 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
A Death-Defying Theorist
Tuesday, November 1, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time
Aubrey de Grey believes that some people alive right now could live to be 1,000 years old. Aging is not, in his view, inevitable, and medical science should be able to reverse its effects in the next decade or two. Mr. de Grey's ideas have won him plenty of praise and criticism. Supporters say that Mr. de Grey is brilliant, if overly optimistic. Detractors say his theories are ludicrous, and point out that he never sets foot in a laboratory.
But does Mr. de Grey's ability to step back and review others' research allow him to make connections that a specialist might miss? Is mainstream gerontology handicapped by viewing death as a foregone conclusion? What about Mr. de Grey's claim that the best thinkers tend to avoid gerontology because progress in the field is so incremental?
If he turns out to be right, what are the implications? And if his theory is bunk, why hasn't anyone accepted an offer of $20,000 to prove it?
» The Man Who Would Murder Death (10/28/2005)
Aubrey de Grey holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. He is married to the geneticist Adelaide Carpenter.
Thomas Bartlett (Moderator):
Hello everyone. I'm Tom Bartlett, a reporter here at the Chronicle, and I'll be moderating today's chat. I'm pleased to welcome Aubrey de Grey, who will be answering your questions ... we already have a bunch of good ones so let's get started.
Question from Jason P. Haggar, law student and banker:
How much money do you think it would take to radically increase (100 or more years) the average lifespan in the next 20 years? $10,000,000,000, $200,000,000,000 or much more?
Aubrey de Grey:
I'll answer in two steps. I think it'll take in the region of $1 billion to demonstrate in mice that radical life extension in humans is possible, and that'll take about ten years if the money appears at once. The money needed to translate the mouse technologies to humans could be very large, but not in practical terms, because the world will be at war. What I mean is that public attitudes to spending money on curing aging as soon as possible will be unlike anything we've seen in the past other than wartime -- people will embrace high taxes and temporarily diminished wealth, just in order to end the slaughter as soon as possible. So it's not really possible to put a number on it: the redistribution of resources will be so wide-ranging that one has to retreat to the basic fact that money is actually just a way of exchanging wealth, not wealth itself.
Question from Leslie, consulting company:
This notion brings to mind the "Struldbrugs," from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. They are a race of immortals, whom Gulliver expects will be full of wisdom and happiness but finds instead that they spend their extra years in decrepit senility. The same general idea was expressed in a recent cartoon in the New Yorker, I believe. The question: what will assure that all those extra years are worth living?
Aubrey de Grey:
Biology will ensure that they are worth living: the Struldbrugg concept (often called the Tithonus error) is not plausible because being frail and decrepit is inherently risky. Frail people can only escape death from infections and such like for so long. Thus, the only way we'll be able to extend lifespan is by extending healthy life.
Question from Frank Forman, U.S. Department of Education:
The economist's question, Sir: How can I make money off increasing life expectancies?The trick is to find *specific* companies that will actually make products that will extend life and do so profitably. In addition, I must have reason to think I am better at predicting their future profit streams than other investors. Otherwise, the price of the stock will already be high and I won't make any additional money. Can you give some advice?
Aubrey de Grey:
Companies that make equipment needed for cryonics -- large dewars, that sort of thing -- are a good bet, because long before these therapies actually arrive they will be seen to be on the horizon and lots of people will realise that cryonics isn't so dumb after all. Your reason for predicting those companies' future profits better than other investors is that other investors mostly haven't asked me your question and are mostly not reading this answer.
Question from Patricia Schwarz:
Mr. de Grey, do you believe the planet could actually support a population with an average lifespan of 1000 years where adults spend 900 or so of those years able to produce children? Or is this idea only environmentally feasible because the treatments will be expensive enough to confine their access to the ultra-wealthy?
Aubrey de Grey:
I think we will maintain a more-or-less constant globl population. Either we will choose not to use life-extension therapies, so as to make room for lots of children, or else we will choose to live very long lives and have very few children. Maybe some societies will choose one, some the other, some an intermediate policy. What matters today is to give future humanity the choice.
Question from Kris Grabarek, MIT:
Mr. de Grey,
In the Chronicle article describing your work you are quoted as saying "If I speed up the cure for aging by one day, then I've saved 100,000 people."
Can you please comment on whether in addition to looking to "cure aging" you are in the process of solving the problems that will result from the overpopulation caused by such a accomplishment.
I would argue that even if you save those 100,000 people per day, at least an equal number, if not more, will be killed or die due to the conflicts resulting from resource depletion caused by overpopulation. One can argue that the current Middle East conflicts are an example of this type of resource related conflict. Other examples have existed over history.
The other side of this arguement is who will have access to this miracle treatment? If the moral imperative is to cure aging, then isn't it a moral worng to deny it to others. Have you considered the distribution problems associated with an aging cure. Or is the cure for aging just another example of the haves receiving demi-god status over the have nots?
I do not doubt that a cure for aging is at some point in our future a possibility. The possibilities in manipulating biology are innumerable. The question here is whether it is something that we should be exploring? Where is the boundary between curing disease, and curing death?
Good luck to you.
Aubrey de Grey:
See my previous reply concerning overpopulation: what matters is that future people have the choice (whether individually, nationally or globally), not what choice we may think they will make.
Inequality of access is another profound issue -- but precisely because it is so profound, it will not be an issue in practice. When these therapies exist, access to them will be considered a human right just as fundamental as access to clean water -- so they will be provided by taxation and will be free at the point of delivery to anyone old enough to need them.
Question from Goldie Mulak, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine:
How does the peer-reviewed journal you edit, REJUVENATION RESEARCH, relate to your other work
Aubrey de Grey:
RR is the only peer-reviewed journal in the world that is focused on postponing aging. It's very new, so it may take another year or two to become the recognised journal of choice for life-extension research, but I'm sure it will have that status soon.
Question from Jean-Francois, Canadian University:
To what do you attribute the current lack of funding for this kind of research -- is it scientific momentum, political short-sightedness, lack of awareness, ...? What do we need to do get decision-makers to turn their attention to this problem before it becomes too late?
Aubrey de Grey:
It's mainly the "pro-aging trance" -- the fact that the historical inevitability of aging has made it a rational coping strategy to invent crazy reasons why aging is a good thing. Policy-makers will follow the public. The public will folow opinion-formers (in the media, mainly). They will follow the "experts". So the fast track is to convince the experts that SENS is sensible. I'm getting there -- see November's issue of EMBO Reports:
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v6/n11/index.html
Question from Kris Carlson, Concord, Massachusetts:
I am unclear on whether you reduce aging to 7 or 9 causes (as in the SAGE KE article). If 7, what about immune decline and endocrine changes? Thank you.
Aubrey de Grey:
Immune decline and endocrine changes are no longer in my list because I now recognise that they are covered by the other seven. Both of them are combinations of loss of cells, accumulation of death-resistant cells, and (to some extent) loss of function of cells due to accumulation of indigestible molecules. For example, immunosenescence is largely caused by (a) shrinkage of the thymus and (b) accumulation of inactive cytotoxic T cells specific for certain viruses.
Question from Jean-Francois, Consulting company:
If people choose to delay having children for a long time (say hundred of years), there will be tremendous impact on existing infrastructure (schools, universities, etc.). Technology directions would be affected -- making things fast wouldn't be so important as making them well. That kind of change will be monumental -- who is supposed to begin this debate?
Aubrey de Grey:
We are! I regard the stimulation of that debate as a key part of my work, just like the science itself.
Question from Chang-Su Lim, Virginia Tech:
I am in favor of his theory, some of which have been in my mind for years. But the challenge would be "How to achieve". My question is What makes Dr. de Grey think that his theory can be achieved easily, e.g., medical advancement? especially when we know just about what things are changing as we age at the cellular level.
Aubrey de Grey:
The main reason why SENS is foreseeable is because it sidesteps our ignorance. You are quite right that we are still enormously ignorant about the details of metabolism -- but when we ask "what is different about the composition of a 40-year old versus a 20-year old that might contribute to the 40-year-old having a shorter remaining life expectancy?", there are very few possibilities. In fact, there seem to be only seven (the SENS strands).
Question from Timothy Woo, U. of Warwick UK:
How do you propose to get over the current problems plagueing gene therapy, since most of your solutions involve it in some way?
Aubrey de Grey:
Gene therapy is a much more vibrant field than one might think from the media. There are two main points:
1) In the first instance we only need to get these therapies working in mice, in order to get people interested. Gene therapy works really very well in mice, because safety is not a big issue.
2) The main safety issue in human gene therapy is random integrtion -- when the engineered DNA gets into the chromosome in a way that disrupts other genes. Various technologies now exist to avoid this very well. They are still only being used in mice, but it's very likely that they'll be useable in humans in 10-20 years, which is when SENS will need them.
Question from Leslie, consulting company:
You stated earlier: "When these therapies exist, access to them will be considered a human right just as fundamental as access to clean water -- so they will be provided by taxation and will be free at the point of delivery to anyone old enough to need them." Isn't this a bit optimistic, given current socio-politcal realities? We NOW have many life-saving therapies that many (most) people don't get access to, and even access to water is limited or at risk of being privatized.
Aubrey de Grey:
Right -- I am indeed claiming that this will not follow past biomedical precedent. My reason is simply that the current non-universality of treatments that could save masses of lives is a result of lack of political will. It may be that, even when these therapies exist, the bulk of the population in some nations will still value life so little that they'll accept leaders who do not agitate for access to these therapies. But what matters is that maybe there will be poor nations that aim higher than that -- and those nations will be dangerous. Let's not forget that wealthy people and nations will be using these therapies in order to live a long time, not in order to get assassinated by resentful poor people. At present, people are willing to accept the absence of AIDS drugs because even if they had those drugs they would probably only live another decade or so before dying of violence or other diseases.
Aubrey de Grey:
Supplementary answer to Timothy Woo - one of the leaders in site-directed gene therapy is your namesake Savio Woo. See this story:
http://www.drugresearcher.com/news/ng.asp?n=63130-pnas-phenylketonuria-bacteriophage
Question from Mark Jones, U. Western Ontario, Canada:
Allow me to set the obvious ethical implications of your claims aside for a moment; can you give examples of the progress science has made already that persuade you to believe that the length of human life on earth can be extended so extensively already? In your opinion, this progress is not being held back by lack of scientific intelligence, so what do you believe are the reasons for the lack of progress in this area so far?
Aubrey de Grey:
I think that until recently the science of aging had not progressed far enough to let us design plausible interventions, but in the past 5-10 years it has reached that point. The main reason for lack of progress today is that most of the acknowledged experts in the biology of aging are being slow to take on board our improved understanding of what aging is and the available techniques to fix it. That's why I spend so much time debating these issues with my colleagues in biogerontology -- educating them, as I see it. When the biogerontological consensus "catches up with me" (as I see it), funding will be easy -- the public will believe aging is defeatable, so there will be votes in it.
Question from Courtney Everts Mykytyn, University of Southern California:
Dr. De Grey: You make a good many public predictions both about the prospects of scientific success and the possibilities of increased life spans. How do these predictions come to matter for you -- in other words, how valuable do you think that such public predictions are? And why do you see them as important? Thank you...
Aubrey de Grey:
I think it is absolutely essential that those with the appropriate expertise should give their best estimates of what can be achieved and how soon and with what probabiliy. Most of my colleagues shy away from this, making the excuse that any statement about what may be achieved is speculation and may raise false hopes. What they ignore is that society is predisposed to think aging will never be defeated, and therefore that if experts stay silent they are perpetuating unwarranted pessimism and therefore delaying progress (because if people think nothing is possible they won't agitate for the funding to let us try). It's not easy to communicate probabilities on such an emotive issue, but we as experts have a duty to do so to the best of our ability.
Thomas Bartlett (Moderator):
Thanks for joining us. And thanks to Aubrey de Grey for being with us today. Also, if you haven't done so, by all means read the article on Mr. de Grey. Here it is:
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i10/10a01401.htm
Aubrey de Grey:
If anyone is interested in finding out more about the science of life extension, the sociopolitical/ethical/psychological implications, and ways to help hasten the development of life-extension therapies, please visit my website:
http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/
Another site I recommend is the Methuselah Mouse Prize:
which is one of my initiatives for raising the profile of life-extension research.