When we are brought into this world, we discover as we grow older that two things are inevitable: change and death. But what if we took something out of that equation? If we could remove growing older and substitute indefinite youth, what impacts would that have on our equation? While we know that change will never end, progress in the several converging sciences may allow us to live indefinitely in the future, at least Aubrey de Grey thinks so.
De Grey is Chief Science Officer at the SENS, or Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence Foundation, located in California. He has been featured on several shows including 60 Minutes, The Colbert Report, TIME, and websites like TED and BigThink.com, where they feature a series on the future of aging that I highly recommend checking out.
De Grey posits that there are seven major types of damage caused by aging that eventually lead to death. Among those types include cancer-causing mutations, cellular loss, cellular age, and intracellular/extracellular aggregates. He believes that many of the therapies necessary to remedy these items, and thus end death by senescence, have already been discovered and simply need to be employed. But is he right?
In 2005, MIT's Technology Review put de Grey and the SENS foundation's claims under the microscope to determine it's legitimacy. The result? A competition was created that challenged teams to prove SENS "so wrong it is unworthy of learned debate" for a $20,000 prize. Of the 5 submissions, no team was able to convince the judging staff comprised of experts chosen by Technology Review that SENS was not worthy of at least such debate. However, the overwhelming answer from much of the scientific community, including several biogerontologists, was that the claims of the foundation were simply "overoptimistic" and would require many more years of hard work to produce anything fruitful.
So yes, a blow to de Grey's claims, but not a death blow by any means. An important aspect of de Grey's postulation is that these increases will be largely incremental, steps at a time, extending the age of humans perhaps 10 to 20 years. In that time, another therapy would be developed that could extend the life of those individuals another 10 years, and so on. Just a few months ago Harvard scientists were able to largely reverse signs of aging in mice, a huge discovery that could be applied to humanity sometime in the future.
But something that I feel many experts fail to take into account is how fast we are progressing in the several fields of technology and how those discoveries can be cross-applied. Ray Kurzweil, whom I mentioned in my post last week, feels there will be a convergence of several technologies (biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc.) that will result in dramatic life extension. In a video interview with expert-driven site BigThink.com, Kurzweil discusses how the convergence of these technologies will allow for microscopic robots to be able to alter our genes, ending aging and disease, and continuously keeping our bodies optimized. A big claim, but nonetheless plausible.
Regardless of how we may extend the length of our lives, there are many social, ethical, and political implications surrounding the issue that may prevent much of the work necessary to make these technologies possible. The same problems that we face in the present will become even more of an issue provided that these technologies were implemented, the most important and relevant being overpopulation. Indefinite life would lose it's value if the world were ravaged by war and famine caused by our dwindling resources.
Fortunately, technological progress stands to create a sustainable future in which all individuals can experience the fruits of the labor of humanity. Drastic life extension has already occurred in our species' past and the average lifespan of the individual is in some cases three fold what it was just a hundred years ago. We are still feeling the effects of this extension economically, socially, and politically but these effects are not anything that we cannot handle. We just have to accept that ideals of the past are not always what is necessary to provide for the future, and as our progress grows faster and faster, so does the inevitably of our reality: change.
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