“Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored! There are games to be won!”---Dr. Seuss
When we were kids, the concept of living to 100 was a non-starter. Life expectancy in 1945 was a mere 63.8 years, which seemed plenty at the time. Most of the very old people we knew were decrepit heaps who would be ensconced in nursing homes in these present days of smaller families and less benevolence. We kids had heard rumors of the Old Folks’ Home and The Crazyhouse but we never knew anyone who was actually shipped off there. Even Grace Dineen, an unhinged old piano teacher, lived quietly in her raggedy Dorchester Street Castle of 1000 Cats and nobody paid her any mind, even when she posted colorful crayoned signs in her windows warning “Beware of Bitches and Doos.” The kids just gave Grace a wide berth, although some of us would like to have asked her why she wore those paper bags on her head. And what the hell were Doos, anyway?
Old Dan Twomey lived at the southern end of Garfield Street, right next to the Monomac Mill. Dan looked to be about seventy and was an inveterate alcoholic, stumbling down the sidewalk with his cane each morning around ten. One day, my best friend, Jackie Mercier and I were sitting on my front steps when Dan wobbled by. Jackie looked at him, sadly. “I’m not going to get old,” he promised. “I’m going to get shot down in my plane in the war.”
Mercier, a little slow in school, was not always up on current events. “You can’t do that, Jackie,” I told him. “The war is over. Everybody says there won’t be any more wars.” My little friend appeared astonished. “Come on, Billy!” he admonished, “There’ll ALWAYS be wars.” Apparently, for Jackie, there were, because he never made it to his 63.8 years, face-planting off a high bulding in his twenties after a failed romance. I’m not an expert at everything, but I know one thing for sure. Getting old is better than that.
Resetting The Bar
“You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.”---Bob Hope
It’s been a long ride on the old wagon train and people are bound to get tired. Some folks opt to dewagon in Dodge, others in Salt Lake City, but I’m taking the thing all the way to Escondido, the final stop. Who knows how long the trip will take? There are prophets roaming the Earth today who claim to have the Secret to Forever and others, more modest, who offer a road map to 120. These Great Plans range from the ridiculous to the sublime. As everybody knows, it’s always more fun to start with the ridiculous:
Tie me telomeres down, sport, tie me telomeres down.
That’s the plan of Elizabeth Parrish, a mid-fortyish genetic engineering pioneer who may or may not have been the first human being to submit to a procedure aimed at slowing down and eventually stopping some of the body’s aging processes. Many scientists studying the subject feel that aging is caused when your telomeres---the ends of the chromosomes which contain our genetic material---become too short. Every time a cell divides into two or more daughter cells, the telomeres decrease in length. When they get too short, the cells can no longer reproduce, which causes our tissues to degenerate and eventually die. Ergo, find a way to stop telomere reduction and you can live forever. Or at least to a piffling 120 years.
There are a lot of people out there who will sell you telomere-enhancing products but only one who has bet her life on it. Or so she says. This much we know for sure: two years ago, Elizabeth Parrish boarded an airliner for Colombia and visited a facility owned by her new company, BioViva. There, she either received two different treatments to lengthen her life or she played pinochle in a back room with the muchachos for a couple of days, you decide which. Allegedly, Patricia first had her white blood cells genetically engineered. Her telomeres were somehow elongated by 9%. If the telomere theory of aging is correct and IF Parrish actually undertook the risky treatment and IF her results are as stated, Elizabeth’s immune system has just grown younger by 20 years. Since she was 44 at the time of the treatment, her immune system should now be 24 years old. Happy birthday to you, Elizabeth Parrish, here’s a funny hat.
Next, EP’s muscle cells were genetically engineered to produce more follistatin, which is a protein that encourages muscle growth. This particular treatment has been used successfully before on people who suffered from muscular atrophy, helping them rebuild muscle mass. Parrish’s muscles could be expected to atrophy less as she ages as a result of that treatment. Both of these procedures were accomplished in Colombia because the United States has a snippy attitude toward experimentally revamping human bodies.
So, you might ask—what good does this do me? Well, unlike most modern studies which promise human testing in ten years---after you’ve been firmly embedded at Forest Lawn or scattered to the four winds off the coast of Singapore—you’ll be thrilled to know you might be eligible for the same treatment Elizabeth Parrish may have had right now! Yessir. BioViva is taking applications from the general public for body enhancements great and small, beginning at a spiffy $50,000 and offering the whole megillah treatment for a cool million. You get fries with that, and a rubdown with Moet & Chandon Brut Imperial, by the way.
To risk it or not to risk it, that is the question. Along with where to get 50,000 or more dollars. If you’re 44, you might want to wait for a safer alternative. If you’re 84, well, how much longer can you afford to wait? The Final Bus to Eternity may be warming up at the station.
The Metformin Alternative
In the Winter of 2016, a clinical trial called Targeting Ageing With Metformin or TAME was initiated to determine whether this inexpensive diabetes drug is capable of slowing down or stopping degenerative diseases and adverse heart conditions. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has allowed trials to take place involving 3000 people in their 70s and 80s who either have or are at risk of having major diseases. The trial will likely take from five to seven years. There is, however, enough positive current evidence on the subject to consider embarking on a course of Metformin right now. And diabetes victims have been taking the drug over sufficiently long periods to establish there are few negative repercussions. We are personally aware of doctors who are taking Metformin for life-extending purposes and are willing to write prescriptions for certain patients. I took advantage of this largesse and tried the stuff. Uh oh. I was greeted with an unsavory blast of diarrhea, which I rarely encounter, thanks be to the Colon Gods. My doctor friend suggested cutting the dose. I suggested an indefinite postponement. If I’m going to have explosive diarrhea every day, I’d just as soon die now. But other people may never have the problem.
Professor Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California is one of the TAME advisors. “If you target an ageing process,” he advises, “and you actually slow down ageing, then you also slow down all the diseases and pathology as well. That’s revolutionary. That’s never happened before. But there’s every reason to believe it’s possible. The future is taking the biology that we’ve now developed and applying it to humans.”
Researchers have already proved Metformin extends the lives of animals. Last year, scientists at Cardiff University found that when human patients with diabetes were given the drug they lived longer than others without the condition, even though they should have died eight years earlier on average. When Belgian researchers tested Metformin on roundworms, the worms aged more slowly and remained healthier longer.
Metformin is the world’s most widely-used diabetes drug. It has been safely used for 60 years and has very few side effects. Metformin works by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation. In the current study, the drug will be aimed at attacking the process of ageing rather than individual diseases. One of the project members, Professor Stuart Jay Olshansky, says this: “We lower the risk of heart disease, somebody lives long enough to get cancer. We reduce the risk of cancer, somebody lives long enough to get Alzheimer’s Disease. So we’re suggesting that the time has arrived to attack them all at once by going after the biological process of ageing.”
So, would you like to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar? And be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a corpse?
Young Blood
“I couldn’t sleep a wink for tryin’. I saw the rising of the sun.”---Doc Pomus
Do you know the way to Monterey? Always a solid stop on the colorful coast of Cali, now there’s one more reason for stopping there. Jesse Karmazin, the Doogie Howser of Young Blood, has set up camp in the vicinity and he’s stoking the boiler. The amazin’ Dr. Karmazin, a mere 31, has founded a company called Ambrosia, and has he got a clinical trial for you! For a piffling $8000, just a trifle more than you’d pay for a hamburger at Fleur Las Vegas, trial participants receive lab tests and a one-time treatment with young plasma. Volunteers for the trial needn’t be sick or even very old---35 and up will do nicely, thank you.
Karmazin bases his work on a stunning scientific report from 2014, in which old mice were injected with the plasma portion of blood from young mice, improving their memories and the ability to learn. Decades ago, parabiosis studies, in which the circulation of old and young animals was connected in such a way that their blood mingled, suggested that young blood can rejuvenate old mice. A recent revival of the unusual approach has shown beneficial effects on muscle, heart, brain and other organs and some researchers are looking at young blood for specific factors that explain these observations.
A UC Berkeley study, however, suggests that young blood does not work by itself. Inna Conroy, an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Berkeley, states that “It is more accurate to say that there are inhibitors in old blood that we need to target to reverse aging.” Other researchers have injected old blood into young mice with devastating consequences for the kiddos.
PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has been called many things in his lively career, one of them being a “wingnut.” If so, he is one of the few wingnuts extant worth $2.7 billion. Thiel was also clever enough to be the first investor in Facebook. Peter, who prefers the title “Life Master,” is now fascinated with Ambrosia’s possibilities and may have already participated, but nobody’s talking. You’ll know if his voice starts to change and he develops a fondness for Taylor Swift.
The Flying Pie’s friend and sometimes copy-reader, Barbara Reissfelder, has a medical condition which will soon require stem-cell therapy, a scary and life-threatening procedure where her own blood is removed and replaced with that of a 24-year-old donor. If Dr. Karmazin’s opinions are to be trusted, Barbara, now standing on the brink, may in the long run outlive the rest of us. In the business, we call that Irony. Meanwhile, could somebody please book us a room at the Spindrift in Monterey for sometime in August? On second thought, make that July, or June, even. There’s no point in tempting the guy with the scythe.
That’s almost all, folks….
But not quite. In Breaking News—which all news has now become—your latest Cataract Report is now available. Fourteen days post-surgery, Bill’s repaired eye (the right) is in sparkling shape, no longer needing the assistance of glasses. Trouble is, the left one is still dependent. Since Bill is occasionally a clever fellow, he thought he had the answer to this dilemma. Couple days ago, he moseyed on down to his eye doctor and had the right lens removed from his glasses frames. How could this not work? Well, we don’t know how but everything is suddenly very wobbly and dizzy-making. Siobhan, the scientist, speculates that this all may have to do with the Optic Chiasm, which sounds like some outfit fighting the X-Men, or maybe a Persian renaissance man. Anyway, the glasses are back on the shelf and we’re winging it with one good eye. It’s an interesting life, post-surgery. I can look at certain flowers that are blue to the right eye and purple to the left or skies that are gloomy or bright, both at the same time. And this as you might suspect, is of no little concern. If worse comes to worse, I may be in danger of becoming a philosopher.
