Transterrestrial Musings

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"people in the past have predicted it, and it didn't happen, therefore it won't now either."

If the past history of predictions is any indicator, its not that "it didn't happen, therefore it won't" its more "it didn't happen the way we predicted but something like it did and in a way we never could have predicted".

So yea, we'll live to 1000 but in a way that no one know can relate to....

Posted by Michael Mealling at December 3, 2004 07:58 AM

With regard to the second article, our lifespans are already growing at an incredibly steady 0.3 years per year. I am expected to live almost 10 years more than my father. However, just like Moore's Law, we don't know when this trend will cease to be a trend.

With regard to the first article, human beings tend to accumulate disabilities and injuries as well as mortality. The author should have calculated the chance for disabilities and injuries as well.

Posted by Dan Schmelzer at December 3, 2004 09:21 AM

With regard to the first article, human beings tend to accumulate disabilities and injuries as well as mortality. The author should have calculated the chance for disabilities and injuries as well.

What kinds of disabilities and injuries are permanent? If we're technologically advanced enough that one no longer dies of old age unless they want to, then what would remain disabilities?

Posted by Karl Hallowell at December 3, 2004 12:39 PM

Well, I found neither persuasive. Olshansky's plain brown wrapper skepticism can be reduced to this analogy: since it rained the last three days, it will probably rain the next 6 hours, too.

Um, yeah. The fact that things tend to go on as they have been going on, until, well, they change, is -- kinda obvious. The interesting question is: when they do change, how and when and why will they? Olshanksy has zip to say.

On the other hand, De Grey's first point that it lies within the ultimate capability of our biological machinery to live ten times longer than we do would seem obvious given that Henrietta Lacks' cervix is as young today as it was when it started growing 80 years ago. (If it ever dies it will be by accident.)

But his thought that executing drastic repairs on your body at age 60 will ever be something available to most plain folks seems economically implausible. Is it not always cheaper to design a mechanism better in the first place than to try to extend its natural lifetime by a factor of ten through heroic and repeated repair jobs? Surely if we learn how to extend human lifespan, it will be first by manipulation of the DNA of a fertilized zygote, meaning only people born to thousand-year lifespans will achieve them. I can't see it ever being commonplace that someone who begins with a body fated to die after 100 years lives to see 1000.

Arguments based on recent improvements in average lifespan don't seem especially meaningful, inasmuch as the bulk of the lifespan improvement we have achieved has been a reduction in childhood and early adulthood deaths. More people are attaining the natural limit, but the natural limit has not increased that much.

Right here the CDC helpfully provides some historical data. Compare the ages to which you could expect to live if you were a given age in 1900 and 2000:

age......total life expectancy
............1900....2000
-----------------------------
0............49.......77
20..........63.......78
60..........75.......82
80..........85.......89

So, if you were 60 years old in 1900, contemplating mortality, you could expect to see your 75th birthday. In 2000 you can expect to see your 82nd. That's an improvement, sure, but not nearly the 28 year improvement in average life expectancy (the numbers at age 0).

Posted by Carl Pham at December 3, 2004 04:00 PM

Is it not always cheaper to design a mechanism better in the first place than to try to extend its natural lifetime by a factor of ten through heroic and repeated repair jobs?

Carl, you're missing an important point. The human body is already self-repairing. That is, when young. The problem is that that capability deteriorates with age. All we have to do is to figure out how to get it to continue to do so (which will also rejuvenate...).

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 3, 2004 04:17 PM

S. Jay Olshansky is not qualified to comment on anti-aging research. His Ph.D. is in sociology and public health. He does not have a technical degree nor has any technical qualifications what so ever. As such, his comments about anti-aging are completely irrelevant. Aubry de Grey, on the other hand, does have technical background and, therefor, is qualified to talk about anti-aging. Non-technical people like Olshansky cannot possibly have anything of value to say about a technical field such as anti-aging.

I think that the people who believe in death should be encouraged to die as quickly as possible and people who believe in "immortality" should have access to anti-aging technology as quickly as possible.

Posted by Kurt at December 4, 2004 01:11 AM

The human body is already self-repairing. That is, when young. . . .All we have to do is to figure out how to get it to continue to do so.

Well, "all" we have to do to colonize the galaxy is develop an FTL drive! The devil is in the details. And I suggest it is critical how the ability to which you refer disappeared. If the Mr. Fixit subsystem remains intact even in old people, in a biochemical garage somewhere, so to speak, just waiting for the right signal to return to work, then we can imagine a focussed and economical intervention that will work.

But if the ability has vanished because the subsystem has long ago been dismantled and sold for parts, or because many subsystems have failed, or been discontinued, then there's not much hope of a fix economical enough that we can all enjoy it.

I suggest it's something like thinking over the Columbia accident. Is this just a failure of one specific component? Can we make a focussed intervention on one or a few subsystems and recover full functionality? Or is there some widespread underlying disease, so many emerging weaknesses (airframe age, design flaws, mission flaws, "cultural" factors) that it makes no sense, and we should just start over again from scratch?

Thing is, we don't know which is the case for senescence. But let me give you two arguments, one theoretical and one empirical, for suspecting that the problem is unfortunately widespread, generalized, and not very susceptible to an economical and focussed intervention.

First, natural selection is unlike human engineering. It tends to produce subsystems which are barely good enough and last barely long enough to get the job done. The reason is that once a subsystem musters a "passing" grade, and is no longer the weakest link in an organism's survival, evolutionary pressure immediately switches to the new weakest link, and there's no foresighted onward push to "A" level surpasses-expectations good safety-margins quality. There's none of the "inertia" we find in human engineering where, once we begin improving a subsystem we tend to improve it beyond minimum requirements and well above the quality of it's neighboring subsystems, just so at least we won't have to revisit this problem for a while.

Nature is more the eternal tinkerer and jury-rigger, never "getting the job done properly," always kludging something up that will barely hold together long enough for something else to fail first.

So I suggest the self-repair ability is not just hanging around largely intact, because that's not the way natural engineering works. Once an ability has fulfilled its mission, it's usually dismantled or falls into a pile of rust all the King's horses couldn't put together again.

Now the empirical argument. If it were true that some small amount of biochemical tinkering could significantly prolong the activities of youthful self-repair, then it would long ago have been observed as a natural variation in humanity. We would have Methusalehs amongst us, from time to time. Maybe not often (if the mutation is rare), perhaps only one person in a hundred million would live to be 220 instead of 80, and we'd only see one every century or so.

But we don't see them at all. We've never seen people who live even a modest 30-50% longer than the apparent maximum lifespan of 100 years. Whatever the variation in physiology that might achieve a significant extension of youthful vigor, it's so different from normality that it's never been seen, even after 5000 years in which 30 to 100 billion random variations on the human theme have been generated. Not a good sign.

In fact, it's actually striking how little variation there is in our experience of aging. The same stuff happens to us all (wrinkles, memory degradation, arthritis, high blood pressure, prostate troubles) with surprisingly little variation in age of onset or prognosis.

This, too, suggests that the processes or lack of processes that lead to senescence are deeply rooted and core to our biochemical design, and therefore there do not exist key leverage spots where small fixes could lead to big improvements in performance.

Posted by Carl Pham at December 4, 2004 01:14 AM

Aubry de Grey, on the other hand, does have technical background.

Not in a field that matters, which would be biochemistry or molecular biology. He's a computer scientist.

That doesn't make him wrong, of course. But if the criterion is only duelling academic credentials, neither of these speakers is very impressive.

Posted by Carl Pham at December 4, 2004 01:23 AM

Well, "all" we have to do to colonize the galaxy is develop an FTL drive!

Not a useful analogy. There are no laws of physics that require that our bodies stop repairing themselves.

If it were true that some small amount of biochemical tinkering could significantly prolong the activities of youthful self-repair, then it would long ago have been observed as a natural variation in humanity. We would have Methusalehs amongst us, from time to time. Maybe not often (if the mutation is rare), perhaps only one person in a hundred million would live to be 220 instead of 80, and we'd only see one every century or so.

But we don't see them at all. We've never seen people who live even a modest 30-50% longer than the apparent maximum lifespan of 100 years.

How do you know? Perhaps Methusaleh was a Methusaleh.

If I were such, I wouldn't let people know about it, particularly in ancient times--it wouldn't have been healthy, and someone who was very old chronologically would accumulate quite a bit of wisdom in this matter. I'd move on whenever I'd been some place too long for the non-aging to become obvious.

Anyway, you argue a strawman, since no one has claimed that "some small amount of biochemical tinkering" is all that's needed. I think it quite likely that senescence is caused by a range of things, but that doesn't mean that we can't chase them down and fix them, one by one. And even if we can't figure out how to get the body to start repairing itself, we may be able to come up with artificial machines that do it for us.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 4, 2004 05:50 AM

Yes, Aubry's background is in computer science, but his recent work is in bio-informatics. This is the IT that is involved in analyzing gene expression and other data that comes off of microarray and microplate scanners. It is true that this is not strictly biology and chemistry. But he does have some background in chemistry and does understand lab technique. Olshansky has neither.

The reason why I believe Aubry to be right on target is that he has taken an engineering approach to the problem of aging in a manner that makes it very clear that he does understand engineering.

We all know that biological systems have regenerative/self-repair capability. The question is why this breaksdown over time. Aubry has simply done an extensive liturature search to identify all of the biochemical mechanisms of decay that have been identified and assumed that some or all of them are the cause of aging (which is a reasonable assumption). There are, at most, 7 of these processes.

Then he has surveyed all of the interventionist methods (i.e. small molecule, gene therapy, stem cells, etc.) to "design" which methods to be used to reverse/cure/eliminate each one of them in turn, then calculated, based on current laboratory techniques, how much time ans money it will take to cure aging.

I am not a biologist. I am a materials scientist who does understand chemistry and engineering enough to know that Aubry's approach is a sound engineering one.

Check out his website; www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens. It is quite interesting.

Olshansky, on the other hand, does not know anything about science or engineering. He has not come up with a credible counter-argument to Aubry de Grey.

Posted by Kurt at December 4, 2004 10:48 AM

Carl Pham said:
“But his thought that executing drastic repairs on your body at age 60 will ever be something available to most plain folks seems economically implausible.”

For someone who didn’t find Olshansky's argument persuasive, it’s blatantly obvious that you haven’t done any homework here, either. Have you even heard of nanotechnology? That this process will be widespread and economically feasible is exactly the point. From that and the rest of your post it seems clear that you have a lot of reading you need to do on both nanotechnology and the anti-aging research that’s actually been done. Nanomedicine (with medical nanobots) eventually followed by genetic re-engineering is the solution. For those who won’t make it that long, you sign up for cryonic suspension and they’ll defrost us when all’s ready.

Posted by Janessa Ravenwood at December 4, 2004 01:44 PM

If I were such, I wouldn't let people know about it.

Well, I don't doubt that if you were 200, you'd be careful which short-timer you told about it. But what you've overlooked is that you would once have been merely a hale 95-year-old who had no clue he was going to live another 150 years. Why hide your age and health then? Why not even boast a bit, be the toast of your village when you turn 115 and still take stiff walks up the hillside? By the time you got up to 140 it would be too late, you'd already be famous whether you wanted to be or not.

That is, to wonder whether you should hide your age from short-timers you have to be aware that you're going to live much longer than they, and by assumption these accidental Methusalehs would not. If there were a whole community who could teach each other that's another story, but then we get into conspiracy theories.

Anyway, you argue a strawman, since no one has claimed that "some small amount of biochemical tinkering" is all that's needed.

I don't think it's a straw man. I think folks like De Grey strongly imply that the intervention would be simple by suggesting it could become widely available in 10 years. He doesn't say "Well, we might be able to reverse aging, but by golly the chances of it being simple enough to become affordable to your average Joe are between zip and zero." And that, I think, is a hard truth that needs to be well considered.

I don't deny it is possible to stop or reverse aging. Of course it is! Nothing in chemistry denies it. What I suggest is simply that it would be so complex and hence so expensive that, first, it will not be available to most of us, and, second, that it will always be far cheaper to adjust the genome before construction begins.

Posted by Carl Pham at December 4, 2004 07:31 PM

Yes, Aubry's background is in computer science, but his recent work is in bio-informatics. This is the IT that...

Yes I know. I also know what bio-informatics is, having done a tiny bit myself. But, as I said, I think the relevant field of expertise here is biochemistry or molecular biology. What de Grey knows in those fields I'd guess he's obtained by reading or talking to people, both of which Olshansky could have done as well.

Remember, I didn't say De Grey's credentials (or lack thereof) means he's wrong. I just took issue with your suggestion that De Grey was so much better credentialed than Olshansky that the latter had no business criticizing the former.

I am not a biologist. I am a materials scientist who does understand chemistry and engineering enough to know that Aubry's approach is a sound engineering one.

Fair enough. But I've got a PhD from Berkeley in chemistry and another 10 years post-doctoral research experience in molecular chemical physics after that, and I'm skeptical that some of Aubry's key assumptions about chemistry are sound.

Also remember that I didn't say it couldn't be done, I just said I don't think it could be done simply and cheaply, and so it would always be easier (and perhaps more advisable) to reprogram fertilized ova than try to undo entropy in old folks.

Olshansky...has not come up with a credible counter-argument to Aubry de Grey.

Well, I agree.

Posted by Carl Pham at December 4, 2004 07:56 PM

Aubry de Grey's publications in reputable refereed biology journals entitles him to be considered well-qualified to make the predictions that he has.

Putting de Grey down because he earns his living in a slightly different area than the one he publishes in is like criticising Einstein for working in a Patent Office and hence not being entitled to repect as a physicist.

De Grey's time-table for the advances he predicts and which surely will come some time in the future is surely wildely optimistic. I was researching in vacuum microelectronics. In the last 10 years hardly any of the optimistic predictions have been realized. If it takes that long to make progress in a non-living arena, how much longer will it take in the biological one discussed by de Grey.

De Grey's contribution, though, is likely to be substantial because it has stirred the imagination of biological researchers world-wide and given respectability to a field that previously had a semi-quackish image. Also, our aging congressmen facing the issue of their own imminent dimise, may start to focus substantial funding on this field.

Posted by Anthony Bell at March 18, 2005 08:55 AM

Aubry de Grey's publications in reputable refereed biology journals entitles him to be considered well-qualified to make the predictions that he has.

Posted by Anthony Bell at March 18, 2005 08:55 AM

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