Living to 1,000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/aubrey-de-grey
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/aubrey-de-grey-ageing-research

Aubrey de Grey: We don't have to get sick as we get older
If we can stop the physical deterioration that comes with age, molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why human beings shouldn't live to be 1,000
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Caspar Llewellyn Smith
The Observer, Sunday 1 August 2010
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Good innings: Aubrey de Grey wants to help people live to a very ripe old age. Photograph: Roland Kemp / Rex Features
With his beard and robust opinions, there's something of the Old Testament prophet about Aubrey de Grey. But the 47-year-old gerontologist (who studies the process of ageing) says his belief that he might live to the very ripe old age of 1,000 is founded not on faith but science. De Grey studied computer science at Cambridge University, but became interested in the problem of ageing more than a decade ago and is the co-founder of the Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in the US.

What's so wrong with getting old?

It is simply that people get sick when they get older. I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage. This is harmless at low levels but eventually it causes the diseases and disabilities of old age – which most people don't think are any fun.

Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world?

Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don't affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing.

Why does the world not recognise this?

People have been trying to claim that we can defeat ageing since the dawn of time, and they haven't been terribly successful; there is a tendency to think there is some sort of inevitability about ageing – it somehow transcends our technological abilities in principle, which is complete nonsense.

And when people have made their peace with this ghastly thing that is going to happen to them at some time in the distant future, they tend to be rather reluctant to re-engage the question when someone comes along with a new idea.

Is it that our bodies just stop being so proactive about living?

Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate. The body does try as hard as it can to fight these things but it is a losing battle. So we are not going to be able to do anything significant about ageing without hi-tech intervention – which is what I'm working on.

Ageing involves the process of metabolism, and then deterioration, and then pathology – is that right?

Basically, that's right. Metabolism involves a vastly complicated network of biochemical and cellular processes that are linked and that succeed in keeping us alive for as long as they do, but they have these side effects.

The side-effects start even before we are born, they go on throughout life and they are manifested as, for example, the accumulation of various types of molecular garbage inside cells and outside cells, or simply as cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. Gradually those changes at the molecular and cellular level accumulate and accumulate and eventually they start to get in the way of metabolism, and that's where pathology comes.

You've identified seven particular areas of cellular decay that might be combated. Can you give examples?

I just mentioned cells dying and not being automatically replaced, that's one. Another is cells not dying when they ought to – certain types of cells are supposed to turn over and sometimes they lose the ability to respond to signals that tell them to die.

A third is cells dividing too much – they may be dying when they are supposed to but dividing too much, and that is what cancer is.

We've known what causes cancer for some time but we are a long way from being able to cure it, aren't we?

I certainly don't claim that any of this is easy. Some of it is easier – but I've always viewed cancer as the single hardest aspect of ageing to fix.

You've talked about enriching people's lives, but isn't it the very fact of death that gives our lives meaning?

That's nonsense. The fact is, people don't want to get sick. I'm just a practical guy. I don't want to get sick and I don't want you to get sick and that's what this is all about. I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30.

You've said you think the first person to live to 1,000 may already be alive. Could that person be you?

It's conceivable that people in my age bracket, their 40s, are young enough to benefit from these therapies. I'd give it a 30% or 40% chance. But that is not why I do this – I do this because I'm interested in saving 100,000 lives a day.

Can the planet cope with people living so long?

That's to do with the balance of birth and death rates. It didn't take us too long to lower the birth rate after we more or less eliminated infant mortality 100 or 150 years ago. I don't see that it's sensible to regard the risk of a population spike as a reason not to give people the best healthcare that we can.

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Synchronium
1 August 2010 12:23AM

I once wrote an essay on the ethics of living forever. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad idea.

Here's that essay: http://www.synchronium.net/2008/11/18/living-forever-is-it-really-worth-it/

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Zadokk
1 August 2010 12:50AM

I don't think your essay can make the conclusion that it is a bad idea. I would agree that it is a precarious situation. After all, the idea of immortality is associated historically with Gods and most recently with nefarious AI robots so we all have a right to be concerned with the amount of power associated with it.

Dystopian speculations aside, the idea of longevity and life extension is certainly a good thing. Most of us value life and we especially value youth. Ageing is considered to be 'natural' but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily good or the 'right' way of living life, JS Mill told us that over a hundred years ago. In fact, postponing death is something that our genes have programmed us to do. We try to avoid death as much as possible everyday whether through instinctive reactions (e.g. dodging out the way of oncoming traffic) or complex rational decisions (e.g. choosing a private pension scheme).

Life is valuable and furthermore our individual lives are especially valuable to us. Many speculate (with good reason) that we are steadily approaching a technological singularity. This will no doubt bring with it existential risks that we are yet to truly understand. Nick Bostrom was recently in the press and his views got a re-airing. They are worth reading. But we should not be afraid of this coming change. We should embrace it.

I mentioned immortality right at the start, perhaps I misspoke. Life extension is just that, extension. It's about having control over one's body and deciding when it is one time's time to die. Perhaps we will get bored the longer we live and maybe at the age of 1,003 we will decide we have had enough. It is why research like this requires a new morality and a new approach to what life and death are.

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Zadokk
1 August 2010 12:52AM

I should point out that the first paragraph or my previous comment was aimed at Synchronium's self-promotion, not De Grey.

Best of luck to SENS.

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DavidNcUsa
1 August 2010 1:15AM

It is fairly clear that we are on the edge of a tranformation that will turn what has been the province of science fiction into science. The exact timing and content will only be known when it actually happens. But we are likely to achieve a more or less complete understanding of our biology in chemical terms. We are also likely to achieve the ability to modify it as we wish if we chose to do it. The time frame is clearly more than ten years and less than a thousand years. The current century is a pretty good ball park guess. It is reasonable to expext that this event will pose large problems for human beings and hard to predict what we (probably not me since I am old enough to escape it) will do with our new knowledge and powers.

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adundeemonkey
1 August 2010 1:21AM

I want to live forever, but only as long as i dont have to see all those that i love around me die.

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farfrom
1 August 2010 1:49AM

If only we could live longer and combine the energy and enthusiasm of youth with the experience and wisdom of age.
We just don't live long enough . , though we do live longer than most other large animals.

Even if there is reincarnation there would be amnesia.

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symmetric1
1 August 2010 1:56AM

@Synchronium I've noticed those who are against extended life spans are usually young, unhappy, or religious (and think they will live forever anyway).

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icurahuman2
1 August 2010 1:57AM

Humans are the only creatures that are so aware of their mortality that they are taught about death as soon as they are old enough to communicate. This knowledge effects our psychological health and personal behaviour unto the grave, and, is the cause of all religious motivation, reckless endeavour and subjective reasoning.

Without a religion, or a developed philosophy of life, procreation would not continue the species line; humans would shun bearing children as their children's lives must ultimately end in tragedy - this is the hidden reason you find so many childless couples among the intelligensia. The same reasoning applies to keeping pets, who usually live far shorter lives than humans; investing empathy in an animal that one day must die is setting oneself up for an emotionally damaging future event.

That we exist but for a few moments against the vastness of time leads many to search for the immortality we all deeply crave, and religious faith, though probably the most effective, is not the only measure of immortality we can recognise or attain. Celebrity is one way to leave an indelible mark that may extend the life of an individual, though immortality as such relies on the belief that the species will survive it's own plague behaviour.

I suggest that everything that has ever existed always will exist, and that the place where this immortality lives is the set-in-concrete position it takes in time. I also suggest that time is only relative to the perceptions of the perceiver and that when that perception ends, at the end of life, it merely begins anew. Should reality be affected by this re-invented perception to the point of an alteration, then multiple and infinite realities, and lives, would be the result.. Quantum mechanics, anyone?

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Knowles2
1 August 2010 2:00AM

Well I do not want to live forever.

Just long enough to do everything I want to do in life, an that a lot of stuff, I mean being able to stand on mars will not happen in my normal human life span or walking on the moon.
May be a thousand years will cover it or may be it will not but eventually I think I would like to find out what lay beyond death, but then again that does scare the hell out me to. I do not know I would like to imagine eventually we would be allow to choose when we are ready to take that path.

I am not sure whether we will come up with a immortality drug any time soon or in my time. I just hope that as a species where a individual can live forever we will still have the drive an ambition to keep evolving to keep pushing towards new technology an discover new wonders in our universe.

It be rather boring to to live forever an only have earth to explore, eventually you would run out of things to do an get bored.

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Basingstoke
1 August 2010 2:04AM

I just find Aubrey de Grey a rather ridiculous attention seeker, who is probably more interested in being famous than in doing science.
He has not discovered or invented anything that could actually help us to live longer, so what exactly is the point of him?

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farfrom
1 August 2010 2:09AM

What exactly is the point of any of us,including you Basingstoke

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rpclarkeuk
1 August 2010 2:14AM

Fifteen years ago I explained that the brain eventually runs out of memory storage space, "Does longer-term memory storage never become overloaded, and would such overload cause Alzheimer's disease and other dementia?"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11058422.
Of course it's much more profitable to research the non-existent cure than the proof it is impossible.
Yet no challenge has been made to the theory.
I subsequently enhanced the theory with an explanation of how there is another, prinicipal overloading within neurons (not got round to publishing as I am very ill). Basically the human mind does not have room for a 1000 years of experience to be worthwhilely recorded. Why should it?

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antipodean1
1 August 2010 2:39AM

@rpclarkeuk

the human mind does not have room for a 1000 years of experience to be worthwhilely recorded. Why should it?

So what. I am in my forties and it seems like i have forgotten more than i can remember already. Thats what computers are for! I have lots of digital memories now which is great.
Living longer will doubtless present lots of challenges for which we are not ready.
However I would love to experience some negligible senescence.
I realise thats a bit selfish though.

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farfrom
1 August 2010 2:44AM

The deletion of memories would seem to occur.

My wife has learned to drive a standard shift several times but it's gone in 6 months. I don't know whether new memories have replaced the the leartning.

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NapoleonKaramazov
1 August 2010 2:51AM

Humans are the only creatures that are so aware of their mortality that they are taught about death as soon as they are old enough to communicate. This knowledge effects our psychological health and personal behaviour unto the grave, and, is the cause of all religious motivation, reckless endeavour and subjective reasoning.

Suppose we really can extend life from a molecular biological basis- are people still going to get run over by car, will trains crash, will planes occasionally fall out of the sky? Of ocurse they will and people will die. The only way for these bio enchanced people to guarantee survival is to live in a hermetically sealed chamber- that would have an extremly negative effect on a person's mental health.

What's more, if people are really taught that they will not die, they will get a much more greater psychological shock when inevitably someone does die- getting run over by a car for example.

Arguing that our knowledge of our mortality affects our psychological health is undoubtedly true, but it would be much worsley affected if we were falsely led to beleive we are immortal.

Without a religion, or a developed philosophy of life, procreation would not continue the species line; humans would shun bearing children as their children's lives must ultimately end in tragedy - this is the hidden reason you find so many childless couples among the intelligensia. The same reasoning applies to keeping pets, who usually live far shorter lives than humans; investing empathy in an animal that one day must die is setting oneself up for an emotionally damaging future event.

Plenty of atheists still have children. There are plenty of non intelligenstia who do not have children. There are plenty of religious people who do not have children.

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Novelist
1 August 2010 3:43AM

So long as Gordon and Tony don't get any magic elixir of life.
Oh no! I just realised - Tony already gets his supply from Cliff.

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Novelist
1 August 2010 3:47AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/users/rpclarkeuk

Basically the human mind does not have room for a 1000 years of experience to be worthwhilely recorded. Why should it?

- That's what 420 is for, fool!

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epinoa
1 August 2010 4:07AM

Ach, aging is just peer pressure.

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Elzadra
1 August 2010 4:50AM

Does anyone believe that anti-aging therapies will be handed out to everybody? Nobody seems to ask De Grey this question. The techniques will, at least at first, be very expensive, while also being experimental and borderline dangerous. But gradually we'll notice that certain very rich people are staying young and healthy for an awfully long time and it doesn't seem to be all down to plastic surgery. This could be the real class division of the future.

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Irina777
1 August 2010 6:39AM

When I was reading the article I asked myself a question "Do I want to love so long?" Of course, no ! People are getting older, because they are very tired of living. The older person becomes the more bored the life....

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Irina777
1 August 2010 6:42AM

Sorry, I wanted to write "Do I want to live so long?"

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rerab2
1 August 2010 7:31AM

It won t be much fun being 1000 - or even 21 - as the environment degrades, population rises, water and food become scarcer, energy shortages make life unbearably hard, society breaks down etc. It will be the Ik again - writ large.
The lucky ones will be the dead,

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PendulumAntiquity
1 August 2010 7:34AM

I'll wager there's more chance of extending life translating the knowledge in the brain to another medium. The body's a fragile container, evolutionarily expendable, processing biomatter for energy a gurgling stinky business, incurring periods of immobility. Plus, we want upgrades!

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thigham
1 August 2010 7:54AM

Oh god not Aubrey de Grey again! This man just forever talks about living forever, he's done nothing as far as I know to actually make it happen. It's such a ridiculous idea anyway, the world is full enough of people without having them all live forever. At the rate we are going the world is not going to be a place one would want to live eternally in anyway. The planet is slowing dying because of us. Hanging around with Aubrey and few other geeks as it finally reaches the end is not a proposition I for one welcome.
He should cut his beard too.

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freeword
1 August 2010 7:55AM

Alright then, let's get things straight.
Our bodies will be able to take a 1000 odd years, so will our brains or auxiliary systems to aid memory recollection, and then we can live happily ever after. And what about love and procreation, newborns coming into the world and increasing the population, feeding, dressing, housing the whole lot, and all that goes with it, like education, law and order.
It would bring about a whole revolution in humanity, in all aspects to say the least. So, when the planet does not contain us any longer because we would not have solved the moral problems of love and procreation, we would have to go deep into the sea, or underground, or colonise the solar system, or send traffic wardens around space to control massive spaceships making the rounds of our system.
The micro reorganisation of our cell system would necessarily bring about a macro revolution in our social order which no government, or world ngo, would be able to handle. To counter Dr Aubrey de Grey's cell manipulations we would just as well need other doctors in futurology to offer solutions for all problems being created? Anyone around... to start from down to earth current problems first before passing on to the apparently unfeasible?

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Clunie
1 August 2010 7:55AM

Irina:

People are getting older, because they are very tired of living.The older person becomes the more bored the life....

Eh? I hate to break it to you, but we don't get an option on the getting older thing - well, unless one counts death, which is rather terminal really.
As far as I'm aware, Aubrey de Grey wants to greatly slow down rather than actually stop the ageing process (and I'm sure if he were successful that our descendants a few hundred years hence will just love him and the other rich, greedy buggers who hang around for centuries to use up far more than everyone else's share of the ever-scarcer resources). But I think you'd need to stop time to actually stop age.

And it very much depends on the person on whether their life is boring or they are boring/bored - the two often go together anyway (and I've met bores of every age - there are plenty of super-narcissistic teen 20, 30, 40-somethings who'd give Aubrey de Grey a run for his money in the tedious self-obsession stakes). Doris Lessing and John Le Carre, meanwhile, are both getting on a bit and I sincerely doubt either of them could be boring company and just hope they hang around a few more years and keep writing - we fans a few decades younger would give our eye teeth for a millionth of their talent in youth or age. Also depends on one's definition of boredom.

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Greysquirrel
1 August 2010 8:07AM

Won't 1,000 years become the new 100?

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Clunie
1 August 2010 8:09AM

Was just thinking that it would be nice if Aubrey (his parents must have hated him) would take his head out of his no-doubt peachy youthful arse and check out the infant and premature mortality figures outside Western nations before making idiotic statements about how we ''more or less eliminated infant mortality.''

Perhaps when humans have managed to do so globally and there aren't nations where at 47 Mr. de Grey has already exceeded the average age for life expectancy by ten years (or by around 16 years, in Swaziland's case) , the whole idea won't sound quite so grotesquely narcissistic and adolescent; ''Don't wanna grow up, wanna live forever; I'm too good/special for death, me, death's for proles."

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Anarcher
1 August 2010 8:10AM

What will be the retirement age?

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azzeebeenin
1 August 2010 8:16AM

Aren't we all confusing eternal life with eternal youth which is the more preferable..

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Aussieinexcelsis
1 August 2010 8:49AM

What purpose could there be in a 1000 years of existence?: Perhaps Mahler may have finished his tenth and his eleventh and maybe Beethoven might of written a tenth and an a 78th (the mind boggles) and Keats may have got old and experienced middle age and Hendrix might have become what?

Your dearly missed Mum and Dad, your tragically taken children, your cancerous wife/partner...the list goes on and on.
Three score and ten looks positively minuscule in comparison but if anyone seriously thinks that a life spent in an eon of youthful bliss and shenagins is somehow missing what lifes about.

There is something quite tantalising about entering into that period of time when your chances of dying are far far better than when your young, it adds a certain (damn I know the French have a term for this) spark, a kind of second guessing about whether you should really bother going through the hassles of doing something that's slightly long term (like investing your money to spend in your latter years).

Come Mr Reaper and attend me at my annointed time.

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muppetteer
1 August 2010 8:50AM

What would people actually do, all day, every day, if they lived to 1000?

We already retire with about 30% of our life span ahead of us if you're lucky and live in a first world country... and even then, aside from getting up, planning the day around meals and going to bed, not that much actually happens for the average person... imagine centuries of that... day time TV would have to get a lot better for sustained life on that scale...

And isn't time relative? I remember talking to my grandmother who at 90, said that time goes so fast...

To anybody over the age of 30, the 6 week school holidays used to last forever when you were 7... now, 6 weeks seem to pass in the blinkmof an eye... i can't imagine how fast time would appear if I got to 300...

Scary stuff... Not sure it's for the best...

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RedRoseAndy
1 August 2010 9:11AM

Wanting to live forever is not as important as wanting to feel young again in most people's minds. The Kadir-Buxton Method is capable of doing just this. When the Queen Mother was in her seventies she told me in conversation that she would pay £1 million to feel 21 again. I performed the Kadir-Buxton Method on her, and the Queen Mother then said that she felt like a 24 year old. So near but so far!

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M0nkeym0n
1 August 2010 9:15AM

I can see it now, the television charity appeal of the future. "People are not dying anymore, we need to do something now..."

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martinique
1 August 2010 9:48AM

Have you ever noticed that the more time you have to do something, the more you put it off?
The despair (for most of us) of realising one's essential mediocrity (or would we all be geniuses, and what would that mean?), combined with loss of memory -or even worse endless technologically extended memory - and increasing indifference - all this prolonged indefinitely....
Ever read Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop? Even the 10th chapter of Gulliver's Travels? "Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public." Recognise this? We already have immortality in the form of corporations, which even possess personhood according to American law, which defines us all, as you know. And if you object that technological advance would keep people forever young: a whole society of adolescents? Eeuw.
And how much great literature would become irrelevant - "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near" - and our lives thus impoverished. We already have the ghastly sub-reality of endless radio & TV serials to remind us of endless triviality. Aging is shit. But the alternative...

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ptah
1 August 2010 9:52AM

What is the objective here. To live to a prescribed age - say 1000 years without any suffering or illness and then just ... not wake up anymore? To live on and on getting slower and slower but never experience suffering? To live like a 27 year old for ever - whizzing around with the joy of life?

I don't get what he wants to achieve. The idea of reducing suffering is always going to find support but to pander to adults who don't want to grow up and live with the consequences of their actions is naive.

The research is probably very interesting but it seems to be an elite branch of science which will offer the rank and file of society little benefit.

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ptah
1 August 2010 10:00AM

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sminky
1 August 2010 10:21AM

when we're born, we're created from the earth's bank of molecules. then when we die, our molecules go back into the earth. we never really cease to exist, we're just re-distributed into new forms, both living and non-living.

the really interesting bit is the inbetween bit that we're all in at the moment. this life. it's what we do with it that matters, not how long we're doing it for.

on a personal basis, i'm trying to appreciate it as fully as i can. trying to see as much of what's going on around me and trying and learn something while i'm here.

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PaulBowes01
1 August 2010 10:35AM

Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world?

Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing.

So we begin by ignoring everyone living outside 'the industrialised world'. Presumably it's okay for them to go on dying from preventable diseases and the effects of remediable poverty while de Grey encourages us to waste resources pursuing a selfish fantasy.

@Clunie gets this right: "grotesquely narcissistic and adolescent".

That doesn't mean that he won't find plenty of supporters, since 'narcissistic and adolescent' pretty well defines our culture.

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UweEllinghausen
1 August 2010 10:38AM

And you get married at age 250 and live for another 750 years with a nagging wife? No, thanks a lot.

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dormant
1 August 2010 10:42AM

The cost will not be prohibitive.

just take out a loan, repayable over 1,000 years.

And hope they raise the retirement age a tad.

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Rantalot
1 August 2010 10:51AM

Imagine how jaded and boring people would be after say 500 years .

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dinky1201
1 August 2010 11:06AM

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dinky1201
1 August 2010 11:08AM

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therealrodhull
1 August 2010 11:11AM

Basingstoke
1 Aug 2010, 2:04AM

He has not discovered or invented anything that could actually help us to live longer, so what exactly is the point of him?

The whole 'point' of him is to come up with the daft ideas that we don't need. In fact, so daft is his idea that as we have 6.5billion people on the planet (along with an already costly ageing population), thinking of ways to increase this number will actually do us more harm than good!

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Sessile
1 August 2010 11:15AM

The English dream. A world without kids.

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dholliday
1 August 2010 11:52AM

humans would shun bearing children as their children's lives must ultimately end in tragedy - this is the hidden reason you find so many childless couples among the intelligensia.

That's the funniest thing I've read all day.

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garetko
1 August 2010 11:52AM

Life should be about quality not quantity, much like beards

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HandandShrimp
1 August 2010 11:54AM

If we could get 500 year mortgages just think what it would do to property prices ;)

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lumpenfolk
1 August 2010 12:26PM

The population of the planet has almost doubled in my lifetime.

Although de Grey is not suggesting that everyone should be eligible for such treatment, it's interesting to think of the consequences.