Week of February 10, 2005, Issue #486
FRONT
The 5,000-year-old man
By CAITLIN CRAWSHAW
He’s not suggesting that he’s stumbled upon some sort of serum of
eternal life, but self-taught gerontologist Aubrey de Grey does think that with
the right amount of tinkering, science can indeed make people live forever.
De Grey is bringing his radical views on aging to the University of Alberta
on Tuesday (February 15), where he will discuss the potential benefits of medical
intervention in the aging process within our lifetime. While the field of gerontology—the
study of how we age—has long interested him, de Grey only entered the
field in the mid-’90s after a career as a computer scientist at Cambridge
University. In his talk, he proposes that the development of “rejuvenation
therapies” to ward off aging in humans could happen within about 30 to
100 years. “The only thing that might change that is if over the next
10 years from now, the funding is good enough,” de Grey says. This period
will be critical, he explains, as he predicts that within this span of time
scientists will dramatically improve the longevity of mice. If this is the case,
the public is likely to back the project with the capital needed to develop
the technologies for humans. “I think that sort of result will be enough
to convince society that we can actually do something about aging in humans
fairly soon,” he argues, “and that will change everything.”
To help the process along, de Grey has helped create the Methuselah Mouse Foundation,
which is offering substantial financial awards to scientists who can profoundly
increase the lifespans of mice. The award’s name—the “M-Prize”—is
a variation on the X-prize, which rewards researchers working to create low-cost
space flight for the development of space tourism.
De Grey’s theory is reasonably simple: aging in humans, he says, is caused
by molecular and cellular damage that accumulates in the body over time, the
end result of the basic processes, like digestion, that keep us alive. But de
Grey believes that by using stem-cell manipulation, he can limit the accumulation
of these by-products without affecting the processes themselves, which are beneficial
to the body. By keeping the abundance of these substances below a certain threshold,
human beings should be able to live young, vibrant lives for thousands of years.
“One’s life will inevitably end, pretty much; it’s just that
it’ll end by being hit by a truck,” notes de Grey, who predicts
that that a lifespan of 5,000 years is not out of the question.
U of A developmental geneticist David Pilgrim, who met de Grey as a young undergraduate
at Cambridge, says that the experiments backing de Grey’s views have yet
to make a splash among biologists. But he notes that the problem of aging is
still baffling researchers, and that new ideas like de Grey’s are needed,
even if they leave many scientists wary. “Almost all scientists tend to
be very dogmatic and conservative,” Pilgrim explains, adding that scientists
tend to raise an eyebrow at researchers from other fields with radical ideas,
since the likelihood is slim that an outsider will make an important contribution.
“It’s very difficult for completely new ideas to get a fair hearing.”
It’s a tendency that, in Pilgrim’s view, only keeps scientists mired
in old ways of thinking. “It’s like your beliefs about the world,”
he says. “If you only talk to people who share your political beliefs,
then you never learn anything. What you need to be confident in your political
beliefs, is to discuss them with people who don’t agree with you.”
Biologists aren’t the only ones to be alarmed by de Grey’s theories;
others worry about the massive population explosion that would result if the
death rate were reduced to almost zero. “The population of the earth would
not stabilize,” says U of A sociologist Herb Northcott. “It would
continue to expand, since you keep adding generations and you’re not subtracting
generations. It might be that the horsepeople of the apocalypse will ride into
de Grey’s scenario at some point, as the population continues to grow
and we will once again be facing widespread starvation, disease, pestilence
and or war.”
And then, of course, come the philosophical questions of whether anti-aging
therapies constitute playing God, and whether humans need a short, fixed lifespan
in order to give their existence meaning. But de Grey is quick to pooh-pooh
such concerns. “This is just one more way in which God made us in his
own image, if you like,” he says. “What’s unnatural is to
reject the opportunity to banish something that causes so much suffering as
aging does.”
As for more practical problems, like overpopulation, de Grey argues that it
isn’t right for current generations to make decisions that could limit
future generations. He urges naysayers to place the concerns in context: “What
we have to remember here,” he says, “is that aging kills 100,000
people a day—that’s 30 World Trade Centers every fucking day. Now,
so, when people say to me that there’s this problem and that problem that
might or might not happen, I say, ‘Don’t give me possible problems
that might or might not happen. Give me the possibility of problems that might
or might not be so bad that it’s preferable to carry on condemning 100,000
people a day to death, forever. That shuts people up pretty quickly.”
V
Aubrey de Grey will deliver his lecture, The Foreseeability of Real
Anti-Aging Medicine, at the University of Alberta Medical Sciences Building
(MS 227) on Tuesday, February 15 at 12:30pm. For more information, call 983-8383.