Feb. 09, 2005 - Issue #486: The Dudes

The 5,000-year-old man

Outsider gerontologist Aubrey de Grey thinks the aging process will soon be obsolete

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.

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