A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.
"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.
"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."
De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.
He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.
"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.
CHALLENGE
Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.
To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.
Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.
De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.
The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science."
They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."
CELL THERAPY
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.
But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.
"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."
De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.
He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there.
"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.
Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.
NO AGE LIMIT
Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.
Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.
"The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.
De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.
"If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.
De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.
In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.
"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said.
"What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said.
"But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."
Even though his book was written back in 2007, the same dilemmas exist today as they did back when the book hit the shelves (in my opinion):
1. Money--who's going to pay for the research and the treatment? We can contribute toward both, but it will take massive quantities (on the order of an X-prize) to get there. Does anyone honestly believe Medicare will pick up the tab for this stuff like they do for Avastin or that late-stage prostate cancer drug that costs $93,000/bottle?
2. Resources--where are we going to get enough embryonic stem cells to keep topping off everyone's tanks every decade or so?
3. Politics--all it takes is one R-T-L president to cut off funding of or use of embryonic stem cells, and the whole project is as scrapped as badly as the space program.
4. Fertility, or rather, lack of--this is a side-effect of the whole longevity scheme. Longevity in this manner directly affects men, and degrades their male chromosome to the point of infertility. In Ray Kurzweil's longevity book that uses nanobots to clean us out rather than stem cells, he asks the question "With vastly extended life spans, would it be necessary to even WANT to breed?"
5. My question: What happens when we outlive our usefulness, and become bored? Some of us are experiencing that now, and we have a normal lifespan--imagine what another 50-100 years would do for us. Talk about committing suicide!
6. My second question: What happens when all the people who know this longevity stuff and have tinkered with us so we all live longer die off themselves, taking their knowledge with them, or worse, nobody wishes to continue their work? Will we inevitably regress back to a (currently) normal lifespan, regain fertility, and come to the conclusion that we've made yet another mistake in evolution, just like we did by adopting agrarianism?
Sure, the benefits of a longer life are many: more time to accumulate necessary monies for retirement (for both you and our government), a longer life to actually start exploring space and coming home again, more time at home with family before feeling compelled to leave the nest, a longer time before puberty, a longer puberty itself, more time to have kids safely without risks of Down's syndrome (or other genetic abnormalities associated with aged eggs and sperm), more time to spend educating yourself, and so on.
The downfalls are equally numerous, and quite often the flip-side of the same issues listed above. Politics comes to mind--does longer living mean we have to endure MORE politicians in our lifetimes, or maybe their terms will be extended to compensate for the increased lifespan of voters? Would representation still hinge on the NUMBER of voters in a district, and not be broken up by age group (since there would be less of us)? I can tell you for sure it would mean more years you'd have to pay taxes, and probably higher ones too!
Would innovation come out of this? Yes and no. Yes if it was already there to come out (through imagination), and no if legislation hampers imagination. I'm concerned about the speed of breakthroughs--currently, we have break-neck speed on technological innovation, and it's almost to the point of complete saturation. How can I tell? Look at how much of our "breakthroughs" have been gratuitous--what new and futuristic function does an i-Pod serve, or an electric car, or a smart phone, or even Avastin? Nothing except ways to blow money on things you don't need. In the case of Avastin, only a handful of people were actually helped by this drug--the rest have only had their lives extended by a few weeks when already dying from Stage 4D breast cancer...at $125,000 a bottle.
$125,000 would have bought an awful lot of preventative produce.
What would innovation look like in the DeGray future? It would probably usher in a whole new raft of time-wasters, because we'd have nothing but time to waste. We may as well go back to a manual labor existence, because it was actually more leisurely than the push-button convenience world we live in now, where we slave away at jobs we hate just to pay for all the gratuitous technology.
We could live the DeGray life right now without stem cells, but with produce, proper supplementation, and manual labor, sparing all the money, politics, behavioral, and ethics issues.
For most of us, longevity to this degree would be gratuitous itself...living longer just to live longer. When do we get to rest (eternally)?
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