MUST WE AGE?

      A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity’s greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging.

      Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely—technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future—is now within reach.

 

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage.  As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars.  We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage.  By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

People alive today could live to be a thousand years old

 

“His clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future.”

—Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging

 

“Seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause.”

—Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell

 

A leading researcher sketches the real “fountain of youth”

 

- The most realistic way to combat aging is to rejuvenate the body at the molecular and cellular level, removing accumulated damage and restoring us to a biologically younger state.  

- Comprehensive rejuvenation therapies can feasibly postpone age-related frailty and disease indefinitely, greatly extending our lives while eliminating, rather than lengthening, the period of late-life frailty and debilitation. 

- A comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies could probably be validated in laboratory mice within a decade.  We would then have a good chance of developing it for human use only a decade or two thereafter. 

- Removing the causes of aging-related deaths will also eliminate all the suffering that aging inflicts on most people in the last years of their lives. 

- Aging kills 100,000 people a day: old people, yes, but old people are people too.  Social concerns about the effects of defeating aging are legitimate but don’t outweigh the merits of saving so many lives and alleviating so much suffering.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., is chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation. His major research interests are the role and causes of all forms of cellular and molecular damage in mammalian aging, and the design of interventions to reverse the age-related accumulation of such damage. He has published extensively on these and other areas of gerontology. He is also editor-in-chief of the high-impact journal Rejuvenation Research, the only peer-reviewed academic periodical focusing on intervention in aging. He has formulated a wide-ranging plan for the comprehensive and eventually indefinite postponement of age-related physical and mental decline, named SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is the organizer of an ongoing series of conferences and workshops that focus on the key biomedical research relevant to SENS, and he also oversees the Methuselah Foundation’s growing sponsorship of SENS research worldwide.

 

Michael Rae is Dr. de Grey’s research assistant. He is the author of several scientific articles and commentaries in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is a longtime member and onetime board member of the Calorie Restriction Society, a main contributor to the society’s “How-to Guide,” and a core scientific investigator with the society’s Cohort Study, which seeks to document the feasibility of calorie restriction in humans and the potential human translatability of the anti-aging effects observed in laboratory organisms.