’s right. A lot of these things, even in the early stages will amount to vaccines and drugs. Though of course, there will also be a lot of gene therapy and stem cell therapy and much more high tech stuff.

Why did you establish both an institute and a prize?

I think it’s very important to have this two-prong approach. The idea here is that we don’t really know what’s going to work, but we have a fair idea of approaches that have a good probability of working.

  If you look at past technological achievements, some of them succeeded by just throwing serious effort and serious resources at the problem, 
and people were pretty sure of what they had to do to make the thing work. The Manhattan Project is a fine example of that. Everyone basically knew how to build the atomic bomb, it was just a question of working out the kinks.

Then we’ve got things where there were loads of different possibilities about how the thing might be done, and it was important to motivate people and give incentives. For example, when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, that won a prize. And when someone invented a chronometer that worked properly at sea, that won a prize. Things like that. That was where you wanted to give incentives for people to follow their hunches, because it wasn’t very clear which approach was going to work.

  I think that when we’re talking about life extension, we’re sort of halfway between these two situations. We have a bunch of ideas which one can make a good case that it’s going to work, but we also want to hedge our bets, and let people follow their hunches as well.

Of your seven SENS targets, which do you consider to be the most important?

It’s not possible to say. I don’t think we will be able to achieve more than a relatively modest amount of life extension, if any, until we can get at least five or so of these things working, and we might need to do all seven before we get more than a decade of life extension.

Why do you personally want to live forever?

It’s not really a matter of living forever, it’s just a matter of not wanting to die. One doesn’t live forever all in one go, one lives forever one year at a time. It’s just a case of "Well, life seems to be fun, and I don’t see any prospect of it ceasing to be fun unless I get frail and miserable and start declining." So if I can avoid declining, I’ll stay with it really.

What would you do if you could live substantially longer?

They say variety is the spice of life, so I don’t think I would do the same things every day. I’d like to be able to spend more time reading, and listen to music, and all that sort of thing, things that I never get to do at all at the moment.

You think this project is going to succeed in your lifetime?

I think it’s got a respectable chance. I’m definitely not relying on it. My main motivation comes from the thought of how many lives will be saved.

Your strategy would involve not only preventing aging, but reversing it as well. Does that mean people will get to choose what age they want to remain?

  Absolutely. So the idea is that we wouldn’t be eliminating aging from the body. It’ll be a case of going in periodically and having the accumulated damage repaired. So exactly what biological age you actually have at any point is really just a question of how often you go in for rejuvenations and how thorough they are.

  So the more treatments you undergo, the younger you can be?

That’s right. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.
 
I'm going to live forever

Some scientists predict that today's children will be able to live for more than 1,000 years. Is immortality just around the corner? Bryan Appleyard peers into a hair-raising future without death

March 13, 2005

Somewhere in the world today lives a child who will change everything. Imagine this child is called Sally. Today is her 11th birthday. She lives in Esher in Surrey. Her parents are happy and wealthy. All her grandparents are old, alive and well.

I’ve given her this background for specific reasons. Sally is a girl because women live about five years longer than men. She is 11 because, at that age, she has successfully navigated the diseases of childhood and her body has yet to endure the effects of ageing. She lives in Esher because it is one of the high life expectancy areas of one of the richest countries in the world.

Her parents are happy so they are less likely to divorce and cause life-threatening stress to Sally. They are wealthy because that means they can afford private medical care and Sally will not have to take the appalling risk of attending an NHS hospital. Finally, her grandparents lived a long time so the family has a history of longevity.

In short, Sally’s life prospects are optimum for a human child in 2005. According to current projections, she can expect to live well into her eighties. But it’s not going to be like that, because Sally is not going to die until 3194.

Hundreds of thousands of people die in the world every day, two-thirds of them from ageing. Is this just life, the way things must be, or is it a problem to be solved? If, as the western tradition teaches, every human life is valuable in and of itself, shouldn’t we be doing more to stop this appalling carnage? Or should we, as the eastern tradition teaches, accept it as the eternal becoming, samsara, or the veil of Maya, the illusion of existence?

Forget all that. This is what will happen to Sally. When she is at university in about 2013 she will hear news of an astonishing experiment performed on a mouse. A healthy two-year-old mouse will have been subjected to numerous protocols to suppress the division of cells and clean them of debris. In critical areas of cell depletion such as the brain and heart, stem cell therapy will have been used to rejuvenate the organs. Mitochondrial and chromosomal DNA will have been manipulated to stop damaging mutations.

The experiment began in 2010. The mouse is now five. Being an average mouse it should have died at three, almost certainly of cancer. At the genetic level, mice are surprisingly like humans.

Society is transformed by the news. In response to public demand, medical researchers are flooded with government money in the expectation that science is on the verge of delivering massive human life extension if not the holy grail itself — immortality. People begin to look after themselves fanatically, cutting out dangerous sports, smoking, excessive drinking, all sugar and red meat, and exercising daily. Everybody wants to live long enough to live for ever.

And sure enough in 2035, when Sally is 41 and beginning to feel the effects of ageing that humans have lamented throughout history, human rejuvenation becomes available. Privileged Sally is the first in the queue. Soon she looks and feels no more than 30 and, as the years pass, continued therapy ensures that she never ages. She has become, in fact, the first immortal.

But not, in the event, invulnerable. Accidents can still happen. Back in the early years of the third millennium an American biologist, Professor Steven Austad, studied death rates among 11-year-olds, the age at which disease is the least likely killer. On the basis of these figures, which included death by accidents of varying degrees of improbability, Austad calculated an “immortal” human was likely to live an average of 1,200 years.

And so, in 3194, blooming, youthful, beautiful, 1,200-year-old Sally is strolling along Esher High Street. A piano falls from a sixth-floor window and kills her. Sad, but never mind, she had a good innings.

All of this — well, not the piano — is exactly what Aubrey de Grey and an increasing number of scientists around the world expect to happen. De Grey is a brilliant, self-taught gerontologist at Cambridge. He is a 41-year-old cyclist with a 2ft beard, enormous whiskers and a rapid, high-pitched voice that on first contact is frankly terrifying.

He is in excellent health. He knows this because he has had one of the most rigorous medicals in the world at Kronos, an anti-ageing research institute in Phoenix, Arizona. But, in case it all goes wrong and he dies, he has arranged for his head to be frozen and stored by the Alcor cryonics facility in nearby Scottsdale. It will be revived when the technology becomes available so that Aubrey can go on talking.

He is generally regarded as the leading theorist of anti-ageing technologies or, as he calls them, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is convinced the first thousand-year-old human has already been born. He is convinced because of his theory of “escape velocity” which, he says, almost nobody has taken into account.

Future life expectancies are usually calculated on the basis of extrapolations from the past. Life expectancies soared in the 20th century largely because of the reduction of infant mortality, improved sewage systems and the development of antibiotics. Clearly there cannot continue to be such huge changes, but demographers make cautious forecasts of increases in life expectancy by extrapolating underlying trends. De Grey snorts.

“Extrapolation is complete nonsense. I call these demographers Extrapaholics Anonymous. They know perfectly well that it’s all guesswork.”

“Escape velocity” is the opposite of extrapolation. Say, for example, we manage to extend life expectancy by 30 or 40 years. This is not inconceivable even within the limitations of present medical knowledge. Increasing numbers of people in the developed world are living to 100 and beyond. If we simply improve people’s behaviour and treatment consistently, many more will live to about 120, the age generally accepted as the maximum for humans beings. And if stem cell therapy works, they will live clear-headed, without the effects of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

At that point de Grey’s theory kicks in because, if you do live that long and scientific knowledge continues to expand at its present rate, then you will almost certainly live a lot longer. In other words, the first 150-year-old is quite likely also to be the first 1,000-year-old.

So how will this happen? De Grey has seven strategies of Engineered Negligible Senescence — replacing cells that are lost, for example, through Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, stopping cells that multiply as in cancer, preventing mutations in chromosomes and mitochondria, the cells’ power plants, removing junk from inside cells and from outside and, finally, getting rid of “extracellular protein crosslinks” which cause hardening of the arteries. Find ways of doing all seven and nobody need ever die again.

“We have a pretty good idea of how to fix all of them,” says de Grey, “and some of the fixes are already in clinical trials. The beauty of it is that we don’t have to fix all of them completely. For example, we don’t have to clear all the junk out of the cells, just enough to stop its ageing effects.”

Page 2: Continues

Cancer, he admits, is the tough one. Even if we cured all other diseases of ageing, life expectancy would not increase radically simply because cancer would strike us down in the end. De Grey has a complex anti-cancer strategy that is now being studied around the world.

The central conceptual element in this approach is that the human body is a machine which can be fixed. This was not, until recently, widely accepted. Either the body was not viewed as a machine or it was seen as a particular type of machine that was programmed to fail. The physicist Geoffrey West, for example, calculates that 120 is the maximum age for a human being by comparing us with other creatures. Biological systems simply cannot sustain themselves beyond a certain point.

But then along comes Tom Kirkwood, professor of medicine at Newcastle University and a Reith lecturer. Kirkwood produced the “disposable soma” theory. As far as the genes are concerned, our sole function is to reproduce. Our bodies put so much energy into this that, once our reproductive years are behind us, there is nothing left to keep us going.

The genes that specify maintenance functions — DNA repair, antioxidant enzymes, stress proteins — weaken in their effects. Disease finally strikes us down. The soma — the body — is disposable. But the point is we do not die, we are killed.

“There is no in principle reason why we should die,” says John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “Tom Kirkwood was largely responsible for changing our view that ageing and dying were programmed into us as part of the evolutionary process.”

As Kirkwood puts it: “Maximum lifespan is not clock-driven but malleable, eg through modifying exposure to damage or enhancing somatic maintenance functions.” The body, in short, can be fixed.

The idea is, in medical terms, revolutionary; in social, political, psychological, philosophical, economic and even aesthetic terms it is earth-shaking, transformative, unimaginable in its implications. In a nutshell, it signals the end of the human.

Death has always defined us. The first creatures to laugh, said Vladimir Nabokov, were also the first creatures that knew they were to die. Self-awareness means, above all, awareness of one’s own ultimate extinction. But, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out in the 17th century, looking directly at death is like staring at the sun. It cannot be done.

And so conscious creatures have always embarked on elaborate programmes of death denial or death justification. Even the Neanderthals decorated their graves and positioned the corpses as if for another life. The great religions promised immortality in another realm or as part of the great wheel of existence. In fact, as the philosopher Roger Scruton has pointed out, all human civilisation might be defined as an attempt to give meaning to death.

In our day, civilisation might be defined not as giving meaning to death but as a desperate attempt to defer it. Staying young is our religion, and every health, cosmetic or diet fad offers just that. The rise of individual, as opposed to collective thinking, has inspired the conviction that the extinction of the individual is the only conceivable evil.

Furthermore, science has relativised death. Death used to be defined as the moment the heartbeat and breathing stopped. But then it was found that people could be revived from this condition, so the concept of brain-stem death was introduced. Now even this turns out to have uncertainties. Death, apparently, is no more than the moment when current medical competencies expire. Perhaps, in fact, death is optional.

Oddly, men fight for this idea more than women. Research by the psychologist Professor Sarah Hampson has shown that, in extremis, men are the sex that most clings on to life. Only 25% of women say they want radical interventions — resuscitation, ventilation, tube-feeding — to save their lives; 75% of men demand such actions as their right. Perhaps this is why men are the leaders in immortality research. But what will it all mean?

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” cries Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Mortals” just means people. That’s what we are, things that die.

But if we don’t die, what are we? Not human. Thinkers like Francis Fukuyama have argued that the destruction of human nature would be a catastrophe. Medical interventions aimed at immortality are, therefore, a potential source of evil. Others, like John Harris, argue that there is nothing so great about being human.

“I don’t think it’s important to be human. I have no attachment to my species membership. We know we’re descended from a small number of apes. If they’d got together and decided not to evolve into us, we’d not be here talking about this. There’s no reason why we should not evolve into something else.”

And yet some argue that the pursuit of immortality is deeply irrational. Leon Kass, an American biochemist and philosopher, points out that even if our bodies last for a thousand years or more our memories won’t. There will be no psychological continuity. We will still, in a sense, suffer extinction because our first self will change into a second and so on.

But Harris says: suppose we go through three selves — A, B and C. C can’t remember being A but can remember being B just as B can remember being A. There is a continuity, therefore, and it is much the same as the one in our lives now. We cannot remember being, say, three with any accuracy, but we know we were three and we have evidence — photographs, the memories of others — to prove it. Immortality may be strange, but not necessarily that much stranger than the lives we now live.

All of which is in the distant future. Closer at hand is the immediate impact of these new technologies on individuals and society.

“It will be total mayhem,” says de Grey of the moment when people realise that mouse experiments suggest immortality may soon be available.

“It will cease to be just me saying this sort of thing: all my colleagues will be agreeing that serious extension of the human healthy lifespan is foreseeable. No one will want to stay in risky jobs. But the biggest thing of all is that people will behave as in wartime. It will be a true war on ageing with everyone’s first priority being to end the slaughter.

“It will mean voting huge expenditure to expedite the remaining science to translate the technology from mice to humans, but also voting even bigger expenditure to train the staggering number of medical personnel to administer the therapy when it arrives. That’s why there will be no expense problems; the money will have already been spent, by governments, before the treatments are even developed.”

In other words, de Grey thinks most of the social problems will be solved by the time the technology arrives. He also thinks that at that point people will have to choose between living for ever and having children. Clearly they can’t do both as the population explosion would be huge.

He regards the imposition of such choices as reasonable. Others, however, believe the impact of immortality therapies would be to widen the gap between rich and poor and create intolerable global frictions. We are already facing the possibility of resource wars over water and oil; imagine the ferocity of the conflict if the resource in question was immortality.

On a lighter but no less gripping note, de Grey’s timescale presents a nice problem for a very spoilt generation, the babyboomers. This population bulge, caused by the increasing number of births after the second world war, covers people aged roughly between 50 and 60. If it is to be 30 years before immortality technology becomes available, this most pampered generation in human history might also be the last generation to die. They got their decaff lattes but they didn’t get eternal life. It is hard not to laugh.

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman are babyboomers in their mid-fifties and both have decided they want to live for ever. Their book describing how to do it — Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever — is to be published here in May. A three-step process is involved. The last step will be the advent of nanotechnology, when molecular-sized robots will run and repair our bodies continuously. The second step will be biotechnology — for example, the benefits of stem cell research, which are currently at least a decade away. But the first step is what you have to do now to stay alive.

It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs. Kurzweil takes 250 supplements a day and spend one whole day a week at a clinic.

“Whereas some of my contemporaries may be satisfied to embrace ageing gracefully as part of the cycle of life, that is not my view. It may be ‘natural’, but I don’t see anything positive in losing my mental agility, sensory acuity, physical limberness, sexual desire, or any other human ability. I view disease and death at any age as a calamity, as problems to be overcome. Until recently there was relatively little that could be done about our short lifespan other than to rationalise this tragedy as actually a good thing.”

Immortality or even just extreme longevity is, in this context, such a supreme goal that babyboomers in the dangerous fifties may be willing to pay for it by the extreme measures taken by Kurzweil and Grossman. After all, if the alternative is mere extinction, what choice do these secular, materialist individualists have?

It is a hard question to answer. Almost any of the traditional answers would be dismissed as deluded mythologies — attempts “to rationalise this tragedy as a good thing” — constructed in the face of what we took to be the inevitability of death. If death is not inevitable, all such mythologies becomes meaningless. We will no longer be foolish mortals, but wise immortals. We will no longer be human, we will have become the gods we have aspired to be ever since 1609 when Galileo proved the church’s astronomy wrong and human reason right. Only accidents — the falling piano, the hurtling asteroid — will remain to thwart our pretensions.

Welcome to immortality, the last consumer good, available soon at your local pharmacy.

HOW TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO LIVE FOREVER: THE 13-STEP APPLEYARD PROGRAMME

1 Don’t even think about smoking and, preferably, don’t hang glide.

2 Eliminate sugar to lower blood insulin levels. Use stevia as a sweetener. It is a South American plant that is both very sweet and good for you.

3 Don’t eat any animal fats. Government guidelies tend to say cut these down, but they probably only say this because they think it’s the best people can manage. No saturated fat at all is probably best.

4 Eat lots of vegetables that grow above ground. Those below ground are heavy in carbohydrates that turn into sugar and raise insulin levels.

5 Don’t overdo the fruit. Contrary to popular wisdom it’s not unconditionally good as it contains sugar. Non-drinking Arabs and Indians who sit around sipping orange juice all day end up with diabetes.

6 Eat nuts. For incompletely understood reasons, people who eat nuts live longer. Not salted peanuts, however (see 7).

7 Don’t salt things. Salt raises blood pressure and will kill you through a stroke or heart attack. For this reason, don’t touch processed food.

8 Don’t have heart bypass surgery or have a stent installed to hold a blocked artery open. Latest figures suggest neither works. People who live longer after them probably do so because the shock made them eat better and exercise more.

9 Have a massive medical assessment, preferably at Kronos in Phoenix, Arizona, to establish what you are doing wrong and, if possible, what genetic weaknesses you have. Continue these assessments throughout your life and adjust supplements accordingly. Read all the latest medical journals to keep up.

10 Exercise vigorously and daily but don’t run. Running is bad for your skeleton.

11 Take a child’s aspirin once a day to thin your blood and a much larger dose before you get on a plane. Ideally, don’t get on a plane.

12 Eat very little. Rats on restricted diets live longer but it is not known if this would damage humans — particularly their brains. So if you forget what 2+2 equals, eat more.

13 Ignore all of the above. They may be wrong and, if a piano falls on you, pointless.
 
Who wants to live forever?

The new movement of transhumanism

by Andy Clark and Vanessa Deij
3 December 2004

"I wouldn't offer people an extra 100 years. What I would see coming down the pike is to offer people an extra 10 years, and then an extra 10 years, and then an extra 10 years. When people say 'I don't want to live to be 200', they are imagining that they will end up a bag of bones in a bucket. What I'm saying is no, I want you to live a healthy, vigorous life for another 10 years, and then you can decide. If you want to commit suicide then, I'm not going to stand in your way." James Hughes

Proponents of transhumanism say nanotechnology will allow humans to radically rebuild and extend their bodies - this will be done with the help of 'nanobots' - tiny robots smaller than human blood cells that will travel around the body fixing DNA errors, fighting poisons and expanding intelligence. The Amsterdam Forum this week examines what was once science fiction and is rapidly becoming reality.

Host Andy Clark is joined for the discussion by James Hughes who teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford. Dr Hughes also serves as the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association. Also taking part is geneticist David King, the director of the campaign group Human Genetics Alert.

Dr Hughes says he thinks people have four basic motivations to enhance themselves: to escape from sickness and disability; to live longer; to think faster and to be more intelligent; to be happier. Dr Hughes:

"We have to keep in mind that looking forward thousands of years the evolution of the human species and whatever its descendents may become is pretty incalculable. But in this century I think we are going to see some pretty dramatic changes I think we will see the indefinite suspension of ageing by the end of this century."

"I think we will see quite dramatic accelerations of the potential of human intelligence in this century. We need to think about the consequences for society of an indefinite suspension of the prospect of death, barring accident."

Scepticism
Dr King found it hard to share the belief that mankind was about to live forever, but admitted that transhumanism was pointing up crucial issues.

"I do think at the moment we are kind of talking about a science fiction fantasy . . . but these technologies are pointing to very fundamental crisis for humanity and one of the key issues of the 21st century will be how we defend the basic concept of humanity."

"I think transhumanism is actually a form of anti-humanism - in some of the transhumanist writings you can almost see the contempt for ordinary humanity and the limitedness of ordinary humanity."

Dr Hughes disagreed, saying transhumanism was all about the full realisation of human potential. Asked how he answered the accusation that transhumanists were seeking to interfere with nature, he said: "We don't see some bright shining line, that humanity has to respect, called 'thus far and no further' and then you've violated the natural order."
"Many of the things that we are proposing and many of the ideas that we are talking about, people's initial gut reactions and 'future shock' [to the ideas] will pass away very quickly, especially when they get offered the benefits of those technologies."

Enhancing nanotechnology is one of those proposals; the transhumanists say using nanotechnology will allow humans to radically rebuild and extend their bodies.

Self uploads
Transhumanists also say, in the future, protection against fatal accidents could be offered by 'mind uploading'; making a back up copy of the content of your brain to be re-used in a new brain in case of a fatal calamity.

And if the technology is developing a little more slowly than planned there's always 'cryonics', freezing your body after death to be thawed out a few decades later when science has the 'nanobots' ready to go.

Some Amsterdam Forum listeners, as Jasmin Nanda, Amritsar, India are worried about the effects of transhumanism on the environment "It's a very tempting idea, to live for hundreds of years but very foolish when you come to think of the long-term consequences. Our planet is already over-populated thanks to the increase in life span due to medical intervention and we are already facing global problems due to fast depleting natural resources. Moreover to live that long for what and whom? Death is nature's way of recycling and maintaining the ecological balance of all life forms and it should be respected. Yes, nanobots can be used in a way to save those in the prime of their lives but certainly not for ever, that life could be quite boring."

Dr Hughes disagrees and says: "I don't think there actually is a moral compulsion on any individual not to take a life extension medication or treatment in order to ensure that the planet survives. I think that human life is more valuable than that. I think that what we really need to do is figure out a way to keep everyone alive and then figure out how we are going to do that."

Other Amsterdam Forum listeners also had their say in the debate. Here's a short selection:

RA Dirven from Voorburg, the Netherlands: "I am a transhumanist. I expect there's a crude 50 percent chance the world is going to be 'the same old mess' in my lifetime or the world will accelerate, with medical technologies, nanotech, space exploration, VR, (and so forth) improving life for everyone. To put it more bluntly, this way of doing this may make the world a whole lot more civilized, implying that I find the current state of affairs rather barbaric."

"But things are improving. If we avoid the dangers posed by terrorism, nuclear proliferation and resource exhaustion . . . we might find progress accelerating and making things better - or at least more interesting. But one of the biggest obstacles will be people who naysay, and when the things they didn't believe in come to pass, want to legislate them away - as George Bush is doing now with regards to cloning technology. "

"The ultimate of these developments can go a long way; there's even talk of acceleration going faster and faster and culminating in an explosion of development; a so called singularity of change, where landslide pace of change will leave nothing as it was - overnight."

Norman Honer, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: " Any technological evolution to a so-called transhuman is likely to come in a series of many small steps with the occasional breakthrough here and there. I think it is more rational and less disruptive for societies to assess these steps as they become apparent rather than trying to comprehend some ultimate transhuman, which, today, could seem like a new species."


Adam Daniel Mezei, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: "The speed at which new technology arrives to market creates a corporate demand for ever-speedier rates of innovative success. There is little tolerance for error in this sort of system."

"This in turn drives human beings into a state where speed equals success. It's something we see daily: with stress levels mounting dangerously because the rate at which people must respond to their correspondence and phone calls and emails is staggering!"

James Hughes also features in Radio Netherlands' Vox Humana programme The self-made man this week. The programme explores the use of computers in enhancing human ability, and also features cyborg Steve Mann.

© Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, all rights reserved
 
High-tech hope: escape from the sands of time
Life-extension movement gains momentum as baby boomers push to live longer

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
05 Aug 2004

Ray Kurzweil plans to live forever. To that end, he carefully chooses what he eats and drinks. On top of that he keeps his weight down, exercises, and takes dietary supplements - about 250 a day.

He feels his strategy is working. Though he was born 56 years ago, a recent exhaustive physical examination revealed that his body is that of a 40-year-old, he says.

So far, so good.

Mr. Kurzweil, a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist, knows even his most rigorous efforts to preserve his body won't by themselves lead to physical immortality. But his plan is to live in good health long enough, perhaps another 30 years, that future scientific advancements can take him the rest of the way.

It's a vision with extraordinary appeal. As the nation's 76 million baby boomers march toward retirement - the first boomers turn 65 in 2011 - many are beginning to cast sidelong glances at what's come to be known as the life-extension movement.

Already in 2002, Americans spent about $43 billion on antiaging products and treatments - and that figure may rise to $64 billion by 2007, according to the market research company FIND/SVP. The bodies of more than 70 people in the United States, including baseball great Ted Williams, have been frozen in anticipation of future life-reviving technology.

There's little evidence so far that any of these strategies and treatments will work, scientists point out. Even the breakthroughs of the 20th century have done little to allow seniors to live longer.Still, skeptics admit that life- extension technologies will eventually emerge. And recent advances in genetics have generated a growing faith that such technologies will appear in decades rather than centuries.

Some observers call this faith a new religion.

"These people are saying, 'I don't want to die, and I'm going to do something about it,' " says Brian Alexander, author of "Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion." They were raised in the post-World War II era of a booming economy, grew up watching the wonders of science fiction, and were told they lived in a world where everything was going to be possible. "And then they're faced with death," he says. "That makes them angry."

There's a sense that they may be the last generation that is going to have to die, that they might just miss out on immortality, Mr. Alexander adds. "And that's going to be enormously frustrating."

Big advances in biotechnology in recent years, such as deciphering the human genome, may have also inflated expectations, says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Chicago and an internationally recognized expert on aging.

In some ways, the current movement echoes the early 20th-century eugenics movement, he says, which followed scientific advances in the understanding of genetics and also sought to perfect humans through genetic manipulation."When we acquire the ability to modify something that kills us, we become giddy and begin to believe that if we can modify this, we can modify that," says Dr. Olshansky, coauthor of the book "The Quest for Immortality." "And that has always been the belief that we can modify aging."

Today, "we're getting giddy again," he adds.

While it's true that the average life expectancy of an American rose from 47 years to 77 years during the 20th century, experts on aging point out that most of that increase was due to reducing deaths at early ages. The upper limit hasn't really changed. "A hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, there were people who made it out past 100 years of age," Olshansky says. "If you brought someone from 5,000 years ago into the present and gave them the lifestyles we have today, they would live equally long. We haven't changed at all biologically."

Even today's medical advances may be overstated. Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett has pointed out that the invention of antibiotics and other 20th-century medical "marvels" have contributed less than 4 percent to the total improvement in life expectancy since the 1700s. Instead, she calculates, longer average life spans are due to better basic public-health measures, including providing clean water, sewage systems, and better nutrition for the poor.

The life-extension argument, then, really centers on views of the future, the potential for breakthroughs, and the speed with which they might arrive.

"Everything they say about life extension is going to become true - and we're all going to be dead by then," says Alexander, who's been called a "fence sitter" on the question of life extension. "It may be 100 years, 500 years, who knows when it's going to happen. But there is a picture emerging now that there will be a thing called radical life extension, and people will live to be a couple of hundred years or more."

But life-extension advocates say that Alexander's time frame is much too long. It fails to take into account the fact that the pace of scientific discovery is quickening.

"Until recently, there wasn't much you could offer people" to radically extend life, says James Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, which advocates the ethical use of technology to overcome the limits of the human body. Now research into areas such as mineral supplements and the benefits of restricting the intake of calories is going to "cascade in the next couple of decades to the point where life extension will begin to radically extend," says Dr. Hughes, who teaches bioethics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

For example: Years of research on animals have suggested that cutting intake of calories in half increases their life span. Few people are willing to endure semistarvation to follow this regimen. However, within the next decade, drugs that mimic the effects of a restricted-calorie diet may become available, Hughes says. "We're very close to being able to have a genetic therapy or a pharmaceutical treatment which will turn on those mechanisms in the body and hopefully gain a one-third to 50 percent increase in life expectancy."

Further into the future, but still in this century, nanobots - tiny robots the size of molecules - may be able to do tasks such as replacing white or red blood cells, he predicts, fighting diseases and carrying oxygen much more efficiently than their biological counterparts and extending life even more dramatically.

Others don't share this techno-exuberance, remaining firmly in the "show me" camp. Upgrading the human body from Version 1.0 to Version 2.0, as computer whiz Kurzweil suggests, may run into unexpected challenges. So far, modifying genes in animals has almost always resulted in negative tradeoffs, Olshansky says. A turkey altered to have more white meat, for example, might also develop problems with infections.

"We may have to pay a price, and the price we pay may be something we don't like," he says. He adds that he'd be "absolutely ecstatic" if science could lengthen the average life span by 10 years.

If lives were ever extended dramatically, bioethicists foresee a number of disruptive questions that will emerge, ranging from practical issues like its effects on government retirement programs and overpopulation to profound philosophical questions about whether there is a natural, even beneficial, shape to human lives. Mortality may provide an urgency to our endeavors and drive humans to achieve, they say.

Alexander sees the search for life extension as a kind of new religion. "What religion has promised to give us is trial and tribulation now, but a reward at the end," he says. "And we will have everlasting life, and we will have happiness, and we'll have enhanced bodies and minds.

"Well, if we can give ourselves these things, why do we need to wait for God to give them to us? That's quite a challenge."

If long-lived humans in the future were just like those of today, after "500 years or 1,000 years we would develop a deep ennui, a profound despair by having more time than we know how to deal with," Kurzweil concedes. But that won't happen.

"We're also going to be expanding our mental horizons during that time," he says. "I think this is our destiny. This is the whole point of our evolution. This is the next step in evolution." Being human, he says, means to "expand our horizons." Humans have learned how to fly and even how to leave this planet. "We didn't stay within the limits of our biology.... We're going to expand our thinking beyond that."
Afterlife...on ice

• Cryonics (not to be confused with cryogenics) refers to the freezing and resuscitation of organisms.

• Some reptiles freeze in solid blocks of winter ice and revive when they thaw. Their secret: high levels of glucose - a natural antifreeze - in their blood.

• R. Ettinger's 1962 book "The Prospect of Immortality" began the cryonics movement. His Cryonics Institute preserves clients in liquid nitrogen. Cost per person: $28,000.

• More than 70 people are frozen in the US, including a man from 1967.

• Many scientists - such as plant cryo-preservation expert Paul Lynch of England's University of Derby - call human resurrection an impossibility.

SOURCES: University of Florida, cryonics.org, Derby Evening Telegraph.
 

SCARED A 'DYIN?

Steve Mason, February 23, 2003
Source: www.transhumanism.com/articles/2003/mason0301.php

We make some of our greatest gains
When we see old things
In new ways

There's a line from that classic tune "Old Man River" that goes: .tired a'livin but scared a'dyin. Interestingly enough, that probably sums up the feelings of a significant share of the population. As the average age goes up, an ever-greater number of people are finding that their lives have become decreasingly joyful and increasingly fearful. The aging process, during which our minds and our bodies deteriorate to mere shadows of our former youthful vigor, should prepare us for death. But it doesn't. People still fight for life, however unsatisfactory, just as the condemned criminal fights to file yet another appeal. And there's a kind of parallel there since, if you think about it, aren't we all really on Death Row?

Religion is a dead end - literally. The notion that one dies and things get better is so patently absurd that virtually no one with all his screws tight takes it seriously. Oh they may pretend to believe in a better place in the sky but for most, when the chips are down, no treatment is too costly and no procedure is too painful not to try to keep them from their final reward. And think about it, if they really took all that streets of gold business as fact, why would they so resist putting themselves in harm's way? If I honestly thought I had a ticket to Paradise in my pocket, I'd be working on being outa here!

So in the end, people invariably turn to science and technology: Forget what I said about a heavenly father and stem cell research.what can you do to keep me alive right now? And that brings me to my topic - what can be done?

Let's begin by dispelling the myth regarding an ever-increasing life span. If, a century ago, people lived only until 40 and now they regularly last into their 70's progress is being made right? Wrong. What has happened is that more babies are being kept alive. Think about it statistically. If one half of the newly born infants didn't survive their first year but then the other half lived on to reach the age of 80, the mean age would be 40. This is not far from the facts of a century ago. Indeed, the typical adult who reached maturity may actually have lived longer back then as a result of having gone through what amounted to a weeding out process. Most of the Founding Fathers lived long lives and Michelangelo almost made it to 90. In fact, the Bible mentions three score and ten (70 years of life) as an average.and that was two millenium ago. Very simply, the longer you live the longer you can expect to live. A 25-year-old male, for example, had a 72-year life expectancy at birth while men who have already made it to 65 can look forward to seeing their 81st birthday.

Of course it would be silly to deny that advances have been made. Most of these, however, turn out to be decidedly low tech and passe science. Things like central heating, pasteurized milk, clean water, closed sewers and adequate nutrition account for most "modern" gains in the battle against death. Getting the jump on just a handful of previously deadly diseases (measles, pneumonia, diphtheria, whooping cough and tuberculosis) made a big difference too. But even at that, Americans spend the most on health care yet rank only 24th in life expectance compared to other industrialize nations. People in Australia, France and Sweden live 73 years to our 70 and in Japan they typically make it all the way to 74 and a half. Too much weight and too little exercise may explain this discrepancy but even if all diseases were eliminated.it would add only about ten years to the average life span.

The fact is, we die as a result of a built in, preprogrammed, hardwired aging process. Exactly how this process took us from healthy adults to senile seniors was something that might only be guessed at 50 years ago. One of the theories, the Hayflick Limit, said our cells contained a kind of counter. They reproduced just so many times and then stopped. An inevitable downhill slide followed. Today, it looks like Hayflick was on the money. The actual mechanism may be compared to a shoelace. Each cellular division wears a bit off the plastic end until, when that magical three score and ten is reached, all the plastic is gone and the lace itself begins to unravel. The details of just how this happens (and how it might be prevented from happening) are covered at great length in many other places so I won't bore you with all the complicated chemical interactions.even though your life depends on them. Instead, I'd like to explore the man-in-the-street's reaction to his possible immortality.

The man in the street hasn't a clue. The notion that death might have a cure is not part of his thinking. Old habits are hard to break. He pays his taxes and he expects to die. Indeed, some philosophers have suggested that life is of value only because of the alternative. Personally, I'm more of the object in motion tends to want to stay in motion school of thought. This made it especially difficult for me to comprehend a caller to one of those late night talk radio shows where I happened to be the guest. The discussion had gotten around to cryogenics and the possibility of freezing and then eventually thawing out the current crop of terminally ill. Starting with a "Yea but" the man on the phone said, "if George Washington could have been frozen and brought back today.what would he do for a living? Being a General would be out - he would know nothing of nuclear weapons - and he couldn't even fall back on his surveying experience because all surveyors today have to belong to a union." So here I was offering everlasting life and here was this cretin concerned with union affiliations. But he was the rule and I was the exception. Just ask around and you'll see what I mean. With the possible exception of Ponce de Leon, most men (including those in policymaking positions) simply can't conceive of a Fountain of Youth. And yet, what fools these mortals be, when immortality is just around the proverbial corner.

And it is. A crash program similar to the one that put a man on the moon in a decade can, I firmly believe, cure death. But without the will, there is no way. Physically we are very, very close. Emotionally there are still many miles to go before we agree to avert the sleep of death. And even you probably doubt my word. How can Mankind possibly beat the Grim Reaper? Well, genetic engineering is one promising avenue. Now that we know our cells have a reproductive limit, simply change that limit. We know the mechanism of the malfunction and we have the tools to fix it. Neither of these, the cause nor the possible cure was ever know before in the thousands of years of Human history since exiting the cave. Identifying the nature of the beast is in itself an incredible leap forward.

And there's one final thing to consider, the way two or more people will so often discover the same thing at the same time. This makes it difficult for future generations to give credit where it's due. Who figured it out first exactly? The reason I bring this up is because there are actually several approaches to immortality (or at least a greatly extended life span) that are close to fruition. Along with the most promising, genetic engineering, there's nano technology which is supposed to have a greater impact on our world than computers by 2015. You can easily see how being able to manipulate individual cells is going to have an extraordinary effect on the nature of living things. And too, with those computers doubling in power and halving in price every couple of years, the day when you'll be able to download your brain can't be far away. As luck would have it, the breakthroughs may well come together with researchers at this lab getting cells to make perfect copies forever and researchers at that lab skipping biology altogether and moving directly into human minds mirrored in machines.

 LOOK AT IT THIS WAY

There will be lots of questions to answer. Will life lose its meaning in the absence of death? There will be lots of problems to solve. What will we do on an already crowded planet if people keep getting on but stop getting off? But the bottom line: Hey Buddy.yours may well be the last generation to die. Think about that.


------------

Dr. Stephen Mason is a psychologist living in Southern California. He is a former university professor, syndicated columnist, talk radio show host and comedy writer for Joan Rivers. He is a member of MENSA, a recipient of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal's Citizen Sane award, and once appeared as a centerfold in Playgirl magazine. Currently, he serves as Media Affairs Director of The Lifestyles Organization. Address comments and column suggestions to him directly at DrSBMason@aol.com.