Despite the best efforts of texters-while-driving, tourists who eat street food in Greece and Yeti Airlines, the human life span continues to rise. Just imagine what it might be if everybody stopped smoking, took an occasional walk around the block and ceased eating at Sonny’s Fat Boy. In spite of ourselves, however, human beings are living longer and aging researchers are writing books on the joys of being 120, as in years of age. If that seems ridiculous to you, consider that the average lifespan 100 years ago was 36.6 meager years for men and 42.2 for women. Woody Allen would have been apoplectic at age 5.
Cheery as it may be to some, 120 years is almost an offense to Joon Yun, a hedge fund manager who has created a $1 million award called The Palo Alto Prize to initiate the development of major breakthroughs in the science of human longevity. Yun thinks 120 is a mere piffle, a flyspeck on the windshield of a civilization racing toward immortality. If you think Joon is crazy, well, he knows about Homeostatic Capacity and you clearly do not.
Homeostatic Capacity is the ability of the body to maintain homeostasis. The latter is like a control system for the human body which erodes as it ages in the same way that an old engine gradually loses strength until one day it stops working. Some examples of homeostasis are the body’s ability to maintain a steady temperature, the constant regulation of blood glucose and the kidneys’ ability to expel excess water as urine. As these processes progressively deteriorate, the body becomes more unregulated, unstable and dangerous. It’s like gradually removing workers from the operating room of a nuclear plant until no one is left to run the place. Boom goes the dynamite.
Joon Yun’s clever plan is to keep those workers around. As he puts it, “The statistical mortality rate per year for someone who is 20 years old is 0.001 percent. If you could maintain the Homeostatic Capacity of that age throughout life, the average lifespan would be 1000 years.” Yeah, but that’s the trick, isn’t it?
A Ray Of Hope
Enter Ray Kurzweil, the futurist author of The Singularity is Near and How to Create a Mind. Ray refers to the goal of increasing Homeostatic Capacity as Bridge One. Kurzeil goes on: “Bridge One, which we are on now, is to use today’s knowledge to slow down disease and aging processes so that we can get to Bridge Two in good shape. Bridge Two is where exponential progress in longevity science will take place. Bridge Two is the emerging ability for us to reprogram the information processes underlying biology. That will provide far more powerful means to stop and even reverse disease and aging process.”
Kurzeil says that scientists have the opportunity to work on fundamental structures of the body in the same way that an engineer can develop software. Armed with genetic code, scientists may have the ability to reprogram humans. “We can turn genes off with RNA inteference. We can add new genes with new forms of gene therapy. We can reprogram stem cells to rejuvenate organs and even grow new organs.” Um….listen, Ray….have you noticed all those religious fundamentalists with pitchforks gathering on your lawn?
Aubrey de Grey of the pioneering SENS Research Foundation, a non-profit partially funded by gazillionaire Peter Thiel, shares Kurweil’s optimism about longevity. “I’ve taken plenty of heat for suggesting that someone is alive on Earth now who will live to be 1000, and it’s extraordinary to me that it’s such an incendiary claim,” says de Grey. “People have a bizarre attitude towards aging. They think it’s some kind of separate thing that isn’t a medical problem and isn’t open to medical intervention.”
Aubrey de Grey believes the idea of surgery is primitive. “The technology which needs to be implemented to defeat heart disease, for instance, is an enzyme or enzymes that can be introduced into human cells to allow them to clean up the garbage of the arteries themselves.” He claims that he has already created a proof of concept of this technology in his lab, albeit only in cell culture so far. “The major obstacle is popular misunderstanding of the nature of the crusade and the importance of it.” And then, of course, there’s always the money.
“We could be going three times faster if we had the funding that we needed and that means that an awful lot of lives are being lost,” de Grey alleges. “The amount of money that is needed to solve these problems is absolutely trivial, the budget that SENS currently has is around $5 million per year. Add another zero to that and you’d have an amount where funding was no longer limiting.” Obviously, one man’s trivial is another man’s round-the-world cruise for the population of Moravia. But the boys aren’t quitting.
Yun and Kurzweil claim the breakthroughs are happening now and will continue to accelerate for two reasons. The first, according to Kurzweil, is “because biotechnologies are doubling in capability each year. They are now a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome project was completed in 2003 and will be another thousand times more powerful in a decade, a million times more powerful in twenty years.” Twenty years? Ray, could you hurry it up a little? I have friends here who will be lucky to make it a decade. And that includes me.
From Russia, With Love
Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov isn’t waiting on the corner for the Longevity Bus. His goal is to stay alive forever by uploading his brain into a computer. Itskov, who made his fortune in internet media, is the founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organization working with a network of scientists to develop cybernetic immortality, which is the next best kind. Itskov acknowledges that without such technology it’s likely he could be dead by 2050, which would be a big setback.
Itskov and his boys are working to perfect the mapping of the human brain, the better to transfer his consciousness into a computer and allowing “him” to live much longer either in the computer or transplanted into a humanoid robot body or even as a hologram. This plan seems altogether unsatisfactory to us because it makes Dunkin’ Donuts utterly superfluous. But we do like his optimism.
Speaking on the BBC, Itskov promised “Within the next 30 years, I am going to make sure that we can all live forever. I’m 100 percent confident it will happen, otherwise I wouldn’t have started all this.” Again with the 30 years. Dmitry, some of us are hanging by a thread. Is there any way we can put this on speed-dial? But hey, get this---the 2045 Initiative promises we’ll see major doings with the creation of personal avatars by 2020 (big cheer from the wheelchair audience). Good boy, Dmitry, that’s more like it.
Larry Is Angry
“Death makes me very angry,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world. Me too, Larry, and I’d feel even more that way if I were fifth-richest person in the world. Maybe even 50th richest. “Death just doesn’t make any sense to me. It never has. How can a person be there and just vanish, not be there?” We ask ourselves this same question all the time, Larry, but the answer doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. In Larry’s case, however, you have a person in a position to do something about it. His Ellison Medical Foundation dispenses over $40 million a year to get to the bottom of this outrage. Larry’s biographer Mark Wilson notes that Ellison sees Death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.” It’s a Silicon Valley take on The Seventh Seal with Ellison as the crusading knight and the Grim Reaper as a pasty, wan CEO at a rival software company. We know who we’re rooting for.
Venture capitalist Paul Glenn is the bank behind a nine-figure endowment supporting laboratory research at institutions like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and the like. The Glenn Foundation isn’t fooling around in its battle “to extend the healthy productive years of life through research on the mechanisms of biological aging.” They may have loftier goals. Glenn is high on a tome titled Reversing Human Aging and claims to be a card-carrying member of the Anything Is Possible tribe.
Google founder Sergey Brin, generally considered a very serious man, lends legitimacy to the cause. Brin has been exploring technology opportunities he deems to be “on the cusp of viability.” Under Brin’s auspices, Google has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Singularity University, where executives pay five figures for weeklong seminars about technology’s capacity to solve “humanity’s grand challenges,” which include aging and death. Google recently hired Ray Kurzweil to be their director of engineering. Just for fun, Brin chose to get married on magician David Copperfield’s private island in the Bahamas. You know the one. It’s the place Copperfield claims he discovered the Fountain of Youth. You can Google it.
Blasts From The Past
This business of trying to live forever is nothing new. Sometimes it’s a smidge macabre, as with the many olden monks of the Shingon Buddhism persuasion who turned to the fun practice of self-mummification to prevent their bodies from decaying. If you’ve never done it, think fraternity initiation which involves starving yourself, drinking a resin-like substance and then voluntarily entering a burial chamber. In one especially unique ceremony, a statue of Buddha was created to encase the remains. Alpha Gamma Rho comes to mind.
Then there was good old Alexander Bogdanov. You remember him. Alex was a major player for the Bolsheviks until Vladimir Lenin had him expelled from the party for no good reason. You can’t keep a good Russian down, so Bogdanov went right out and started the Proletkuit art movement and developed a study of tectology, whatever that is. Alexander believed that blood transfusions were the key to human rejuvenation and perhaps eternal youth so he engaged in a number of blood exchanges, reporting improved health after each one. Well, okay, until the last one. That was with a student who had a touch of malaria. Plunk your magic twanger, Froggie.
Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of the Chinese Qin dynasty, died at 39 from consuming mercury, which he thought would make him immortal. Qin was big on mercury, thought it was the elixir of life. He liked it so much he ordered a moat of mercury encircling his tomb, greatly complicating plans for excavation anyone might have.
Other emperors opted for immortality pills. Five T’ang emperors bought the farm (or “nongchang” as they say in Fuqing) after ingesting these little beauties, including Emperor Xianzong, who supposedly went stark raving mad and was assassinated by his eunuchs. We can see his tombstone now: “Here lies our fabled Emperor X. He had a lot of balls. Erased by horrid infidels who hadn’t none at all.”
Although Henry II of France was married to Catherine de’ Medici, his closest companion was the widow Diane de Poitiers, a woman famous for her beauty and the ability to maintain it well into her life. Not only did Diane expect to live forever, she thought she’d look great doing it. Her apothecary promised her that drinking an elixir of gold chloride and diethyl ether could prevent aging, those silly boys. The substance slowly killed Diane, who perished at 66. This sort of thing almost never happens at Walgreen’s.
Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard, a man of many names, was a respected physiologist and neurologist who wanted to live forever. Alas and alack, there were no guidebooks in those days (the 1850s) like, say, Immortality For Dummies. Back then, you had to figure things out for yourself. What Charles-Edouard figured out, and we can’t imagine how, was that injecting yourself with extracts from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs would rejuvenate the human system and allow a man to live a longer life. It might even have worked because old Charlie kept the ball rolling til age 76, not a bad performance for those days.
A disciple of Brown-Sequard, major-league baseball pitcher Pud Galvin, thought that injections of the formula made him a better player. Maybe they did, but they didn’t make him immortal. Galvin died at age 45 of “catarrh of the stomach,” one of our favorite diseases. Dumbhead, you say. Nitwit, you scoff. Who, after all, would ingest completely unknown substances into their bodies, products peddled by nefarious characters out to make a fast buck and devil take the hindmost? Who, indeed? Oh, and by the way, were you at Woodstock?
That’s all, folks. Unless we figure out something pretty quick. No elixirs need apply.
