Does a British Researcher Hold the Key to Life Eternal?
By Rafaela von Bredow
The dream of eternal life is as old as mankind. Now an eccentric British researcher believes he has discovered how to stop aging and, at some point in the future, even reverse it. Aubrey de Grey has shaken up the scientific world with his rejuvenation theories.
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Charlie Gray
Aging researcher Aubrey de Grey: "Aging is as undesirable as leprosy." |
Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Léon sailed from island to island, tempted by the promise of eternal youth. In 1512, he sailed from Puerto Rico in 1512 in search of the source of eternal life faraway in the north, where he believed he would find a true f
During his journey, sipping sea water and drinking from rivers in the hope of discovering the fabled fountain, he also stumbled upon the piece of land that's now called Florida. In the end, angry natives and dwindling supplies forced the self-proclaimed naturalist to return to Spain, no younger than when he had set out.
Even as methods and beliefs changed in the ensuing centuries, the fountain of youth remained an enduring fantasy for mankind. But it his also remained an eternally unfulfilled fantasy, and even modern-day researchers haven't managed to come any closer to the promise of a forever youthful existence on earth than Ponce de Léon, that pioneer of the Renaissance.
But now one man believes he has found the answer. Not only is he convinced that life can be extended by a quantum leap -- he also believes that aging itself, the decline of the human body as the ultimate cause of death, can be eliminated, healed like a troublesome illness. He also believes that aging can ultimately be reversed, that wrinkled skin can be made smooth again, sagging breasts can be lifted and mental clarity restored.
Aubrey de Grey is a British geneticist at the University of Cambridge, but he likes to call himself a "theoretical biomedical gerontologist." Lately, the gangly eccentric has been turning the scientific world on its head with his theories of rejuvenation, earning the scorn of some fellow scientists and the support of others.
De Grey is amused by all the attention. His smile gently lifts the strands of his moustache as he leans back into a bench in his favorite pub, the Eagle, the same place where James Watson and Francis Crick once met to discuss their quest for the secrets of DNA. Perhaps this is why de Grey likes to discuss his theories in the musty pub -- almost as if he were hoping that the aura of one of the world's greatest scientific revolutions had somehow been preserved in the pub's patina and could seep into the head of his interview partner by osmosis.
The 42-year-old researcher is so convinced that his theories are correct that he has no trouble uttering such audacious statements as: "I always knew that aging is, in principle, reparable," adding that this is "as obvious as the fact that the sky is blue."
Aging is fundamentally barbaric
De Grey sometimes meets people who question the wisdom and desirability of eliminating the natural aging process. And sometimes their doubts prompt de Grey to slam his white, flawless academic's hands onto the table, but his response is always the same: "Of course aging is undesirable! It's just as undesirable as leprosy! Because it kills people!" The physical decline that kills 100,000 people a day, he says, is "fundamentally barbaric."
To wage his campaign against barbarism, de Grey spent years researching the literature, analyzing cancer studies, learning about stem cell research and gene therapy, reading up on soil bacteria and studying every conceivable detail of Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and Parkinson's disease. His efforts paid off. In the end, de Grey, trained as a computer scientist, became a self-taught biologist. And then came his greatest achievement. By combining all his accumulated knowledge, he developed his strategy for what he calls "rejuvenation therapy."
This therapy, he claims, could allow human beings to live healthy and vibrant lives for thousands of years, enjoying the eternal youthful freshness of a Dorian Gray. As he discusses his theories, de Grey constantly twists the ends of his moustache, smoothes his long beard and then suddenly grabs it, almost as if he had just been struck by a flash of inspiration.
De Grey is the spitting image of the classic eccentric, with his tall, gaunt figure, flowing beard and pony tail, as reddish-brown as the ale he loves to drink. "The first people who will benefit from rejuvenation therapy were born a long time ago," says de Gray, speaking in the rapid and mumbling tones of the highly educated.
Is he crazy? The respected US scientific journal Technology Review -- which recently devoted its cover story to de Grey -- doesn't think so. The article state: "Whether one chooses to believe that he is a brilliant and prophetic architect of futuristic biology or merely a misguided and nutty theorist, there can be no doubt about the astonishing magnitude of his intellect."
The list of attendees at the world's second major gerontology conference in Cambridge, which de Grey is currently organizing, also serves as testimony to just how seriously the scientific world takes his theories. De Grey has managed to attract researchers from MIT, Harvard and Stanford, including such luminaries as renowned US stem cell researchers Jose Cibelli and Gerald Schatten, who recently impressed the scientific community with his contributions to cloning experiments in South Korea.
"The problem is that Aubrey has never worked in a laboratory in his life," says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "He comes up with things in his head that no one can verify." De Grey's critics agree. In their view, to truly understand the complexity of the body and its processes, scientists must have years of experience under their belts counting fruit flies or infecting wax moth larvae with fungal spores.
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| Holger Keifel Aging researcher Nir Barzilai: "(De Grey) has come up with things that no one can verify." |
Richard Miller, a bio-gerontologist at the University of Michigan, even believes that de Grey is "dangerous," because he "is bringing the science of gerontology into disrepute with his promises of slowing down aging indefinitely." Miller believes that the field of gerontology, which has always attracted charlatans promising to stop aging with the latest fountain-of-youth remedies, is already on shaky ground. As a result, it suffers from a poor reputation and limited research budgets.
Ironically, gerontologists are in need of more research funding nowadays. De Grey is only part of a larger movement of researchers who have already accumulated so much knowledge about the basic elements of aging that many are anxious to put it to use - for the benefit of mankind.
"The scientists in our field are clearly moving in the direction of applied age research," says Barzilai. Peter Gruss, president of Germany's renowned research group, the Max Planck Society, only recently declared age research a priority and unveiled the organization's plans to establish a new "Institute for the Biology of Aging."
"Live long enough to live forever"
The idea that eliminating physical decline is a purely technical challenge is in vogue, at least among the techies in the anti-aging research community. Legendary US inventor Ray Kurzweil, for one, is convinced that nano-robots will one day replace the imperfectly operating digestive tract. According to Kurzweil, these miniature machines would then transport precisely the right amount of precisely the right substances to precisely those tissues or organs where they are needed.
Kurzweil believes that this improved "Human Body, version 2.0" could be built in about 20 years. But until then, he says, people will just have to exercise regularly and remain hyper-healthy by adhering to the latest medical discoveries in nutrition. Kurzweil's motto, not surprisingly, is to "live long enough to live forever."
When it comes to his philosophy, the 57-year-old computer scientist is his own best guinea pig, swallowing 250 pills (containing such miracle foods as grape seed extract, milk thistle and ginkgo) and downing up to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea a day. Once a week, Kurzweil goes to a clinic for an acupuncture treatment and a venous infusion of six different rejuvenation fluids.
His strategy has been successful, at least when it comes to Kurzweil's perceived age: 40. His goal? "Let's just say I'm not planning not to die."
Even without Kurzweil's radical anti-aging treatments, our average life expectancy has increased by three months each year for the past 160 years. In Germany, women now live to 81 and men to 75, on average. But this is more likely attributable to improved hygiene and nutrition than to any scientific breakthroughs in the search for eternal youth. And until now, medical science has been unable to do away with -- or even minimize -- the fragility and infirmity of the elderly as harbingers of death.
Most medical research nowadays is devoted to cancer, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. We have powerful lobbies for diseases, but not for aging. US biostatistician Jay Olschansky calculates that, in theory, a human being would live only 14 years longer if medical science could eliminate these leading causes of death. But bio-gerontologists believe that if one could prevent aging itself, people wouldn't fall ill in the first place -- or at least only much later in life.
Researchers have managed to prolong the life spans of certain mice and rats by one third, producing animals that are capable of running thousands of meters on their tread wheels each day, even at an advanced age. Their muscles are firm, their hearts healthy and their memories intact.
The National Institute on Aging in Maryland is currently funding a short-term experiment that addresses the possibility of influencing human aging by reducing caloric intake. In other experiments, this type of diet seemed to protect rhesus monkeys against age-related diabetes, and they also appeared to have healthier hearts than monkeys fed normal diets.
What do these results mean for human beings? Running a marathon at the age of 90? Although results achieved with laboratory animals cannot simply be transferred to human beings, scientists now know that the process of aging is universal, at least among mammals. They also agree that, from threadworms to fruit flies to human beings, very specific genes play a role in aging, and it's precisely these genes that hold so much potential in rejuvenation medicine.
Seduced by the seeming proximity of the fountain of youth, age researcher Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California in San Francisco founded a company called Elixir to search for agents that could make up an anti-aging pill. Kenyon, a biologist, believes that "it could happen at any time." She has even managed to extend the lives of tiny threadworms from 20 days to six months in the laboratory - a record for animals. Kenyon is so confident about her research that she says she would be willing to take such a pill herself.
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| DDP De Gray's therapies, if they work, could enable people to lead healthy and vibrant lives for thousands of years, enjoying the eternal youthful freshness of a Dorian Gray. |
But as far as de Grey is concerned, delaying death by a few years is little more than child's play. He wants to turn back the clock. "You would be able to return to a more youthful state," he explains. "Depending on how often and how thoroughly you were to undergo this therapy, you'd able to spend eternity in your twenties."
The ingredients of aging
De Grey has identified seven distinct ingredients in the aging process, and has conceived a means of manipulating each of them -- as if the body were a machine that only requires maintenance and the occasional repair.
For example, it would be important to prevent the accumulation of harmful "junk" within the cell, indigestible remnants of large molecules that impair the functioning of cells, causing atherosclerosis, for example. Certain soil bacteria are capable of digesting such material. De Grey envisions that the genetic material of these bacteria would be injected into the cells using gene therapy. To combat cancer, the British researcher proposes replacing the would-be immortal's stem cells about every ten years with new cells that have been slightly corrected, using genetic engineering, so that they no longer produce a certain damaging enzyme.
De Grey has also come up with strategies to combat atrophying cells and the loss of elasticity in once-flexible proteins; he imagines administering a vaccination to counteract the accumulation of junk molecules between cells, which are found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, for example.
Established gerontologists charge that de Grey's approach does not take into account the immense complexity of biological processes. But de Grey counters that gerontologists' thinking about the issue is too complex. "The wonderful thing about this is that we can circumnavigate our lack of knowledge," he says. To repair damage, he says, one doesn't necessarily have to know what caused it.
"He may not be right yet," the Institute for Aging Research's Barzilai says. "But one day he will be -- at least I hope so." James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in the northern German city of Rostock, concedes that "some of the things that de Gray says could be true," but adds that "he is simply too optimistic when it comes to the pace of these developments."
De Grey predicts that if his theories are true, the world could be turned upside down in just 10 years. Then -- assuming the research receives the right amount of funding - the news that researchers, using de Grey's therapy, have managed to triple the remaining life span of a two-year-old mouse would spread like wildfire.
"The first people could benefit from the therapy only 15 years after the mouse experiment," de Grey estimates. "But it could also happen within only 10 years. But certainly not more than a 100."
The first functioning therapy would at least be sufficient to double the life expectancy of a 55-year-old, "because 25 or 30 years are an eternity in science," says de Grey. By the time the body of this first patient reaches the status of someone who is biologically 55 years old, improved therapies would be available that would enable him to take the next quantum leap in rejuvenation research. And then, says de Grey, the process would continue indefinitely.
Life eternal
Or until, after 5,000 years, all wishes and hopes and loves of the immortal being have succumbed to endless indifference. At least that's what happens - after a mere few hundred years, at that -- to the character Fosca, who is damned to eternal life in Simone de Beauvoir's novel "All Men Are Mortal." Of course, the immortal could also vegetate away in endless frustration, because his 155th profession is somehow unsatisfying -- especially after his 98th girlfriend leaves him for a 200-year-old young buck with no life experience whatsoever.
Ageless man would spend his days endlessly terrified of accidents, plagues and natural disasters. Of course, he would also be childless, since anyone who wishes to live forever would have to give up the idea of having children. Otherwise the world would quickly break down in the face of exponential overpopulation. De Grey has no solution to this problem, but he's confident that society will somehow work it out by imposing rules.
Perhaps immortal man will simply end up shooting himself in the head -- or choosing whatever method of suicide happens to be in vogue at the time.
Do people even want to live forever?
"That's the wrong question," says de Grey. "Instead, you should ask someone whether they want to die in the foreseeable future."
In his crusade against dying, Aubrey de Grey, confident that he knows the answer, raises the fundamental question of what it is to be human. After all, how does man define himself in the world, if not by the fact that he is the only living being who can envision his own death? Art, music and literature are expressions of our sense of happiness and despair in the face of the unavoidable truth that all human beings must die.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov once described this drama as "the extreme sense of debasement, the mockery and horror of having developed an eternity of sensation and thought within a finite existence." Would this deep contradiction be resolved if eternity became real?
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More about Aubrey de Grey and the topic see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm
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