In the past decade, the concept of not growing old has crept from the pages of fiction into the mission statements of some of the best research institutions in the world. The branding is different — they speak of “regenerative medicine” or “tissue engineering” or “biogerontology” rather than “the elixir of youth” — but the basic idea is the same: decrepitude is not inevitable; science will help us to stop the rot.
By the reckoning of some scientists, there is a real-life Dorian Gray among us. That person may not be a beautiful young man with a mysterious portrait in the attic: in Oscar Wilde’s dark tale, a new film of which comes out tomorrow, the portrait ages and withers in Dorian’s stead, allowing him to remain perpetually handsome despite a life of debauchery. Rather, it is someone who, through a mixture of good genes, healthy lifestyle and timely medical interventions, will give every illusion of staying young throughout an extraordinarily long life.
While in the developed world every succeeding generation has enjoyed a longer life expectancy than the one before it — thanks primarily to modern sanitation, nutrition, disease control and a virtual end to infant mortality, which has stretched life expectancy from under 50 years to more than 75 in the past century — it is only this generation that has really dared to think of ageing as a “disease” that requires curing.
So, while the middle-aged of today can look forward to notching up about 80 or 90 years, some biologists have speculated that our children will routinely surpass the 120-year mark with their faculties intact. And although a double century still seems optimistic, some, such as Professor Steve Austad, of the University of Texas, think that the first person destined to reach 150 is already alive (in 2000 Austad made a $150 bet with Professor Jay Olshansky that by the year 2150 someone will have reached 150 years old in good mental shape; Professor Olshansky, at the University of Illinois, bet on 130). Austad’s optimism is based mostly on the incremental advances in life expectancy that accrue as society advances.
But the anti-ageing dream is further fuelled by the recent phenomenal advances in biology and biotechnology, which are giving us an insight into the processes that grind down our bodies and providing clues to how to combat them.
Ageing results from wear and tear on our cells; our bodies repair easily when young but their patching-up abilities become lacklustre or go awry as the years rack up. It is the relentless accumulation of cellular onslaughts that eventually overwhelms us, often in the form of age-related diseases such as cancers (which occur when faulty cells fail to self-destruct and gather to form tumours), arthritis and Alzheimer’s. Sometimes death just happens; it is the white flag of old age, the point of ultimate biological surrender.
There are armies of researchers studying how to repair the onslaughts and eradicate diseases of old age, buoyed by advances in genetics and stem-cell research. For example, reseachers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Maryland, reported in June that liver tumours in mice virtually vanished when treated with genetic snippets called microRNAs. “Since we were able to demonstrate such dramatic therapeutic benefit in this extremely aggressive model of human liver cancer, we are hopeful that similar strategies will be effective for patients with this disease,” said Dr Joshua Mendell, one of the astounded authors of the paper in the journal Cell.
Drug companies are on the case, because ageing afflicts everyone and makes every person in the developed world a potential customer. The current silver-haired generation is richer and vainer than any that has preceded it; the anti-ageing industry in the US alone is estimated to be worth $20 billion (£12 billion) and will grow by 9 per cent this year thanks to therapies to deal with menopause, hair loss, joint problems and ailing memories. Factor in the substantial number of billionaires who wake up one morning and decide that they don’t want to die (such as John Sperling, the $3 billion education-for-profit magnate who tried to buy the company that cloned Dolly the sheep) and you have a very competitive, fast-moving, well-funded research field with ready custom. Not all the research is being done in academic and company labs; numerous organisations, such as the Maximum Life Foundation (mission statement: where biotech, infotech and nanotech meet to reverse ageing by 2029), are marshalling biologists, futurists and doctors in their quest to extend lifespan radically.
Some researchers believe that if senescence (the ageing of an organism) can be reduced or even reversed, its end point — death — is no longer inevitable. The controversial British researcher Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why the human body cannot last for 1,000 years (barring accidents). He believes that such a modern-day Methuselah already walks among us. De Grey’s vision is close to that of “transhumanists”, people who believe in using science to transcend the limitations of being human, the most obvious limitation being death.
As de Grey puts it: “I claim that we are close to that point (someone living to 1,000) because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it is a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time — and each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.” His argument is that anti-ageing therapies will improve faster than we age, so that a young person today will be able to stave off ageing almost indefinitely.
but why would you want to live forever.....I mean wow boring