Meet the Methuselah man
Aubrey de Grey says humans can live forever...
They just don't know it yet
PETER CALAMAI
SCIENCE REPORTER, OTTAWA
Forget about being offered shares in a perpetual-motion machine or the promise of faster-than-light travel. Aubrey de Grey wants to sell you a seemingly impossible dream: an end to aging.The self-taught "theoretical biomedical gerontologist" says anyone can be Methuselah as long as they avoid accidental death and submit to a few medical therapies, as yet uninvented.And if the prospect of living for thousands of years — what he terms an "indefinite" healthy life — is a hard sell, that's only because society has put itself in a "trance" over aging and death."It's a coping strategy, because no one wants to spend their lives worrying about this ghastly thing that's going to happen to them on a fairly predictable time scale," de Grey says. "Once you're in this state, it's a bit difficult to notice when aging stops being inevitable and when the time has come that we've learned enough that we might have a fighting chance of doing something about it."For the 41-year-old Englishman, that time is now, and his self-assumed mission is to proselytize for "robust human regeneration." In the past five years, de Grey — trained as a computer scientist — has delivered countless speeches, including two last month in Canada.He has also poured out a stream of articles in peer-reviewed scientific literature and been the subject of feature articles in serious magazines like Fortune and last month's Technology Review, which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).He's got a seven-point research plan, a foundation, a New York public relations agency, and sympathizers and committed followers in Europe and North America.He is also the instigator of the M (for Methuselah) Prize, which awards a $1 million (U.S.) cheque to the researcher who can make two-year-old mice live to five years, tripling their expected remaining life."I reckon that is an impressive enough result that, if you read it in the paper, you would be convinced that there is a fair prospect that similar results might come in humans in the next couple of decades," de Grey says. "You wouldn't know that it was going to happen, but you wouldn't be able to carry on persuading yourself that it was impossible."And you would vote for it, so overnight it will become impossible to get elected except on a manifesto of having a proper war on aging. And I mean a war on aging on the scale of the war on Iraq and more."De Grey estimates that delivering success in mice could cost $100 million (U.S.) a year and take a decade.With an even bigger investment and the right breaks in the research lab, he says this impossible dream could arrive for humanity within 25 years. He calls that reaching "life extension escape velocity." "I'm certainly not saying that we will have therapies in 25 years that eliminate aging so thoroughly that people live to a thousand. I'm saying we will have therapies, and it is the rate of improvement of those therapies that will make people who are alive today live to a thousand."First-generation therapies would add 30 to 40 years to a healthy life span, even if started by someone already 60. While those people were enjoying their years as they approached 100, scientists would come up with second-generation therapies to extend life even more.Says de Grey, with what sounds like a touch of asperity, "Some people who accuse me of being completely mad for making these predictions are doing so largely because they haven't understood this very important point."All the above quotes by de Grey are printed as delivered. There were no false starts, no grammatical slips, no ums and ahs. For 75 minutes down a phone line from Cambridge, England, where he works as the computer support for a university genetics team, de Gray spoke in flawless, fluid prose.
`Overnight it will become impossible to get elected except on a manifesto of having a proper war on aging. And I mean a war on aging on the scale of the war on Iraq and more'
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Dr. Sherwin Nuland, a professor of surgery at Yale's medical school, had the same unnerving experience during 10 hours of talks with de Grey for his article in Technology Review. "He has the gift of expressing himself both verbally and in print with such clarity and completeness that a listener finds himself entranced by the flow of seemingly logical statements following one after the other," Nuland wrote, emphasizing "seemingly."Such seeming logic pervades Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), the seven components of the aging process that de Grey says can be tamed by the appropriate advances in molecular biology. (For more details, visit http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens.)On the phone, de Grey gallops though the list, not even pausing after saying, "I've got a really, really good cure for all age-related cancers."The "cure" depends on combining the experimental procedure of gene therapy with the currently controversial practice of stem-cell injection. The therapy would knock out the gene that produces an enzyme called telomerase, which is essential to cell division.Eliminating all telomerase would mean that cells couldn't reproduce uncontrollably, as in most cancers. But it would also mean an end to the replication of cells that need to divide, such as blood, skin and gut. So every decade or so, the genetically engineered humans would have to receive a stem-cell injection.On his website, de Grey comments, "The idea of course sounds crazy at first hearing, but it may well be possible."Some of the other therapies in the seven-point plan may initially involve up to a month's stay in hospital. In theory this could be reduced to no more than a day within a decade and eventually become just a simple injection or pill. Even huge initial costs aren't a barrier to launching the war on aging, in de Grey's view."One has to come up with a reason that outweighs the reason to cure aging, which is that it kills 100,000 people a day. One has to come up with a reason that it's better to continue condemning 100,000 people a day to an early death. Forever. And that's pretty difficult." When explaining the scientific aspects of his plan, de Grey is unfailingly patient. Yet he can be dismissive when dealing with the ethical considerations, especially the issue of adding yet more people to a world many already consider overcrowded."If you ask people whether they think it would be a good idea to cure aging completely, most people come over all solemn and ambivalent and start talking about overpopulation, inequality, immortal tyrant and rubbish like that," he says."What I like to emphasize is simply that the future should have the right to choose. We do not have the right to impose the unavailability of long life spans on future societies by hesitating now to develop the technology." Married since 1991, de Grey and his American wife have never wanted children. He's said numerous times that he's convinced that most people would opt for life extension over having children, if they had the choice. That view has stirred up criticism but, with characteristic frankness, he doesn't hesitate in repeating it."It could be that in 50 or 80 or 100 years' time when these technologies have been developed that society will decide to abandon them because the alternative is having very few children around, and people don't like having very few children around. "Or they may, alternatively, decide that children are a bit of a pain in the neck anyway and it's actually more fun to carry on not getting old and to do other things with one's life."We don't know what society will choose to do, and we have no right to guess."Additional articles by Peter Calamai › Get the NEW Sunday paper! Save 50% now! |
