Future Current

Aubrey de Grey and William B. Hurlbut present at the Bay Area Future Salon: July 20, 2007

To live forever is an age-old dream of humankind. Aubrey de Grey thinks it is within our reach and advocates research whose ultimate goal is to make age-related illness and death obsolete. Peter Thiel has supported Aubrey’s research by pledging a matching grant of up to $3.5 million in funds.

Not so fast, says Stanford Neuroscience Professor William B. Hurlbut. Longevity research threatens to disrupt the fragile relationship between the generations, the pace and purpose of our lives and whatnot.

On Friday July 20th both speakers argued their sides of the life extension issue at the Bay Area Future Salon, organized by Mark Finnern and the Acceleration Studies Foundation.

The following transcript of Aubrey de Grey’s July 20, 2007 Future Salon presentation has not been approved by the author. A low quality audio mp3 is also available.

“The first 1,000 year-old may not be that much younger than the first 150 year-old.”

Aubrey de Grey - Longevity Escape Velocity

I’m going to start with a couple of plugs. I’m running a conference in Cambridge in one and a half months. This is where you’ll find out the real details of the science that I only have ten minutes to tell you about today. My other shameless plug, which is slightly more accessible, is for a book with Michael Rae, it’s coming out September the 4th. This will describe the process of aging in as accessible terms as possible without cutting any corners. People who are interested in SENS will find out more about it than they ever could by listening to one of my talks.

Okay, so I want to start with what I see as possibly the central reason why there is so much difficulty in getting across the concept that aging might turn out to be amenable to serious intervention, and also that doing so might be a good thing. People have doubts on both sides of this question: both the potential for defeating aging and its desirability. And they use them to avoid thinking about each other. So, I’m going to start by addressing the feasibility side.

Persuading people that we can actually get somewhere in this is hard, because people tend to start out with what philosophers have called the argument for personal incredulity–which means, I can’t believe that this is possible, and therefore it’s impossible. And also the argument from selective, superficial, self-serving authority, which is that such and such a person who appears to be respectable says it is not true, and therefore it’s not true.

Now the ways I feel are effective in getting around these problems are first of all to make it difficult to maintain incredulity, simply by showing that it’s common sense. And the second thing is to show results, the progress that’s being made in the first steps of achieving the overall goal, and thereby also undermining the incredulity aspect.

This is the sort of thing that gets me into an enormous amount of trouble. I tend to go around the world saying this sort of thing. If we were able to implement Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence we might be able to achieve what I have called longevity escape velocity, which I will get into in a moment. The bottom line can be described by the fact that if we get to the point where we can extend people’s lives in something in the region of thirty years with interventions that are initiated when people are already in middle age, then it will be all downhill from there. It will get easier after that. We will be able to extend people’s healthy, and therefore useful, lifespan indefinitely, essentially. So, that means the first 1,000 year-old may not be that much younger than the first 150 year-old.

If we think of aging as the gradual accumulation of damage, or the gradual loss of reserve–where reserve can be defined as the amount of additional damage at the molecular and cellular level that you can stand to accumulate before the body stops working very well–then we can consider various types of intervention. One type of intervention is one that slows down the rate at which damage accumulates. So that’s indicated by the blue line in its deviation from the red line, which is the natural cause of events. In this blue line, we are halving the rate at which further damage accumulates. And when we reach what I call the frailty threshold, things feed back on each other and spiral out of control. And at that point the therapy fails to work.

But we get a much more respectable increase in healthy lifespan before this frailty threshold can be reached by repairing preexisting damage rather than simply slowing down the accumulation of that damage. And I’m speaking of a comparably effective therapy, one that can halve the damage, thereby slowing down the accumulated factors responsible for aging. And here you can reapply the therapy periodically as time goes on. And the upshot is what you see in the big jagged line by repeatedly administering the therapy. The reason why the therapy is increasingly ineffective and you get diminishing returns is that there are other types of damage that the therapy doesn’t work on. And eventually on their own, even if we’re fixing all the easy damage, they still kill us.

Now, the orange line is the equivalent to the pink jagged line if we take into account the progressive improvement of biomedical technology. Remember that we’re talking here of a time frame on the x-axis measured in decades such that the interval between the first and second applications of this therapy to a human individual may be twenty years apart. Twenty years is a very long time in biotechnology, just as in other technologies. And the result is that we should be able to fix a higher proportion of the damage the second time around. We would be able to fix not only the damage we fixed before but also a variety of new types of damage that we couldn’t fix before. This result in an indefinite escape from the frailty threshold. There’s no diminishing returns anymore. The therapies can be applied at a decreasing interval, and youth can be indefinitely maintained in this manner.

It’s very simple logic that mathematicians or computer scientists can pick up very quickly, but it seems to be difficult to get gerontologists to grasp it. The effectiveness of rejuvenation therapies must improve in order to outpace the natural processes of aging. This would be called robust human rejuvenation, which means simply the ability to fix roughly half the damage in the first place. If you could only fix a very small amount of damage in the first place, then the whole iterative process doesn’t really take hold. So you need some major breakthroughs in order to make it start.

Now, there’s a fair degree of personal incredulity that goes along with this. So, in order to help to grind that down I worked with a great computer scientist who is also involved in nanotechnology research, Chris Phoenix. And he, with my guidance, and by helping me to understand my own understanding a bit better, was able to put together a bit of software to simulate this very nicely. If you are 80 years-old when the first therapies come along in a schedule that subsequently doubles the efficacy of these therapies for a long time–every, say, 40 years–then not a lot happens. The black line here shows what happens naturally with no therapies. The blue line shows the benefit to those who are already 80 years-old when the therapies arrive. But if you’re 70 years-old and you start getting these benefits a little earlier, then most of you still die, but some of you don’t. And those of you lucky enough to survive out to the age of 100 or 120, become less and less likely to die as time goes on because the damage that is accumulating is being fixed. 10% of this particular cohort managed to escape death indefinitely. Aging is eliminated as a cause of death for all practical purposes for these people.

Is this practical? We can look at other technologies and ask how quickly does progress advance in their efficacy following the initial breakthroughs. With powered flight, the Wright brothers , 24 years to Lindbergh’s flying across the Atlantic (1903, 1927). 22 years after that we had the first commercial jetliner (1949 de Havilland Comet), twenty years after that we had the Concorde (1969). The rate at which incremental advances, incremental refinements of fundamental breakthroughs are pretty uniform and pretty rapid depending on one thing–sustained public enthusiasm for these advances. It’s certainly important that that should occur when we’re talking about saving people’s lives.

The following transcript of William B. Hurlbut’s July 20, 2007 Future Salon presentation has not been approved by the author. A low quality audio mp3 is also available.

“I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly.”

“I’m inclined to think that there’s something profound about aging and death.”

William B. Hurlbut - A Fragile Balance

If life is good, then should not more life be better? For me to stand up here and make comments in contradiction to what Aubrey says sounds like being in favor of tooth decay, or wrinkles, or even death itself. Yet, it is not necessarily true that if something is good, then more of it is better. More of what? And what does it mean to alter the process of aging? Stretching out all of life, so that each phase is longer? Or just stretching out some parts of it? If so, do we end up with a coherent whole? The metaphor I use of a symphony. If you think of life metaphorically as a symphony, would it necessarily be better if you stretched out one of the movements of the symphony? Might you not lose the balance?

As a physician, my first admonition ethically is to do no harm. We must always think in terms of the coherent wholeness of our lives. I want to focus on a few dimensions of this: the relationship between the generations. What are its implications to the meaning of our embodiment? And are their considerations related to adaptive evolution? Our species as a whole and our place within the ecosystem of life. So even as we may embrace a program of research and a positive disposition toward the goals outlined, and I largely do, given the enormous implications, both personally and socially, we should be very cautious.

Just think of the difference, for example, if you are able to live for 150 or 1000 years, of the meaning of the term “a life sentence.” Or the term “’til death do us part.” It’s clear that a deeper reflection is warranted. Prude probing of both the purposes and the practical problems of this issue are in order. Clearly a desire to overcome aging and death seem as natural to us as life itself. In the words of Woody Allen, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.” So, I’m open, I’m interested. I think the exploration that Aubrey is involved in is very interesting and exciting.

What is this thing called aging? Do we have a clear understanding of what it is? And is it something indeed that is worthy of the word “cure?” That’s a very loaded word. Galen, the 1st century Roman physician, said that the physician is nature’s assistant. That goal was the one I was trained around, to restore the patient so that the natural life processes could be optimalized. But now there is a new paradigm in medicine: technological transformation in the quest for happiness and human perfection. Increasingly we’ve come to expect from medicine not just freedom from disease, but freedom from distress, struggle, and even the constraints of life’s natural processes. All that’s unattractive, imperfect, or just inconvenient. This is the medicalization of natural life. Biomedical technology gives not just new powers of comprehension and control but a transformation in our conceptual and ethical outlook, a vision of nature and human nature and the role of human desires, transformed and inflated by new powers and new possibilities.

The hegemony of this is the dominance of technology over our traditions–what we might call our spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic traditions. I guess the first thing I would say about this is, to put it simply, “Mother Nature always bats in the bottom of the ninth.” There is a lot to be said about this from a physical, medical, biological standpoint. The main points I want to make are there’s a relationship between mechanism and meaning. Our minds do not somehow hover over our bodily being. We are our bodies. What we do to our bodies will affect the entire psycho-physical unity that we are. But is it not our nature, part of who we are, to intervene in nature? Are we not the creature who is also a creator?

Yes, that’s true. And indeed, all of medicine is an intervention against nature and natural processes. In the Presiden’t Council on Bioethics on which I sit, we did take on this issue. We published a report called “Beyond Therapy” on Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. This was a very challenging task. I found it about the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. In the end we couldn’t make this easy distinction between enhancement and therapy, and decided we had to do the hard work of ethics, thereby defining a more comprehensive understanding that some alterations in nature are justifiable, while others seemed to disrupt the whole which is the purposeful center of existence. Human beings are the creature that comprehends the whole. We see not just the pixels but the picture. There is a coherence to the parts, giving the whole its meaning. Harmonious balance, meaning and moral are deeply related.

Is a good life necessarily a long life? I think all of us would say, not necessarily. Martin Luther King said, “If there is nothing you would die for, you have never really been alive.” William Hazeltine, a famous biologist-geneticist, said at the founding for the Society for Regenerative Medicine, “The real goal is to live forever.” I’m not so sure. Yet, I lament with Abraham Lincoln over what he called “the brutal bombardment by the silent artillery of time.” Do we all crave at some level for the unchanging vitality and youthful intensity that we have experienced? Do we all feel the vulnerability of frailty and finitude? On the other hand, is there something about it that gives meaning, purpose, shape and coherence to our lives? When I faced my frailty and finitude, I felt that I came to terms with it in a positive way that I had not previous come to. In fact, I think I arrived at the conclusion that life is a little wiser than we are. We need to be careful not to just go from the immediate and the obvious, but we have to look profoundly and realize that life has a pace and procession that moves on to fresh territories and perspectives.

I want to mention a few practical biological problems first in thinking about this. I think we have to be careful. We have to realize that if we are going to transform life in such a way that we don’t ag, that the interventions are probably going to have to be early, pervasive, and invasive, broad in effect, and probably permanent. They aren’t going to be like drugs you can take and then stop. They’re not going to be interventions you probably can reverse, if you don’t like what’s happening. I think these experiments will take generations in time to see what the effects are. Who has the right to do these experiments, and on whom? Suppose it means that you have to actually intervene in the genetic constitution of an individual. Do we have a right to do that to our children? That’s a very profound question. Do we have a right to do it to ourselves? Well, maybe not altogether. Because, even we are subject to what you might call the flavor of the month syndrome. How often have you thought that something was important, and then five years later realized that really something else was important. I never got a tattoo for that reason. But I think what I’m talking about here is, there’s something about stages. I would not want to prolong all the stages of our lives. I would not have wanted a long time to be an adolescent. It was bad enough as it was. So I think we have to be careful about too static a model of life.

There’s something about the pace of things. There’s a fragile balance to all this. Magic bullet solutions are not realistic solutions. Two principles I teach my students in every class I teach: pleiotropy and polygenic inheritance. Any one gene does many things, and any one trait is affected by many genes. So, are you going to alter a gene? You’ll get many effects. Do you wish to alter one trait? You’ll need to alter many genes. It’s not going to be easy. You’ll have to repair the repair of the alteration. And I guess it comes down to how many pills do you really want to take? For example, overall, a large number of clinical trials associated with antioxidants have produced very little in the way of positive results because there are too many things that antioxidants effect. So I would warn you against a reductionistic model. The body is very, very complicated. What serves one stage of life may alter adversely another.

Let’s consider, what is the relationship between the meaning of our lives and aging. I kind of think what’s imposed on us gives us meaning. As an adolescent I probably would have been happy just to have continuous errant sexual encounters. But I’m very grateful I have children. Many, many women use contraception and now have no children. 5% of births are IVF mainly because people waited too long, and many of them will not have children because of it. We’re not wise enough for that–well maybe we’ll learn. But there are great questions of wisdom involved. There is a coherence to our lives that relates to the pacing and purposes and different roles that we serve in the relationship between different generations. There is coherence between our physical, our psychological, and what I would call our spiritual existence. We, our society, has lost its sense of spiritual hope and therefore we’re turning toward biology to rescue us from our mortality. We want a technological solution to this inevitable problem of aging and death–I do believe it is inevitable.

Will we ever transcend the fear of death that operates over all of life? What was in the beginning of the 20th century largely a reality of death through external causes–injuries and infections, largely–was transcended in the mid-20th century through antibiotics and better surgical procedures. We went from dying from those external forces to increasingly dying of psychological forces. Accidents provoked by behaviors. Auto accidents, for example. Drug addictions. And increasingly, life now is moving from physical death, to psychological death, to what you might call spiritual death. Somewhere between the last two are addictions. Addictive behaviors are killing a lot of people. And slowly but surely we might edge over into what you might call spiritual death. Death from despair. I’m not convinced that simply extending life will keep us from that. Life is a strange, strange process. And I do believe that if we preoccupy ourselves with the ambitions and appetites of consumer culture, you’re draining the aliveness from us. And I see one of the dangers of this preoccupation with aging is the neglect of a more imperative challenge in my opinion.

Aubrey has mentioned that 100,000 people die each day from aging, but I find to be a much more shocking figure to be the 30,000 children under the age of five who die on average every day from starvation and diseases related to malnutrition. I find the present reality of spinal chord disease, multiple sclerosis, and breast cancer to be more worthy of technological efforts than to extend the fringes of current life… although I’m not against it. And a lot would be learned that would feed back into the middle of life. So there’s something to be said for that.

Two concluding comments. I want to be a little brutal about this. I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly. What I mean by that is that I think there’s something profoundly human and profoundly strong about really facing the realities of aging and death. I think otherwise we trivialize life, and I think it’s very easy to believe that we don’t have to deal with these challenging realities. But we do. If we didn’t, I think we’d have to contend with something else: what Hannah Arendt profoundly noted in one of her writings. “The greatest and most appalling danger for human thought is that what we once believed could be wiped out by the discovery of some fact that had hitherto remained unknown. For example, it could be that some day we succeed in making men immortal, and everything we had ever thought concerning death and its profundity would then become simply laughable. It is possible to say that this is too high a price to pay for the suppression of death.” In other words, she’s saying we would disconnect ourselves from the most profound currents of human existence. Would Buddha mean much? Would Ghandi mean much? Would Jesus mean much for an immortal humanity? I’m inclined to think that there’s something profound about aging and death.

Related articles:

7.23.07 Policy Scenarios for the Longevity Dividend: Anders Sandberg discusses possible scenarios attending the introduction of radical life extension to society at the IEET “Securing the Longevity Dividend” talk.

10.15.07 Eliezer Yudkowsky, SIAI Blog, The Meaning That Immortality Gives to Life.

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