In the year 2020, for the first time, there will be more people on Earth over the age of 65 than under the age of 5. Many of them would like to hang around awhile longer, and we’re not talking about ten or twenty years here. We’re talking about….well, permanently. Not that this hasn’t always been the case with a modest number of dreamers, but they’ve never arrived in such numbers. And they were never anywhere close to having a Plan. The sheer volume of older citizens tromping around the planet lends more emphasis to the issue and the fact that major players like Google with its death-defying Calico Labs are taking on the challenge sparks hope about a subject which previously received only ridicule.
The concept of eternal life, of course, has been around forever. People living today might be extant indefinitely if it weren’t for an errant ancestor. Remember Adam? He had it made. All Adam had to do was to stick with the fruit of the Tree of Life and immortality was insured. Couldn’t do it. Even though he’d been assured by The Big Guy “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.” So thanks, Adam, for blowing our legacy.
Christianity and many other religions promote the notion of another life after physical death. If you behave on Earth, you get to live in Heaven with God forever. If you decide to become a miscreant in this life, you still get to live forever, only this time you spend the rest of your days with Donald Trump in Murkyland. Other religions subscribe to reincarnation, a phenomenon in which its adherents are allowed to return to Earth in another form, human or otherwise. You might come back as the Duke of Earl or you could return as a parakeet. Nobody seems to know how this determination is made but karma could have something to do with it. Anyway, be nice to your pets---one of them might have been Mother Teresa.
The Fountain Of Youth
During the Middle Ages, alchemists tried to create the Philosopher’s Stone, a magical substance that could make a man immortal, not to mention turning everyday metals into gold. Meanwhile, Juan Ponce de Leon, a Spanish explorer, set out to locate the Fountain of Youth, a fabled spring of water inducing eternal life. Imagine his disappointment when all he discovered was Florida. But if failures were the inevitable result of such undertakings, we humans are an optimistic lot and we don’t give up all that easy. And now we’ve zipped forward into an ultra-fast-paced world of whiz-bang supercomputers and daily medical breakthroughs which seem to make almost anything a possibility. Need a finger, a hand, an arm, a heart? We’ve got an extra over here in the body-parts bin. Cut off your nose? Stick it in a sandwich bag with some ice and bring it in to the clinic, we’ll slap it back on after lunch. All this is child’s play, of course, compared to repairing aging bodies, the components of which often fall apart all at once. But there’s a special place in this world that doesn’t know from impossible, a magic land populated by wizards and wise guys, a place where pots of gold are found at the end of rainbows, a fantasyland where no chore is too difficult and nothing is seen as impossible. That place is called “California.”
They have some funny ideas in this California. Take Dr. Joon Yun, a medical man who runs a health-care hedge fund. Yun says “I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it’s encoded. If something is encoded, you can crack the code. If you can crack the code, you can HACK the code!” People don’t talk like this in Omaha. Dr. Joon believes that if the code is hacked correctly “thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.”
Then there’s Martine Rothblatt, founder of a biotech firm called United Therapeutics, which intends to grow new organs from people’s DNA. “Clearly, it is possible through technology to make death optional,” she claims. “And we choose to make death optional.”
For most of us, aging is the creeping and then catastrophic dysfunction of everything, all at once. It’s the onset of the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu. Our mitochondria sputter, our endocrine system sags, our DNA snaps. Our sight and hearing and strength diminish, our arteries clog, our brains fog and we falter, seize and fail. Our telomeres shorten and when these shields go, cells stop dividing. The motor cools down, the heat goes down and that’s when we hear that highway sound.
Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of Silicon Valley’s SENS Research Foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), has proposed that if we fix seven types of physical damage we will be on the path to living for more than a thousand years, barring runaway asteroids. “Gerontologists have been led massively astray by looking for a root cause to aging when it’s actually that everything falls apart at the same time because all our systems are interrelated. So we have to divide and conquer.” Which means restore tissue suppleness, replace cells that have stopped dividing and remove those which have grown toxic, avert the consequences of DNA mutations and mop up the nasty byproducts of all of the above. If we can just disarm these killers, de Grey suggests we should gain thirty years of healthy life and during that time there will be enough further advances to allow us to begin growing biologically younger.
Google Vs. Death
Bill Maris, the founder and CEO of Google Ventures, lost his father to a brain tumor in 2001, when Maris was twenty-six. “I majored in neuroscience and I’ve worked in hospitals but until my father died I did not understand the finality of ‘gone, never to be seen again,’’’ he said. “Obviously, I didn’t like it.”
Maris, a longtime vegetarian and workout enthusiast, decided to build a company that would solve death. He pitched Goodle’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who has a gene variant that predisposes him to Parkinson’s disease. Both were enthusiastic. “Let’s do it here!” Page suggested.
In 2013, Google launched Calico, short for California Life Company, with a billion dollars in funding. “Calico added a tremendous amount of validation to aging research,” according to George Vlasuk, head of a biotech startup called Navitor. Calico’s large investment of money, brainpower and time impressed many doubters and nudged others into the field. But Calico has been extremely secretive about its progress. All that’s known is that their labs are tracking a thousand mice from birth to death to try to determine biomarkers of aging---biochemical substances whose levels predict morbidity---and that Calico has invested in drugs which may prove helpful with diabetes and Alzheimer’s. The company has no comment but Maris had this to say: “This is not about Silicon Valley billionaires living off the blood of young people. It’s about a ‘Star Trek’ future where no one dies of preventable diseases and where life is fair.”
Not that living off the blood of young people is necessarily a bad idea. In 2005, a Stanford University lab run by stem-cell biologist and neurologist Tim Rando announced that heterochronic parabiosis, an exchange of blood between older and younger mice, rejuvenated the livers and muscles of the older ones. In recent years, however, the parabiosis field has grown quarrelsome. Is the rejuvenative key the presence of young-blood proteins or the absence of SASP (Senescence-associated Secretory Phenotype)? Could it be a cellular byproduct from one mouse or the effect of borrowing a younger mouse’s liver?
After Rando’s colleague Tony Wyss-Coray showed that young blood can foster new neurons in the hippocampus region of the brains of old mice, a company called Alkahest spun out from his work. Alkahest has begun to sift more than ten thousand proteins in plasma in hopes that the right protein can cure Alzheimer’s.
Every longevity experimenter has talismanic photos or videos of two mice: one timid and shuffling, with patchy fur; the other sleek and vital, seething with the miracle elixir. The question remains whether or not mice can be our proxies. Tony Wyss-Coray doesn’t know, either. “We don’t know if it’s safe. We don’t know if mice are the same as humans in this regard. We just have to wait.” Unless, of course, you are Jesse Karmazin of Monterey, whose company Ambrosia has set up clinical trials where participants receive lab tests and a one-time treatment with young plasma. The tab is $8000, but what’s a few grand for eternal life?
Has NASA Got A Pill For You!
Who said NASA was dead? They’re still out there banging away, even planning to send a guy to Mars. And now scientists have made a discovery which could lead to a revolutionary drug that reverses aging. What’s this? Get the car, Marge---we’re going to Cape Canaveral! The new discovery will not only miraculously repair damaged DNA, it will also protect NASA astronauts on Mars from solar radiation. And maybe even repair potholes on the Martian surface, for crying out loud.
A team of researchers developed the drug after discovering a key signalling process in DNA repair and cell aging. During trials on mice (what would we do without the little critters?), the team found that the drug directly repaired DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. “The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice after just one week of treatment,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. David Sinclair. “This is the closest we have come to a safe and effective anti-aging drug that’s perhaps only three to five years from marketability if the trials go well.” If you’re wondering, Sinclair is not just some Rootie-Kazootie in on the last train from Tacoma. He’s a tenured Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard University Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging. Last time we looked, Harvard wasn’t hiring dumbheads.
NASA is considering the challenge of keeping its astronauts healthy during a four-year mission to Mars. Even on short missions, astronauts experience accelerated aging from cosmic radiation, suffering from muscle weakness, memory loss and other symptoms when they return. On a trip to Mars, the situation would be far worse. Five percent of the astronauts would die and the chances of cancer in the rest would be nearly 100%. The new pill would eliminate all of these problems.
Human trials, by the way, begin in five months. Hey, Captain Dave---where does the volunteer line start?
Rise Of The Naysayers
With every pro, of course, there is a con. “There are too many people in the world already!” Does that mean I should give up my seat on the bus because somebody else wants on? That some wise and contributory senior should take a hike because a rising crackhead wants a spot at the party? Our esteemed politicians are already taking on this overpopulation problem by loosening up the gun laws. Maybe they could pass further legislation requiring each state to triple its number of cheeseburger emporiums, doughnut shops and microbreweries. Arab bombing consortiums and Global Warming will take care of millions more. If the numbers of old people continue to grow, well, we’ll just have to build more Olive Gardens and Macaroni Grills, install more shuffleboard courts, get to work on a new batch of jigsaw puzzles.
“Yeah, but what about the nude beaches?” Okay, there are some problems not so easily resolved. For one thing, we will need vast voter reeducation programs to combat senior citizens’ inclinations to become Republicans. Maybe Democrats could start driving gaffers to the polls in old Corvettes and T-birds, blasting out Buddy Holly tunes on the radios. A new television network based in Hawaii could be created to battle Fox News, with sexy senior anchors broadcasting from cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, all the while swigging multi-colored umbrella drinks and strumming ukuleles, ala Arthur Godfrey. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, right? Okay then, you all get on it forthwith. I have to take a short break to contact my broker. It just occurred to me my investment in Viagra stock is vastly insufficient.
That’s all, folks….
A Final Word on the cataract wars. The first eye (the right), which took forever to settle down, is now perfect. Surgery on the left, performed 14 days ago, netted faster results. I was able to see extremely well the next day. Vision in both eyes is now 20-20 without glasses, and I have been referred back to my regular eye doc for further evaluation. The left eye gets a little weepy by 8 p.m., but is getting better daily. The vision improvement is startling. Everything is brighter, more alive. Earlier problems with reading have ceased and I can now read the tiniest print on medicine bottles. If you’re floundering around and vacillating about this surgery (like I was), forget it. Pie readers Harry Edwards and Bron Beynon promised me cataract surgery would be a revelation and they were right. How many body parts can you make better than they were 50 years ago? Well, there are at least two. What are you waiting for?
