| | | “I ain’t gonna live forever”, American rocker Jon Bon Jovi philosophized back in 2000 (It’s My Life), belting out his Carpe Diem hit. While the prospect of grabbing life by the horns remains a persuasive one, two decades into the millennium, we are looking at an ambitious assemblage of scientists and tech trailblazers who are working to expand, if not alter, the longevity of life itself. Make no mistake, the boon (or bane) of vampire-like immortality is still elusive. But what could it mean to live until the age of 150, our somewhat finite forever, imminent in the future of medical technology? | | |
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| Viva Longevity Scientists | 1 - What’s In a Name? The guardians of the extended life movement are longevity scientists, and some from the small but significant community are integral to the cadre. |
| | | 2 - Healthy Old Thing Dr. Nir Barzilai, Director of the Institute of Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is used to speaking passionately about targeted delay of aging and the reversal of its manifestations. The author of Age Later believes an extended lifespan must go hand in hand with an extended ‘healthspan’— the number of years a human being can enjoy optimum health. With this conversation, he demystifies the still-esoteric subject, for what skeptic can dismiss the dream of waking up ten years from retirement day, equipped to contemplate a hike or a rock concert, instead of scrambling for their scrabble? In a 2020 interview for Live Long and Master Aging, he links the need for a healthier old age to our present reality of COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus continues to expose deep social fissures, Barzilai highlights how the elderly have been reestablished as most vulnerable, not just to physical ravages, but also crisis-time access. For the Israeli-American innovator, this presents an urgent incentive for medically amplifying the value assigned to our aged populace. |
| 3 - Master of Molecules Like Barzilai, British molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey rejects the traditional inevitability of aging as “complete nonsense”. His counter-spell to the society’s “pro-aging trance” is high-tech intervention, aimed at amending the long term effects of metabolism on the human body. Little headway can be made without cutting-edge technology and some uncharted adventures involving labs and mice, reckons the researcher, as our body’s in-built anti-aging machinery is “not 100 % comprehensive, so it allows for different types of molecular and cellular damage”. The technologies championed by Grey seek to “repair at the microscopic level, by injecting the right kind of stem cells”. The 59-year-old has long rallied to combat seven specific causes of cellular decay, sometimes with therapies already in clinical trials, such as immunotherapy against amyloid in the brain. Others, like preventing excess division of cells, have emerged as slow-resolving challenges. The world recognizes this particular life-ender as cancer. |
| 4 - Money Where Your Method Is Laura Deming is 28. At 23, the biologist and venture capitalist had already bet $22 million on anti-aging R&D. She is the founder of The Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm invested in research of the biology of aging, Deming’s pet preoccupation from the tender age of eight. What makes the New Zealander a powerful figure is not her identity as one of the youngest minds in the life expansion research community, but rather the fact that she straddles the potent intersection of biology and economy. The future of longevity research needs both dedicated time and money, and Deming is not disconnected from either ends of the movement. Passionate to the tee, she is often interviewed fondly reminiscing the providential start of her journey at the laboratory of stalwart molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon. It had all started with an e-mail. |
| 5 - Of Worms and Women So who is Cynthia Jane Kenyon? For starters, she is an American biogerontologist who has successfully established that aging is a genetically controllable process, at least with roundworms. An emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, Kenyon is an inspirational figure whose early advances in the subject way back in the ’80s have inspired a legion of young researchers like Deming. She is also a quirky conversationalist. Before Deming managed to expand the lifespan of roundworms, she ended up killing a few with tiny, but lethal doses of sugar. An interview with The Guardian records her tongue-in-cheek quip: “I didn’t go home,” she laughs, “I went straight to the store and I bought a book on low-GI diets and found a recipe and that was it, I changed immediately. ” Kenyon admits to now avoiding all sweet seductions except dark chocolate, bread, and of course, the low-GI diet that worked wonders for her lucky batch of worms. |
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| | | WATCH ACTOR EVA MARCILLE As She Talks Family, Crypto, and Living Her Best Life!
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| To Live, or not to Live? | | | 1 - An Ethical Debate Prolonged living, like most radical concepts, comes wearing a veil of ethical ambiguities. Some quandaries have seen reasonable rebuttals, while others remain relatively less tackled. Here are some to wrestle with. |
| 2 - Diminishing Returns Is it ethical to deprive ourselves of the “benefits of growing old, such as gaining wisdom and learning to accept death”, fret some respondents in a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project. English philosopher Bernard Williams, for his part, dreads the immitigable boredom over an elastic number of years crammed into one’s natural life. Journalist Caspar Smith raises a similar concern in his (cited) interview with Grey, wondering if life does not, in part, derives its value from the limitation of death, or in this case, a well-capped finiteness. In this conversation and others, Grey has urged people to look at the ‘extra’ years as a byproduct of being able to stay healthy for a longer time—“the fact is people don’t want to get sick—rather than treat it as an end goal. One can theorize that a healthy life is very likely a stimulating life, at five, 50, or dare we say, 150. |
| 3 - No Country for Young Men Ask Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, and he would pitch overpopulation as the obvious argument against an extended lifespan. He's not the only one. Others include Bioethics professor and author Walter Glannon, who has brought up the question of resource crunch, likely to occur unless the balance of life and death is somehow leveled out even after the fresh lease of longer lives. Some have proposed “to limit the number of children after life extension” to tally the math. But that is a road that perhaps leads to more questions than answers, dredging up fundamental questions on personal choice and freedom. |
| 4 - Blow Hot, Blow Cold Climate change, which has been the eye of many political tornadoes at present, will logically offer a defeating blow to the future of increased life expectancies, if overpopulation continues to remain addressed. Excess waste, harmful emissions, crop failure, and rising temperature and water levels are already high-octane issues, all emergencies with a trickle effect on global economics. Walking into a future involving more people (and presumably less resources) will likely exacerbate the crisis. On the flip side, medical journal The BMJ cites a Lancet Countdown report as tying climate change directly with the loss of longer life expectancy. “Infants and small children will be among the worst affected by malnutrition and related health problems such as stunted growth, weak immune systems, and long term developmental problems, ” it postulates, the early damages soon devolving into health hazards of a lifetime. It can be said that the future of life expansion and the future of Earth's climate are locked in an invisible duel, and it might be dangerous, if not impossible, to pursue one without resolving the other. |
| 5 - Access to Arrested Death If it’s the gift of delayed death on offer, social access is of natural significance. Philosopher John Harris is skeptical about the same, worrying that the fruits of such revolutionary science and technology will only be available to the rich. His fears are echoed by a survey drawn up by the Pew Center, where a sweeping 79% of respondents believe that “everyone should be able to get these treatments if they want them”. But two-thirds agree that in effect, the wealthy people would enjoy maximum access to such treatments. One can suppose that the fears hinge on current realities, where higher medical access has been repeatedly established as being disproportionate for the rich and financially disadvantaged—one of the saddest markers of social inequality across the globe. |
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