The Times: How to live to be 1,000
By David Rowan
Fancy sticking around for another few hundred years? Dr Aubrey de Grey has some good news for you. "I see a true cure for human ageing as a very real possibility," the Cambridge University biogerontologist explains casually over a pint in his local. "I reckon we have a 50-50 chance of developing a human rejuvenation therapy that really works within ten to 15 years once we can show it works for mice - and the mice should take around ten years. At that point," he adds nonchalantly, rubbing his long ginger beard, "I see absolutely no limit on the age that humans could reach."
When a man in a pub promises you the secret to eternal life, you would normally be wise to walk swiftly away. But de Grey, the loquacious 41-year-old editor of the journal Rejuvenation Research, has become an influential if controversial voice among scientists studying why we age. Two years ago, the respected Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published his argument that "the indefinite postponement of ageing ... may be within sight", since when he has become a leading advocate for what has become known as "radical life extension". Sure, it will take billions of pounds, unprecedented political goodwill and the small matter of his scientific hunches being proved correct. Yet, with genetic engineering, stem-cell research and other technologies promising vast new opportunities to "correct" the body's ills, de Grey and his supporters are shaking up traditional approaches to treating old age.
"The gerontological establishment finds me alarming and refuses to engage with me," de Grey says with the arrogance of an outsider suddenly enjoying the limelight. "Fortunately I'm not encumbered by their conventional wisdom."
Admittedly, this tall, pale, ponytailed obsessive lacks any medical or experimental training. A computer scientist who worked with Clive Sinclair, his day job is to run the fruit-fly database in the university genetics department. Yet his provocative thinking on why the body dies has stirred up furious debate among the research community. By breaking ageing down into seven underlying processes, and suggesting interventions designed to disrupt them, de Grey claims to offer new hope for defeating heart disease, strokes, even cancer. "We won't be able to eliminate them from body, but we will develop therapies to knock them back repeatedly and restore the individual to healthy life. It's almost certain that, if we fix all the things that determine why we can only live to 120 today, we'll live for longer - to 130, 200 or perhaps even 5,000. Most of these treatments will be periodic - you'll go back for rejuvenation every few years and decide just how old you want to be today."
Some dismiss such sci-fi posturing as an audacious quest for attention. But what has led a distinguished international audience to debate de Grey's vision is the apparently credible science behind it. Advances in gene therapy have, for instance, raised new possibilities for correcting harmful mutations within our cells' mitochondria, one of his seven suggested fixes. The mitochondria, the machines in cells that provide our energy, contain DNA that is highly vulnerable to mutation - a process that damages the surrounding cells. Yet if this DNA could be copied from the mitochondria into the cell nuclei, de Grey explains, the number of mutations would collapse, potentially slowing the ageing process by half. The next step is to make it work for mice. As for cancer, he suggests, that could be permanently postponed through periodic stem-cell treatments. You would book yourself a blood transfusion every few years, just as today you have your house decorated.
Dr Jay Olshansky, a public-health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an authority on anti-ageing medicine, is one of those taking de Grey's views seriously - albeit with reservations. "What I like about Aubrey is he's making scientists think about influencing the ageing process in ways we haven't thought of before," Olshansky says. "What I disagree with are some of his conclusions. To say we're going to achieve life expectancies of 100, as a population, any time soon is outside the realm of possibility. I'd be elated if we could get ten more years of life by slowing down ageing. But talking about 50, 60, 5,000 more years? That's counterproductive."
For all the advances in healthcare and hygiene over the past century, western life expectancy has been nearing a plateau. In 1901, baby boys in the UK could expect to reach 45 and girls 48.7. Fifty years later, boys' life expectancy had shot up to 65.6 and girls' to 70.4; yet by 2001, the pace of growth had slowed, with boys at 75.7 and girls at 80.4. Despite our growing medical knowledge, the human lifespan appears to have peaked at around 120 years, with one or other of our vital bodily systems inevitably failing by this stage. Nor has our extended old-age been entirely happy news, with more of those years lived each decade in poor health.
A major barrier to finding a "solution" is the scientific establishment's failure to agree on what ageing actually is. Some gerontologists see it as an unavoidable process of life, whose decline may only be "managed"; others define it as a specific biological process that one day we may learn to switch off. Ask a group of specialists how we might bypass the apparent 120-year limit, and their answers range from targeting specific diseases such as cancer and restricting calorific intake to the use of biotechnology or nanotechnology to replenish our bodily functions.
In Jay Olshansky's view, it is misguided to see ageing as a "disease" that can be "fixed". Instead, it is the inevitable result of irreparable molecular damage caused in our cells as a by-product of living. Better, he suggests, to find ways to slow the ageing process and so postpone the onset of age-related diseases. Nor, he adds, should we draw too many conclusions from experiments on mice, worms or other creatures. Humans, as cognitive beings, require mental as well as physical health - and who would want a functioning centuries-old body if our minds had not caught up?
"In the next two decades, we'll probably be able to intervene in heart disease, cancer and strokes, learning enough about them either to significantly postpone them or in some cases eliminate them altogether," Olshansky believes. "But they're diseases. I'd be surprised if we have an intervention that could affect ageing itself. It's feasible that we'll be able to add 10 or 20 healthy years by slowing down the ageing process, but I seriously doubt if it will happen in time for you or me."
Of more immediate concern to Olshansky are the lurid claims being made for some commercially available treatments which claim to "reverse" or "stop" the ageing process. Two years ago, 51 leading researchers in the field signed a statement he drafted condemning "ineffective and potentially harmful anti-ageing interventions" being marketed that lacked any basis in science. These untested products - from dietary supplements to hormones - may cause harmful biochemical reactions and unpredictable side effects, he warns. "Prospective patients should keep their money in their pockets, as there is no scientific evidence to support the claims currently being made by the anti-ageing industry," he says. "Doctors who recommend these products are simply conducting biological experiments on their patients."
Olshansky has been particularly outspoken against the American Academy of Anti Ageing Medicine, a Chicago-based body which is organising London's "First International Anti-Ageing Conference" next Friday and Saturday.at Kensington Town Hall. The academy's founders have twice earned an unwelcome "Silver Fleece Award", which Olshansky founded with fellow scientists three years ago "to expose the most outrageous or exaggerated claims about slowing or reversing human aging". Their latest award, last March, went to a suite of anti-ageing products created by the academy's co-founders, Drs Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, which cost around £300 for a short-term course sold through the Market America website. "Market America uses clever hype and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to convince consumers that 'nutraceuticals' and 'cosmeceuticals' can alter the ageing process," Olshansky stated at the time. "About the only thing these anti-ageing products do is fatten the wallets of those selling them."
Klatz and Goldman have not responded well to Olshansky's criticisms. Indeed, last month they launched a $150 million lawsuit against him and a Harvard medical professor, Dr Thomas Perls, alleging "damage to their reputations". "We take great exception to Mr Olshansky and his tactics which have finally compelled us to file suit for various unprofessional and improper actions," Klatz tells The Times. ("They can do whatever they want," Olshansky replies, "but there's zero per cent chance that they're going to silence scientists on this topic.") "The only thing I sell are books," Klatz insists, professing outrage. "My website is non-commercial - we're just trying to advance science."
Nonetheless, Market America has been trumpeting its valuable partnership with Klatz and Goldman to develop new products designed to "catapult this company to the forefront of the anti-ageing market". The range, according to a Market America press release, promises "to slow the ageing process" through "a unique secretogogue that stimulates the pituitary gland to produce more human growth hormone", not forgetting its "powerful blend of vitamins, minerals, pro-hormones and herbs that help stimulate the production of cytokines and create a balanced intracellular environment". All claims, as far as Olshansky and his colleagues are concerned, that are simply unscientific, meaningless marketing pitches.
Klatz's association claims to represent "12,500 physicians, scientists, health professionals, and the health minded public from 73 countries" - who, via his website, are invited to spend $595 on "educational materials" or $150 on their paperback books that call for ageing to be treated "as a disease".He himself is the bestselling author of books such as Grow Young with Human Growth Hormone, Seven Anti-Aging Secrets and Stopping the Clock - even if his and Goldman's medical qualifications, obtained in Belize, have brought them into conflict with professional regulators in Illinois. Four years ago, both agreed to pay $5,000 penalties for allegedly identifying themselves as MDs in the state without being "properly licensed".
Still, as "a recognised leading authority in the new clinical science of anti-ageing", how does Klatz rate the promise of human longevity? "I see an end to the major causes of death," he replies with certainty. "In 1900, pneumonia, TB and diarrhoeal diseases were our biggest killers, yet not that many people die of them now. Today, if we could beat heart disease, cancer and diabetes, we could add 12 to 15 years to any person's life expectancy." Through stem-cell techniques, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, he says, "living to be 100 becomes no big tickle at all". Indeed, it is no longer the science but the politics that are standing in the way of great breakthroughs, Klatz adds. "The science is the easy part. The reason the power establishment wants to suppress stem-cell technology is because it puts in danger the disease-based model of medicine that gerontologists rely on."
Aubrey de Grey has accepted an invitation to speak at Klatz's London conference - although, he admits, he is "taking a bit of a risk" by associating with the academy. Still, he welcomes the opportunity to promote his theories, particularly to the gerontologists whom he, like Klatz, identifies as barriers to progress. "We only think there's anything wrong with curing ageing because we've grown up with it as something ghastly but inevitable," he claims. "That won't survive the creation of the mice. Then everything will change overnight. There'll be unprecedented pressure to cure ageing, and politicians will be unable to get elected without promising a Manhattan Project geared towards life extension. Then people will realise that all ethical objections are a smokescreen."
We might not be quite there yet - but let's just say that de Grey is one day proved right. How would society cope with the prospect of five or ten times our current life expectancy - and with some of us, perhaps the wealthy, facing millennia-long lifespans, while the less fortunate, and those with still untreatable diseases, continue to succumb to old-fashioned death? Would it even be ethical to "cure" old age?
It is a prospect that has greatly preoccupied John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University's School of Law, and one of our leading medical philosophers. Prof Harris's conclusion? There are no coherent ethical reasons to object to greatly increased life-spans and even "immortality". "If we believed that there was some moral imperative not to interfere with nature, we would not practise medicine, which in itself is a comprehensive attempt to frustrate the course of nature," he concludes. "If there is an imperative to saving life, it's very difficult to see why postponing death should not always be a good thing in moral terms."
Harris himself would be glad to sample the new therapies. "There's a lot of crap written that people would get bored if life was vastly extended, but only boring people would get bored," he reflects. "I could happily try the next million or two years." Besides, he adds, immortality is not invulnerability. "And we'd still be able to kill ourselves if we chose to."
(The Times, Body & Soul section, September 3, 2004)
Fancy sticking around for another few hundred years? Dr Aubrey de Grey has some good news for you. "I see a true cure for human ageing as a very real possibility," the Cambridge University biogerontologist explains casually over a pint in his local. "I reckon we have a 50-50 chance of developing a human rejuvenation therapy that really works within ten to 15 years once we can show it works for mice - and the mice should take around ten years. At that point," he adds nonchalantly, rubbing his long ginger beard, "I see absolutely no limit on the age that humans could reach."
When a man in a pub promises you the secret to eternal life, you would normally be wise to walk swiftly away. But de Grey, the loquacious 41-year-old editor of the journal Rejuvenation Research, has become an influential if controversial voice among scientists studying why we age. Two years ago, the respected Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published his argument that "the indefinite postponement of ageing ... may be within sight", since when he has become a leading advocate for what has become known as "radical life extension". Sure, it will take billions of pounds, unprecedented political goodwill and the small matter of his scientific hunches being proved correct. Yet, with genetic engineering, stem-cell research and other technologies promising vast new opportunities to "correct" the body's ills, de Grey and his supporters are shaking up traditional approaches to treating old age.
"The gerontological establishment finds me alarming and refuses to engage with me," de Grey says with the arrogance of an outsider suddenly enjoying the limelight. "Fortunately I'm not encumbered by their conventional wisdom."
Admittedly, this tall, pale, ponytailed obsessive lacks any medical or experimental training. A computer scientist who worked with Clive Sinclair, his day job is to run the fruit-fly database in the university genetics department. Yet his provocative thinking on why the body dies has stirred up furious debate among the research community. By breaking ageing down into seven underlying processes, and suggesting interventions designed to disrupt them, de Grey claims to offer new hope for defeating heart disease, strokes, even cancer. "We won't be able to eliminate them from body, but we will develop therapies to knock them back repeatedly and restore the individual to healthy life. It's almost certain that, if we fix all the things that determine why we can only live to 120 today, we'll live for longer - to 130, 200 or perhaps even 5,000. Most of these treatments will be periodic - you'll go back for rejuvenation every few years and decide just how old you want to be today."
Some dismiss such sci-fi posturing as an audacious quest for attention. But what has led a distinguished international audience to debate de Grey's vision is the apparently credible science behind it. Advances in gene therapy have, for instance, raised new possibilities for correcting harmful mutations within our cells' mitochondria, one of his seven suggested fixes. The mitochondria, the machines in cells that provide our energy, contain DNA that is highly vulnerable to mutation - a process that damages the surrounding cells. Yet if this DNA could be copied from the mitochondria into the cell nuclei, de Grey explains, the number of mutations would collapse, potentially slowing the ageing process by half. The next step is to make it work for mice. As for cancer, he suggests, that could be permanently postponed through periodic stem-cell treatments. You would book yourself a blood transfusion every few years, just as today you have your house decorated.
Dr Jay Olshansky, a public-health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an authority on anti-ageing medicine, is one of those taking de Grey's views seriously - albeit with reservations. "What I like about Aubrey is he's making scientists think about influencing the ageing process in ways we haven't thought of before," Olshansky says. "What I disagree with are some of his conclusions. To say we're going to achieve life expectancies of 100, as a population, any time soon is outside the realm of possibility. I'd be elated if we could get ten more years of life by slowing down ageing. But talking about 50, 60, 5,000 more years? That's counterproductive."
For all the advances in healthcare and hygiene over the past century, western life expectancy has been nearing a plateau. In 1901, baby boys in the UK could expect to reach 45 and girls 48.7. Fifty years later, boys' life expectancy had shot up to 65.6 and girls' to 70.4; yet by 2001, the pace of growth had slowed, with boys at 75.7 and girls at 80.4. Despite our growing medical knowledge, the human lifespan appears to have peaked at around 120 years, with one or other of our vital bodily systems inevitably failing by this stage. Nor has our extended old-age been entirely happy news, with more of those years lived each decade in poor health.
A major barrier to finding a "solution" is the scientific establishment's failure to agree on what ageing actually is. Some gerontologists see it as an unavoidable process of life, whose decline may only be "managed"; others define it as a specific biological process that one day we may learn to switch off. Ask a group of specialists how we might bypass the apparent 120-year limit, and their answers range from targeting specific diseases such as cancer and restricting calorific intake to the use of biotechnology or nanotechnology to replenish our bodily functions.
In Jay Olshansky's view, it is misguided to see ageing as a "disease" that can be "fixed". Instead, it is the inevitable result of irreparable molecular damage caused in our cells as a by-product of living. Better, he suggests, to find ways to slow the ageing process and so postpone the onset of age-related diseases. Nor, he adds, should we draw too many conclusions from experiments on mice, worms or other creatures. Humans, as cognitive beings, require mental as well as physical health - and who would want a functioning centuries-old body if our minds had not caught up?
"In the next two decades, we'll probably be able to intervene in heart disease, cancer and strokes, learning enough about them either to significantly postpone them or in some cases eliminate them altogether," Olshansky believes. "But they're diseases. I'd be surprised if we have an intervention that could affect ageing itself. It's feasible that we'll be able to add 10 or 20 healthy years by slowing down the ageing process, but I seriously doubt if it will happen in time for you or me."
Of more immediate concern to Olshansky are the lurid claims being made for some commercially available treatments which claim to "reverse" or "stop" the ageing process. Two years ago, 51 leading researchers in the field signed a statement he drafted condemning "ineffective and potentially harmful anti-ageing interventions" being marketed that lacked any basis in science. These untested products - from dietary supplements to hormones - may cause harmful biochemical reactions and unpredictable side effects, he warns. "Prospective patients should keep their money in their pockets, as there is no scientific evidence to support the claims currently being made by the anti-ageing industry," he says. "Doctors who recommend these products are simply conducting biological experiments on their patients."
Olshansky has been particularly outspoken against the American Academy of Anti Ageing Medicine, a Chicago-based body which is organising London's "First International Anti-Ageing Conference" next Friday and Saturday.at Kensington Town Hall. The academy's founders have twice earned an unwelcome "Silver Fleece Award", which Olshansky founded with fellow scientists three years ago "to expose the most outrageous or exaggerated claims about slowing or reversing human aging". Their latest award, last March, went to a suite of anti-ageing products created by the academy's co-founders, Drs Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, which cost around £300 for a short-term course sold through the Market America website. "Market America uses clever hype and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to convince consumers that 'nutraceuticals' and 'cosmeceuticals' can alter the ageing process," Olshansky stated at the time. "About the only thing these anti-ageing products do is fatten the wallets of those selling them."
Klatz and Goldman have not responded well to Olshansky's criticisms. Indeed, last month they launched a $150 million lawsuit against him and a Harvard medical professor, Dr Thomas Perls, alleging "damage to their reputations". "We take great exception to Mr Olshansky and his tactics which have finally compelled us to file suit for various unprofessional and improper actions," Klatz tells The Times. ("They can do whatever they want," Olshansky replies, "but there's zero per cent chance that they're going to silence scientists on this topic.") "The only thing I sell are books," Klatz insists, professing outrage. "My website is non-commercial - we're just trying to advance science."
Nonetheless, Market America has been trumpeting its valuable partnership with Klatz and Goldman to develop new products designed to "catapult this company to the forefront of the anti-ageing market". The range, according to a Market America press release, promises "to slow the ageing process" through "a unique secretogogue that stimulates the pituitary gland to produce more human growth hormone", not forgetting its "powerful blend of vitamins, minerals, pro-hormones and herbs that help stimulate the production of cytokines and create a balanced intracellular environment". All claims, as far as Olshansky and his colleagues are concerned, that are simply unscientific, meaningless marketing pitches.
Klatz's association claims to represent "12,500 physicians, scientists, health professionals, and the health minded public from 73 countries" - who, via his website, are invited to spend $595 on "educational materials" or $150 on their paperback books that call for ageing to be treated "as a disease".He himself is the bestselling author of books such as Grow Young with Human Growth Hormone, Seven Anti-Aging Secrets and Stopping the Clock - even if his and Goldman's medical qualifications, obtained in Belize, have brought them into conflict with professional regulators in Illinois. Four years ago, both agreed to pay $5,000 penalties for allegedly identifying themselves as MDs in the state without being "properly licensed".
Still, as "a recognised leading authority in the new clinical science of anti-ageing", how does Klatz rate the promise of human longevity? "I see an end to the major causes of death," he replies with certainty. "In 1900, pneumonia, TB and diarrhoeal diseases were our biggest killers, yet not that many people die of them now. Today, if we could beat heart disease, cancer and diabetes, we could add 12 to 15 years to any person's life expectancy." Through stem-cell techniques, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, he says, "living to be 100 becomes no big tickle at all". Indeed, it is no longer the science but the politics that are standing in the way of great breakthroughs, Klatz adds. "The science is the easy part. The reason the power establishment wants to suppress stem-cell technology is because it puts in danger the disease-based model of medicine that gerontologists rely on."
Aubrey de Grey has accepted an invitation to speak at Klatz's London conference - although, he admits, he is "taking a bit of a risk" by associating with the academy. Still, he welcomes the opportunity to promote his theories, particularly to the gerontologists whom he, like Klatz, identifies as barriers to progress. "We only think there's anything wrong with curing ageing because we've grown up with it as something ghastly but inevitable," he claims. "That won't survive the creation of the mice. Then everything will change overnight. There'll be unprecedented pressure to cure ageing, and politicians will be unable to get elected without promising a Manhattan Project geared towards life extension. Then people will realise that all ethical objections are a smokescreen."
We might not be quite there yet - but let's just say that de Grey is one day proved right. How would society cope with the prospect of five or ten times our current life expectancy - and with some of us, perhaps the wealthy, facing millennia-long lifespans, while the less fortunate, and those with still untreatable diseases, continue to succumb to old-fashioned death? Would it even be ethical to "cure" old age?
It is a prospect that has greatly preoccupied John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University's School of Law, and one of our leading medical philosophers. Prof Harris's conclusion? There are no coherent ethical reasons to object to greatly increased life-spans and even "immortality". "If we believed that there was some moral imperative not to interfere with nature, we would not practise medicine, which in itself is a comprehensive attempt to frustrate the course of nature," he concludes. "If there is an imperative to saving life, it's very difficult to see why postponing death should not always be a good thing in moral terms."
Harris himself would be glad to sample the new therapies. "There's a lot of crap written that people would get bored if life was vastly extended, but only boring people would get bored," he reflects. "I could happily try the next million or two years." Besides, he adds, immortality is not invulnerability. "And we'd still be able to kill ourselves if we chose to."
(The Times, Body & Soul section, September 3, 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, September 03, 2004
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