On this page, Dr Aubrey de Grey, SENS Foundation's Chief Science Officer, answers questions regarding how (and how quickly) a biomedical cure for the suffering, disease, and disabilities of aging can be achieved. Questions that are more particular to the specific panel of therapies in the SENS platform are addressed in the sources listed on our publications page.
No, antioxidants/meditation/hormones won't do it. Since such approaches are already available and money can be made from selling them, there is of course a fair degree of downplaying of the limitations of existing products in the available literature on them, most of which literature is generated by those who are selling the products. Modest health benefits may indeed result from some of these products, and that's fine — but neither they nor any foreseeable improved versions of them have any chance, on current evidence, of giving us more than a few years extra healthy or total lifespan over what we will get just by living and eating sensibly.
Looking at this question from the opposite angle, however, we can see that the pharmaceutical industry has succeeded in educating the public about the mechanisms of aging that are alleged to be slowed down by antioxidants and such like, and it's a fair bet that many people are inclined to buy these products because they understand a bit about how they're supposed to work, whereas if it were entirely a matter of faith they might not buy them. This makes it all the more important for each of us to support progress in the development of genuine, foreseeable biomedical rejuvenation therapies.
All biogerontologists are asked one question more than any other by non-biologists:
How soon do you think we'll start to see real life extension treatments?
Most of my colleagues absolutely refuse to answer this question, because they feel that no answer can be scientifically defended and hence that to provide an answer is to misuse their exalted status as scientists. I agree with that stance in areas of science that are not medically relevant, but not in medical areas: I feel that those with the best information have a duty to state their best-guess timeframe, because that information determines people's life choices, whether or not the public's assessment of the reliability of what experts tell them is accurate. Thus, though I know that my best guess is highly tentative, I don't regard that as justifying silence.
There's also the fact that providing concrete timeframe estimates (even while always emphasising how tentative those estimates are) may help to undermine people's apathy. Most people seem to feel that, well, we all die some time, so is there all that much point in putting all that effort into buying ourselves another few years, or even another few decades? This is, I'm sure, the main reason why most people in the developed world are so inattentive to their health, spending no time or money on exercise, fruit and vegetables, etc. — it just doesn't seem like fun, and if one's life is a bit shorter as a result, well, that's a price worth paying. That's a big reason why I tend to be quite outspoken about what I consider the likely rate of progress in combating aging in the coming decades and the consequent impact of how long people will live — and live healthily, let's not forget that. Once people realise the sheer scale of what they could gain if they just hang in there until these therapies arrive, I reason, maybe they'll start to see that a bit of sacrifice now is worth it after all.
Simple — they have four characteristics that, jointly, make them the species in which life-extension successes dramatic enough to convince the public that aging can be postponed in humans will be most quickly achievable. These characteristics are:
One class of animals that also seems an attractive proposition is cats and dogs. These are even better than mice in terms of (b) and (c) above, they're not all that much worse in terms of (d), and there is a fifth advantage, namely people's emotional attachment to them. This has paid off somewhat in one important area, somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning: John Sperling, the billionaire who founded the University of Phoenix, started and funded a company, Genetic Savings and Clone to clone dogs and cats, and he did this largely to clone his own dog, Missy. Missy died a few years ago now but they have plenty of her cells and dog cloning may be only a year or so away. (Cats turned out to be easier, and GSC are now cloning them for profit at an increasing rate.) GSC are not just riding on the coattails of science — they were the first to clone cats and they seem set to be first with dogs too. But the current problem for leveraging this motivation in terms of the SENS therapies is that those therapies are a decade away even in mice, and not many pet owners think about their pets' aging until a lot closer to the pet's death than that. This may not be a showstopper, though, and I remain open to suggestions in this area.
My main problem with this sort of advice is just that the softly-softly approach has been a catastrophic failure for gerontology for 50 years. How long does a failed strategy have to fail before we should abandon it? I just don't foresee policy-makers channeling funds into life extension behind the public's back — the public must lead them. (Convincing the public of the near-term feasibility of genuine anti-aging biomedicine, in turn, is a matter of breaking the vicious cycle that is paralyzing the public discussion).
An additional problem with trying to say things about life extension that one thinks people want to hear, rather than telling it like it is, is that in large part it comes down to advocating modest life extension (in terms of both feasibility and desirability) but playing down the feasibility of very large increases in youthful lifespan so as to avoid having a serious discussion about the desirability of so dramatic an advance. The problem with this approach is that it would obviously risk being a significant waste of resources to the benefit of only a few. Faced with a false dichotomy of leaving aging as it is versus adding only a couple of decades to life, it is reasonable to conclude that for the same amount of money, we could give just as many decades to many more people: the billion people on our planet living in extreme poverty, whose present life expectancy is cut short by a similar amount but by things that are much less expensive to fix. Only if one considers the prospect of very greatly increased youthful lifespans does it become clear that investment in rejuvenation biomedicine would be a benefit to all.
Government ultimately has one goal above all others: to get re-elected. This means they can only manipulate the public in two ways: by keeping information from them or by making something else even more important to the public than the thing they disagree with the public about. Neither option will be available in this case. Besides, remember we're talking about delaying a cure for something that everyone in government suffers from... so whatever the political risks and uncertainties, the usual rules may not entirely apply.
"Big pharma" has often been cited to me as an enemy of SENS because it makes its money from keeping people alive but frail, so that they have to carry on buying the products. But that's not a problem for SENS, for two reasons.
Firstly, the initial generation of SENS therapies will initially be applied in piecemeal fashion, to cure specific age-related diseases, even before they are combined in a suite that will greatly extend lifespan. This is a model with which the biotech industry is already comfortable, and in several examples is already pursuing — usually without considering what its impact might be as part of a rejuvenation regimen.
Secondly, the "engineering" approach to anti-aging medicine involves a periodic rejuvenation of youthful health, rather than a once-and-for-all treatment. People who wish to continue enjoying youthful, healthy lives will undergo a complex and multi-pronged schedule of advanced medical therapies, each of which will temporarily remove enough of a given kind of aging damage to renew their healthy lease on life, and repeat them on a periodic basis into the indefinite future.
Moreover, as the recipients of these therapies come to live longer and longer lives, there will be a need to identify previously-unknown, progressively slower-accumulating forms of aging damage and to find ways to repair them, too. The need to both repeatedly administer their existing suite of therapies, combined with the need to discover and develop new therapies, will keep the biomedical industry productively busy for as long as humans want to continue living youthful, healthy lives.
Religious people, like all people, vary in their initial response to the idea of extending healthy lifespan — but the force of the major religions' core teachings will ultimately bring them to support the goal as a moral imperative. All faiths teach that life is sacred, that suffering should be alleviated, and that it is unacceptable to stand idly by and let people with an opportunity to live healthy lives die by our inaction, even if the life to come may be even richer than this one is. But when some sincere religious people object to curing aging, it is not grounded in the core teachings of their faith, but in the same mental block about curing aging as many other people: telling yourself that aging is actually a good thing allows you to come to terms with the heretofore-inevitable fate that aging has in store for you, and for everyone that you love.
When confronted with the utter lack of defensibility of all the arguments against curing aging, non-religious people (not unlike the self-absorbed passers-by in the parable of the Good Samaritan) will often retreat into a false show of apathy: "Yes, I probably should help the effort to cure aging as soon as possible, but I have other things to do, sorry." Sincerely religious people simply don't have that option: when they become convinced that it is their duty as good Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or whatever to help a given cause, they are compelled by their faith to do something about it. Some of the most energetic people in the life-extension movement are intensely religious.
This is basically a challenge to me to provide evidence that people do actually want to live longer (so long as the extra life is healthy). There's abundant such evidence — it's called the anti-aging industry. If you ask people the question whether they would like to live a lot longer in good health, they get all solemn and ambivalent about it and start going on about the social and economic consequences — but actions speak louder than words. Also, it's important to remember that the correct question in deciding whether this research should be expedited is not whether most people want to live longer but whether most people feel that people should have the choice to live longer if they want to.
It's true that my strategy relies on the belief that where scientific consensus leads (in terms of what's possible and what isn't), society reliably follows. There are some cases which might be regarded as counterexamples: genetically modified crops in the UK and stem cell research in the USA are two that spring to mind. But wait! — look more closely at those two examples. Genetically modified crops are thought by most scientists to be unlikely to be dangerous to the ecology, but most scientists certainly do not think that they have a zero chance of being dangerous, so the question for the public is not whether to believe scientific consensus but how to weigh the risk against the benefit — and of course the magnitude of that benefit is a matter of legitimate debate. As for stem cell research, the problem is again not one of whether these therapies are possible or whether they would be therapeutic, but of whether they are ethical. I'm not saying that won't also happen with aging — but look what's happening with stem cell research: it's not proceeding as fast as it might in the US, but it's still proceeding pretty fast, and faster elsewhere, and that's mainly due to the support of large swathes of society, enabled and encouraged by scientific consensus in this field.
