PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

It's thought that all species share a very basic survival tactic: the ability to switch their body's priorities from reproduction to survival under famine conditions. At a continuous 30% reduction in caloric intake, the creatures are able to better recover from injuries and significantly extend their life spans by slowing down the aging process. While this does help them survive long periods without food, it sounds kind of miserable, doesn't it? A life spent asexually is a life wasted (sorry, priests: Sex is rad. Also, as long as we're being honest here, those robes make you look fat). To make matters worse, you need to basically be starving to death forever to maintain this mechanism. So you're constantly hungry and bad at sex — it's like being a Bizarro John Goodman (see, because he's kind of a big guy, and he looks like a tender lover?).

But what if scientists could trigger the famine response without actually cutting calories, thereby still leaving the body the necessary resources to celebrate hump day?

Good news: They absolutely can! An enzyme called sirtuin, which is thought to mediate that famine reflex, is the subject of extensive recent experimentation. They're hoping to release drugs called sirtuin activators that, well... activate the sirtuin. Listen, not all science is inscrutable; sometimes it's just straight up with you.

A mild sirtuin activator called SRT501 is actually through human testing stages and slated for release relatively soon. In tests, it prompted a mild famine response in human subjects with no change in diet and no negative side effects. Nothing too crazy, just kind of neat, right? But wait, there's another — as yet unnamed — sibling drug that has also just started human testing... and is one thousand times more effective. No negative effects have been observed thus far, and the drug is on the fast track to approval for release. Within the next few lifetimes, there could easily be a drug available to you that will extend your overall health, healing abilities and life span considerably.

But what about the endgame — the fountain of youth, the Holy Grail, the... punching of father time in the beanbags? (Okay, so I ran out of euphemisms there, but you know what I mean.) The big one: The complete and total cessation of aging. True, literal immortality.

Forgive the candor, but screw fantasy: We did it.

Scientists at Yeshiva University in New York have completely stopped the aging process — brought it to an indefinite standstill — in an organ's cells by blocking the buildup of harmful proteins. The entire reason you age is the gradually increasing ineffectiveness of your cell's abilities to get rid of damaged proteins. We're trying to replicate that MCAT stuff to repair the muscles, and we're working on Sirtuin Activators to increase the healing factor, but the true scourge of aging is always going to be organ shutdown. In healthy cells, there's a cleaning method present called chaperone-mediated autophagy that eliminates damaged proteins. And as we age, it stops working; our organs begin to die.

By simply adding "extra copies" of CMA receptors to the cells, the researchers were able to artificially restart the cleaning mechanism, and they completely stopped a liver from showing any signs of aging whatsoever... .

... in mice.

All right, that's kind of a rip-off, I know. But the good news is that the central cause of cell damage is the same in humans as it is in mice, and those same Yeshiva researchers have already moved on to working with pharmaceutical companies on drugs that could kickstart these receptors in humans. So a new race of immortals isn't exactly being birthed tomorrow, but we've definitely passed step one. Eternal (or at least significantly longer, substantially improved) life could very well be a reality within your lifetime.

Of course, maybe you forgot why I'm here in the first place: My book. You know? The one called Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody?

All the pills in the world won't help you when the robots come for you, when the nanotech plagues start, when the asteroids hit and the skyscraper-sized tsunamis break the cities in half. All of those things are quite real, and some of them could happen at any moment. Actually, come to think of it, there are some pills that might help you — but they're not so much the "life-prolonging miracle" kind, than they are the "anti-depressant or narcotic" kind

A key component of living forever is functionality: Who wants immortality, if it means centuries of joint pain, 4AM breakfasts, driving 30 miles an hour on the freeway, and an inexplicable fondness for Larry King? The first step to meaningful longevity is extending the quality of our old age.

And that's great: Research in this field even benefits the existing elderly, who might not otherwise reap the full rewards of longevity extension breakthroughs. If they can't live forever, at least we make it so it doesn't feel like they're trapped in a wet bag — all achy, cold, and smelling of burlap — for the last thirty years of their lives.

Start with infirmity: When human muscles age, they become less able to repair themselves, therefore less able to heal and rebuild themselves stronger after exertion. It's the reason your grandma acts like you've suddenly become He-man when you lift a grocery bag for her, and also why you generally don't see geriatric dudes rockin' the half-shirts to show off their sweet abs... which is probably for the best, really. But science is on the path to fixing that (for better or worse).

Researchers at the University of California recently stated that "the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals." That means they've found a way to restart the healing process in old muscle. In other words, they could, at least partially, give the elderly their younger bodies back.

And they're not the only ones: University of Missouri scientists have isolated a longevity gene in mice called MCAT, which is responsible for destroying the destructive free radicals in mitochondria. While that sounds like inscrutable biology speak (or possibly the plot to the new Star Wars prequels,) it basically just means that, by injecting the gene into a harmless virus and infecting the mice with it, the researchers were able to artificially provoke a much higher level of physical health in the mice. They were able to run faster and farther than the other uninfected mice, and for much, much longer. If similar techniques could be applied to elderly humans, the boost in stamina could compensate (or maybe more than compensate) for the natural decay of aging. So we're giving senior citizens increased endurance and the heightened muscle-building abilities? You know what that means:

We all need to start mentally preparing for old people gangs.

That's just logically where this is going: Old people are notoriously grumpy, fed-up with your uppity crap, and are staring down their own mortality every day. Give them muscle and endurance back, and every day is Geriatric Fight Club.

But I digress. The point is, soon we could theoretically be more active, stronger, and extend our life spans. But that's all theory: None of what we've covered so far has actually been applied yet. And besides, living a longer, better life is great, but that's still not quite forever, is it? Scientists are going to have to significantly slow down ageing — or even stop it entirely — to achieve literal immortality. That's always going to be the stuff of science fiction, right? Not

The Japanese are famous for one thing: Disturbing pornography.

Well, that and the fact that they age wonderfully. They tend to live longer, show less mental and physical decline, and use their active golden years to teach more New Jersey kids karate through household chores than any other race. Part of this could be chalked up to lifestyle differences: they're not all motoring about on Rascal scooters loaded down with three hundred pounds of Bacon Ranchurrito fat — they stay active later in life, and eat much healthier than other countries, but those aren't the only factors. Studies have actually found that the Japanese are genetically biased towards a longer lifespan. Long ago, scientists had determined that a gene called FOXO3A was much more present in the extremely elderly Japanese, and this was likely responsible for their famously slow aging process.

Scientists have recently revisited that study, however, and this time they did it without the baffling bias that Japanese just mysteriously live forever through some kind of racially inherent magic; this time they performed the research on people of American and European ancestry as well. Guess what they found? Our extremely long-lived also possess the exact same gene! There's a common genetic explanation for why the extremely elderly, across all races and cultures, live as long as they do. But if a rare, select few have this longevity gene regardless of race, then why do the Japanese specifically have much higher percentages of extremely old senior citizens?

Let's face, it probably really is the diet and lifestyle.

So, unless you're willing to commit to morning calisthenics and cold octopus, you are sadly going to die earlier. But look on the bright side: you'll probably do so while popping sweet-ass wheelies on your fat-scooter, horking down some delicious combination of Ranch Dressing, bacon, cheddar, more bacon, and then Ranch again; it's a matter of quality over quantity, I guess is what I'm saying here.

So what was the point of explaining all this? Well, manipulating genetics is very possible; we do it every day. The hardest part of that manipulation is isolating the gene responsible for the desired behavior, and we've not only found it, but already know it's compatible with all humans, regardless of race. Now it's just a matter of figuring out a way to introduce FOXO3A to the human body, and everybody can live longer and healthier lives, even it's only more time we can use to spiral into infirmity on our Hover-Rounds, covered in Ham Kickers and Jumpin' Jack Cheesefood Sauce.

But what's the point of living longer if we're just going to decay? The worst part about getting old is... being old. Who wants to live forever if it's not in better shape? Nobody! Which is why we're well on our way to fixing that,

We've been trained to think that immortality is fantasy — the stuff of fairy tales and science fiction. But immortal creatures (in the sense that they do not decay or die of old age but can still be injured or killed) have been around pretty much since the dawn of time; they're actually somewhat common in nature. I'm not referring just to fungi or plant matter, either: There are plenty of actual living, breathing, moving animals that, if left completely unharmed, would simply never die. It's called negligible senescence, and you're probably already familiar with a few animals that possess it: Certain types of sturgeon, tortoises, and even lobsters could live forever if predators didn't get them first. Lobsters actually have an enzyme in their bodies called telomerase that repairs the damage in their DNA. So not only do they not age, they actually get more fertile and active as they get older.

Oh, and bigger. Much, much bigger.

Lobsters can theoretically live forever, and their size and overall virility would only increase with age. The only reason you're not slaving away beneath the thumb of bus-sized immortal super-lobsters is because nature cursed them with deliciousness (not literally, of course: There's a maximum size an animal with an exoskeleton can grow to, plus I'd like to believe that age would bring a tempered kind of wisdom to our lobster masters that would make slavery distasteful to them).

There are jellyfish that actually display negative senescence: When they're severely injured or begin to decline, they revert to a polyp form rather than dying. They simply start over as a baby, and there's no limit to how many times they can do it. If nothing had eaten the first of those jellyfish over these millions of years, it would still be alive today in the oceans. It could be swimming around right now, older than the continents, probably pissing off all the other jellyfish by trying to use expired coupons in the express lane.

So if immortality is not against the laws of nature, and we're obviously capable of genetic manipulation, why the hell aren't we as a species sinking all of our resources into creating a race of immortals? Well, that's the good news: We totally are!

Scientists are generally pretty good at science, and they're all over this one — lab coats a-flutter, proclaiming Eureka! to nobody in particular — and making some amazing breakthroughs…

…which we'll talk all about tomorrow! Hey, show some patience — you might have all the time in the

Hello!

I'm here because I wrote a book: a nonfiction one, specifically. It's about the end of the world. I get some blank stares and a fair share of wary backing away when I say that. How can the end of the world be nonfiction?

That's easy: We're a pretty fragile race, really. A large-scale natural disaster would top us off neatly, a particularly virulent new virus could put us down, or it might just be our own advanced scientific knowledge coupled with our poor impulse control that leads to our destruction. My book is not about the eventual heat death of the universe, or the impending supernova of our sun, or some other such cosmic event far into the distant future. No, my book is entirely about the threats that could pose some kind of realistic threat to the survival of the human race in the very near future and the close shaves we've experienced in recent history that nearly did us all in. Everything in here either damn near killed you, personally, when it happened, or might kill you, personally, if it does happen.

It's... rather dark stuff, really.

But the book itself is supposed to be funny; the commentary is rather lighthearted, and the tone is humorous because, hell — what else are you going to do but laugh in the face of death? There are just generally not a lot of options open to you once you're "in the face of" something. I doubt you want to make out with death. And he probably wouldn't take kindly to punches or spitting, so we're left with laughter. Well, that was my reasoning, anyway; clearly, I was suffering from some kind of emotional problem to want to write a book like this. And if I wasn't before, I certainly am now.

But Jesus Christ, you guys: I cannot take any more of this darkness. I have spent the last year of my life intensely studying the death of humanity; they're going to revoke my liver if I keep drinking myself to sleep at night like this. So that leaves me in a quandary: If you don't know me well enough to care about my autobiography, and I'm going to have to start abusing prescription pharmaceuticals if I keep talking about the end of all life on Earth, what do we do?

We're going to take the complete opposite tack: For the rest of this week, I'm going to write about all the very real emerging sciences and techniques that could help you live forever...

That is, if the things in my book don't wipe you out