Life Extension: Good News, Bad News, Surprising News
Posted by Jeriaska on November 23rd, 2007
Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, including nanotechnology and life extension. She is Founder and Vice President, Public Policy, of Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. In 1991 she coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, full text online), which sketches nanotechnology’s potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible abuses.
She serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology, the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA’s Nanotech Briefs, and on California’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology. For years she directed the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organized the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chaired the Foresight Vision Weekends. Her presentation at the 7th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on longevity research relating to her new life extension website Healthactivator.com.
Christine Peterson of HealthActivator.com and Susan Fonseca-Klein of the Immortality Institute
The following transcript of Christine Peterson’s 7th Alcor presentation “Life Extension: Good News, Bad News, Surprising News” has not been approved by the author. DVD sets of the conference can be purchased at the Alcor website.
Life Extension: Good News, Bad News, Surprising News
The title of this talk is “Life Extension: Good News, Bad News, Surprising News.” It might also be a whirlwind tour. We’re going to touch on a wide variety of life extension areas. It’s kind of a hubristic thing to do, but I think that at a life extension conference someone should touch on them all, so we’re going to do that, along with some things that I hope will be useful to you personally.
As for who I am, most of you know me from my nanotechnology work . Life extension has been more of an amateur thing for me up until recently. Now I’m about half-time. I’m getting more serious about it but I’m also finding it can be a lot of fun. You’ll see that I am going to emphasize that’s kind of key to getting the whole thing to work. You really want it to be fun. You want it to be a pleasurable thing rather than a burden. The acronyms at the bottom stand for “I Am Not A Doctor,” “This Is Not Medical Advice.” The human body is the most complex thing we know. The state-o-the-art changes every day. I don’t think there is a person on the planet who can advise you completely about your life extension program. Keep that in mind as we go forward.
It’s a little intimidating to be the speaker on this topic right before Chris Heward, who is a big expert in this area, but it’s also comforting because I know if I make a mistake Chris will catch it and straighten you all out. If he corrects me, you can probably go with what he says.
Terminology matters. It’s hard to come up with terms that really work for what we are trying to do. To a lot of people “life extension” does not get across the idea that we are talking about extending healthy lifespan. You’d think it would be obvious. Evidently it is not. Lots of people think that you just want to live longer in an older and older body. “Health extension” sounds kind of good, but it doesn’t get across the idea of adding extra years. “Anti-aging,” believe it or not, there are people out there who think that that means you don’t like old people. “Longevity,” same problem as life extension. “Immortality,” to some people that has a religious connotation. Kind of a problem there. “Permanent health” is a possibility. I’m just starting to go with plain old “health.” I just want to be healthy and, you know, keep on going.
You may have heard of the wonderful classic science fiction short, short story called “They’re Made Out of Meat,” where two aliens are discussing the fact that human beings seem to actually be made out of meat. It’s absolutely hysterical. If you need a good belly laugh (and it is good for your life extension to have a good belly laugh) go on the internet, type in “They’re Made Out of Meat” and read it. I can almost guarantee you one. We are made out of meat. It’s our substrate. There are benefits. It works well for a few decades. It is actually quite pleasurable for that period of time, but we all know what happens to meat eventually. Not a pretty picture. On top of this, our memory storage system appears to be a form of a fragile gray thing. We don’t have a back-up system for our pudding. We do a great job of backing up our computers; we don’t back up our pudding. So this is a scary situation. What are we doing about it?
What we would like, at least what I think we would like while we are in this meat substrate, would be a pill you could take for life extension. I don’t care what’s in the pill: it could be nanomachines, whatever. Just give us a pill, one a day. If we ever decide we’re tired of that, we stop taking the pill. That would be nice. The bad news is, there’s no pill now, there’s no pill soon. The good news is there are some things we can do to buy some time, and some of them are fun things.
But first let’s do a little digression. Why is there no pill now or soon? Well, first, there are lots of folks that you would think would be interested in this area who are not. Most medical doctors, the vast majority of medical researchers are not interested. The FDA is not interested. They don’t even see aging as something that you can say, “Okay this aging is approved for that.” That’s my understanding. But those aren’t the main problems. The biggest problem is that the challenge is extraordinarily difficult. It’s a big problem.
Politically, we have a problem. Leon Kass was for a long time the Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Just hearing about religious issues with life extension, his view, based on this quote that I’m showing here on this slide, is that people who are interested in life extension are childish and narcissistic, and their wishes are incompatible with devotion to posterity. This is totally different from my experience with people in life extension. The people I know in the community are very benevolent, altruistic, they care a lot about other people. One of the reasons they want to stick around is to make the world a better place. My theory here is that Dr. Kass has been spending too much time on the internet reading some of the more extreme transhumanist rants. I wish he would come here and meet some of us and find out that we’re very nice people. By all means, let’s have him here.
In contrast we have Bill Clinton who I was surprised to hear, I think it was through the Immortality Institute that I found this, a quote saying, “We want to live forever and we’re getting there.” A totally different view. I have no idea what Hilary thinks, though. Bill is not the candidate, so we don’t know what she would do. In terms of who is doing something, Aubrey de Grey is doing something with his SENS work, Chris Heward is working at Kronos, but there is not as much going on as we would like. There are “soft” versus “hard” approaches. SENS, which is Aubrey’s approach, mainly these are biomedical strategies. This is a very powerful thing to do: bootstrap off nature’s molecular machinery. The hard approach we are hearing about from Ralph Merkle, who is working in nanotechnology. There is some near-term nano that is looking very exciting for cancer treatment. You see phrases like “complete tumor remission in one treatment.” Very surprising kinds of statements. If even some of them are true, we’ve got some nanomedicine coming.
Later on, those of you who are paying attention to nano, know that we are looking for more advanced medical devices to be able to repair at the cellular-level and molecular-level. Both approaches are going to do great things, and we are going to have a pretty long overlap. Eventually you want, and here is a quote from Robert Freitas, true nanomedicine able to control human biological systems at the molecular level. To really do this, you are going to want precisely controlled, programmable medical nanomachines and nanorobots. We have here an illustration. It’s an artist’s conception, but it was advised by people who have a clue about how to get across an impression of what things would be lik. Those of you who know biology better know that one problem with this slide is I think it’s actually very crowded in there. There’s not all this space. So when you see these illustrations, you’ve got to imagine everything kind of jammed in together, but this is just to give you a flavor.
What is the primary life extension strategy? We need to apply the available anti-aging methods, whatever they are, in the hope that this buys us some time until some of these more ambitious efforts kick in. When is that going to be? Well, here we have a quote that claims that the year 2020 is suggested by Ray Kurzweil for when aging could be defeated. I think that’s actually probably a misquote of Ray. I think that year is when he predicts when computers will reach human levels of intelligence. But then from that he projects the advance is applied to life extension. I think that year may not be quite right. Ray is pretty aggressive in his time estimates.
So, how do you buy some time? Everything helps. There’s a lot of different things you can do. Some of these are pretty traditional things, some of these are a little more edgy. I’ve got eleven things listed here. We will be talking about some of them one by one. The interesting thing is I put a star by the ones that can be pleasurable. That’s necessary because some are easy to do. When I first made this slide I didn’t put the asterisk by biomarker testing, and a friend of mine said, “Wait a minute, I just saw you having a lot of fun comparing your Kronos test results to your current test results.” For anyone who’s technical at all, it is really fun to get that data, track it over time, and see how you’re doing. It’s like getting your SAT scores and doing really well. It’s a fun thing to do. Most of these actually have an asterisk by them. They can be fun to do.
I like to start with stress reduction, for lots of reasons. Chronic stress is really bad for us. Some of those effects are reversible, so there’s a pay-off if you can get it down. Mostly, it makes your life better and it really helps you get around to the other techniques, so there is a lot of leverage in starting here. There’s a lot of things you can do. There’s a nice list here. Sex is on the list: you noticed quantity for men, quality for women. So you’ve got to get both, I guess, if you can make that work. You’ve noticed I’m suggesting “spend dollars.” Now, I realized after I made this slide, mentioning sex and then saying “spend dollars,” this could be misinterpreted. I’m not suggesting that at all. Let’s say “spend time and resources in trying to do these things.” It seems like kind of a luxury to spend money and time on these things but really, this is your life extension, right? It’s okay to spend money on life extension. It really is. It’s okay. You may need to make a big change in your life. Sometimes you’ve got a toxic person in your life and it’s hard to find a way to move away from that person. You can’t really change other people. Or a job or a community that is causing you tremendous stress. You notice I didn’t put “kids” on here. I don’t know what you do if you have toxic kids. Some of you with toxic kids maybe can speak to that issue. It may not be a solvable issue.
Biomarker testing, some of you may have seen this wonderful animation by Gina Miller and Robert Freitas. I believe now there is actually an animation that has an audio track by Robert, telling about what you’re seeing. It would allow you to have a real time read-out that would just tell you what is going on in your body. That would be great. There’s nothing like that. So, what can you actually get? Before you start getting serious about life extension, it’s great to get a baseline: see where are you, what are your numbers. A lot of folks are technical. I have a technical background. It’s great to do those numbers, find out what’s the situation. You can go to Kronos, that’s what I did. It’s not inexpensive, unfortunately. You can also do a lot of testing from Life Extension Foundation. I haven’t done that personally, but I know they have a lot of tests available. This is something that I did wrong, so learn from my mistake: Do you need to get some portable health insurance before you find out there’s something wrong with you? If you think you might want portable health insurance, get it first before you go to Kronos, before you start a medical plan to find out what’s wrong. Because once you find out what’s wrong, you don’t necessarily have that option. Involuntarily, I’ve become quite an expert on this. Come see me if you have questions. I did succeed in getting my health insurance but it was definitely the wrong way to go. You want to get that before you go to Kronos.
Supplements, this is the closest thing to what we want. They’re easy to take. The hard thing is deciding what to take. Most people taking supplements are doing it, I think, too indiscriminately. Certainly, I was in the past. Many of you became interested in life extension early on, maybe from Durk and Sandy‘s book. How many of you read Durk and Sandy’s book and got interested? That was a big change and a lot of people started taking things. I would say you, want to be careful and not just take everything that “might help.” You don’t pick up something and say, “Oh, this might help,” and put a pill in your mouth. These things can conflict, they can cause damage. One thing I did wrong and I’m trying to do better now is keeping detailed records: When did I start? When did I stop a certain supplement? When did I change the dose? Why did I make these changes? After about 20 years it gets really hard to remember.
First, before you start taking these things, you want to think about what are your minimal criteria for taking these supplements? These are different levels of confidence in supplements. I’m assigning levels one to six. The lowest level is chemical theory. It’s an antioxidant, that’s certainly not a reason to put something in your mouth. Buckyballs are antioxidants. We don’t put those in our mouths. Then you move up the scale to some higher levels of confidence. You get up into some more comfortable range, 5 and 6, one large, well designed human study or multiple such studies. The more types of evidence the better. The problem, of course, is these studies haven’t been done, and so you don’t have the data you want to make these guesses. You have to make the best informed judgment you can.
Supplements can do damage. I will spare you my stories about my own supplement use that made me think, “Gee, what am I doing here?” Also, you can overdo supplements that all push you in the same direction. You could conceivably take too many things that are “blood thinners.” I was told I was doing that and I backed off. You think serotonin is a great thing; it is possible to overdo that. You can have too much serotonin. You’d think vitamin C, how could you overdo that? Well, vitamin C makes you absorb iron better. That’s good, right? It turns out more Americans are too high on iron than too low. You have to monitor these things. You can’t just assume that you want more iron. You can’t trust your family physician to tell you how much iron you need, because the ranges that you will see on the blood tests from your regular doctor are wider than the ones that at least I saw from Kronos. Just because your doctor says you’re fine, unless you have a life extension doctor, you can’t necessarily go by that.
Another reason to require good evidence is that a lot of medical studies are done poorly. The reason is they are very expensive to do and it’s extremely difficult to do double-blind human studies on cases. They often rely on patient-reported histories, they often mistake correlation for causation. I’m sure you’ve seen that. This is information that showed up in the media, and my point here is that you can’t go by what’s in the media. You can see that the first paragraph is complaining that supplements are causing people to die prematurely. The supplement manufacturers said, “But the people taking the supplements were sick people.” The fellow doing the study comes back and says, “But 70% of my participants were healthy.” Okay, let’s do the math here. 70% of 100 is 30, so you’ve got 30% sick patients. Those numbers above are 16, 7, and 4. That’s lower than 30. So, what’s going on here? Who the heck knows? It’s totally unclear what’s going on here. Even if you read the journal article it’s not clear that you could figure out what’s going on here.
Another confusing thing in the media was an account saying that taking siestas was good for your heart. Sounds great. We all love an excuse to take siestas. Well, this was not a random study. This was a study of people who were taking siestas because they personally chose to take siestas. What kind of people personally choose to take siestas in the 1990′s? These are pretty relaxed folks. Let’s look at some other siesta studies: In Greece, it improved their heart disease problems. In Costa Rica it gave them heart attacks. And in Jerusalem, there was no effect. You just can’t tell when you see this stuff in the media. You have to dig in pretty deep to find out what’s going on, and you’d be lucky then.
Here is sort of a list of people who will tell you what to take. I wish I could tell you who on this list is absolutely right. I can’t tell you that. What I’ve done is arrange them from people who tell you to take the least amount of supplements to the people who tell you to take the most. So you can see, a lot of doctors won’t even ask you what you’re taking. Then you move up the range and you see different organizations, different websites who will tell you to take more and more. We have representatives from two of these organizations. We have Chris Heward from Kronos here. I don’t think he’s going to be talking about supplements. I have seen Saul Kent here, and he is a representative of the Life Extension Foundation. He might present you with his own philosophy. They are relatively more aggressive on this list. I can’t say this list is aranged from conservative to aggressive because, what is conservative? All these folks are claiming that they are the most conservative in the sense of conserving healthy structure. I think it is fair to say that the farther down you are, the more aggressive you are in terms of supplementation. You noticed Ray Kurzweil’s personal program, not his book Fantastic Voyage, but his personal program is on the very bottom of the list. He takes the most supplements of anybody I know, but he has extensive testing done on himself I believe every week. So, if you are going to be that aggressive you need to be careful. This is not for amateurs, what he is doing. I particularly ask that you watch out for hormones. Hormones are very powerful things in your body. Some of them at least are sold over the counter. I haven’t heard complaints about melatonin, but I can tell you stories about pregnenolone. Don’t just take a lot of pregnenolone, believe me.
I think we should expect regulatory attacks on our supplements. Even if I were the most ethical pharmaceutical company CEO, I would have to look into the fact that these things are cutting into my sales, and there is the fact that some people do misuse them. It would be hard to resist the temptation to call up my congressman and say, “You know, this is damaging.” There are some people who are damaged. It’s possible. I think we’ve already started to see some of this. If you are familiar with how supplements are treated in the European Union, they are very heavily regulated. It’s quite hard to get what you want over there, often. It could happen here. There are periodic attempts. There’s a couple legislative things for you to consider supporting. If you are on an email list and you get an alert saying we need to defend our rights, take the ten minutes or the fifteen minutes. Do what it tells you, because you can lose these rights. The folks in Europe already have.
There is a more aggressive approach, calorie restriction. If you want to do it the whole way, it’s a fairly aggressive approach. Not too many people are up for it. It’s been apparently shown to increase maximum lifespan in rats and fruit flies, but not in houseflies, so it does not work in every species. It’s being tested on monkeys. It seems to have reduced the diseases of aging in monkeys. Go online and look at pictures of these animal. The ones on calorie restriction look a lot better. They look younger, they really do. We can’t be sure that they are going to have an extended lifespan, but they look a heckuva lot better. I would ask, if you are going to do this, don’t start and stop. Think of what you’re doing to your body. We’ve all heard, don’t do this yo-yo dieting. This is like the ultimate yo-yo dieting. You are sending your body messages, saying, “You’re in a famine, you’re not in a famine.” Don’t do that to yourself.
You may have heard the term “inflammaging.” Inflammation is bad for us. It’s one of these mechanisms of aging. Visceral fat in the abdomen causes a lot of inflammation, and as we all know, if you want to get rid of visceral fat traditional diets don’t work. It’s pretty easy to see why. Somebody’s eating this way and suddenly you ask them to change to a completely other way of eating. It’s very hard to do that and very few people can do it. That’s not what I would recommend. I would tell you two things that worked for me. There is the slow but fun way, which I would definitely recommend. It’s a recognition first that we often don’t eat because we’re hungry. We mostly eat, or at least I mostly eat, because I want a treat. And I deserve a treat, by gum, and I can have one.
So, I had a treat value equation, which is “yumminess times amount,” or “quality times quantity.” In order for this to work, your treat value needs to stay the same or go higher. If it goes down, you’re going to be unhappy and throw it away. If you want to reduce the amount, what do you have to do? It’s really clear, right? You’ve got to increase yumminess. So, that’s what I did. I selected a number of things that to me are good treats. They’re healthy treats, but they’re good treats, and I have them all the time. This seems to have let me “be good.” We all want to be good. It’s not that you don’t know what to do, you just can’t do it, or at least it’s hard.
There are lots of little tricks you can do to cut 100 calories a day. They’re pretty much painless. If you just pick one now and then and add it, each one gives you one pound a month weight loss. These tweaks are not that hard to find and they’re pretty painless. I do want to share with you the bizarre way, which also worked for me. I don’t recommend it because it is so weird. Another way you can handle this treat issue is to make it so the food is no longer a treat. What I ran across was something called the Shangri-La diet. It’s not a diet, it’s just a trick where you add extra flavorless calories before a meal, about 100 calories or so. It is a trick to make you feel full and it results, at least for me and a lot of people, in an alienation from the food. Now, I don’t know about you, but I normally have warm, fuzzy feelings about my food. I like food. I look at my food, it’s a friend. This is like, what is this stuff? It had might as well be cardboard. This is a weird feeling, it’s not a fun thing, but if you’re getting kind of desperate and thinking about stomach stapling, I would definitely say try this first. If you’re going to do this, you’d better have some non-food treats in your life. Lots of them, because food is no longer a treat. I’m not recommending this one but, as I say, for folks who are desperate it’s something to do.
This whole question of how do you control weight is a big, complex topic. I would mainly ask you to be gradual. Movement or exercise, I noticed Tanya yesterday had a little button that said, “I’m not dead yet.” Those of you who know Monty Python know that’s a joke from Monty Python. Movement is one of the ways your cells tell each other they’re not dead yet: a really important thing to do. I would say the gym teachers of America have a lot to answer for here. A lot of us in this room grew up as technical, kind of geeky people and were forced to play blood combat sports at school, and this is a great way to convince people that they hate exercise. There’s nothing like throwing a ball very fast at someone’s head to get them to be sure that they hate exercise. So, I think we should have the math and science teachers in charge of what kids do in gym class and keep the coaches out of the business.
By the way, when you’re on these exercise machines and there’s a calorie counter on there and you’re looking and saying, “Why would I want to spend this much time doing this for 100 calories worth of benefit? I’d rather just not eat those two cookies and quit the exercise.” Well, don’t go by that. Those things are not helpful. When you’re on those machines and you’re working out, you’re adding muscle and muscle burns more calories all day long. So the numbers are misleading and it shows incredibly poor marketing skills on the part of these treadmill machine owners. You want about 10,000 steps per day. They have these really cool hi-tech pedometers now. They’re fun to use, so go ahead and wear one. You don’t need to do a lot of weightlifting. I’ve seen studies that indicate most muscles need only once a week. Also, be aware that the main purpose in my view of personal trainers is to amuse you and distract you while you work out, and this is a perfectly legitimate use of personal trainers. I used one for quite awhile until my body became totally addicted and I couldn’t give it up anymore. So, spend the money. It seems expensive, yes. It’s expensive. But remember, this is your life extension and you deserve this. Spend the money.
These are the traditional methods. I want to talk about some non-traditional things. One, you’ve heard the term uploading? What is that? Well, there’s a hope that someday we can get away from meat substrate and re-implement our entire brain structure in another form. Fascinating idea, people have no idea how to do this. We don’t even have the beginnings of research in this area. So, it’s going to require extremely advanced technology to do that, even to just analyze the brain on that level. I think it’s a fine thing to think about and work on, but in terms of your personal life extension, I would say put it in the back of your mind and focus on practical techniques you can do today. Don’t count on this. It may never happen. I think it will happen someday, but for you, right now, not the most productive thing to focus on.
Another extreme strategy which is what you fall back on when things are not going so well for you in terms of life extension, which is a very conservative strategy, is biostasis or cryonics. Here I’m using that term “conservative” in the sense of conserving structure. Unless we’re lucky and life extension goes really well, many of us in this room are going to run out of time and not have any options except biostasis at that point. I know many of you are not Alcor members. I would suggest that if you’re not sure, or just don’t have time to deal with it, just get the life insurance. Rudi will agree with this. He can help you with this. I’m serious. You want that insurance because you don’t know what’s going to happen to you tomorrow. What you want is to have the insurance in place first and then go and find out what the issues are. You want that nailed down while you’re still healthy.
You don’t know when you’ll need it. I have two friends who were in their early 40′s who are already over at Alcor. One of them made a mistake with his physical risk reduction. He took a physical risk that did not work out for him. The other one was not paying enough attention to his testing and was caught off-guard. By the time he found out about his problem it was too far along to solve it. So you definitely want to have this in your back pocket. This is your emergency planning.
In terms of taking action, I’ve talked about nanotechnology, I’ve talked about life extension. Both these topics will be covered at the Foresight Vision Weekend November 3rd and 4th. You are all invited. Some of you are speaking at that. That’s what we call an “unconference,” which means you can propose topics. I asked Tanya to volunteer to present on cryonics and she said she will be there. But you are also allowed to just propose topics. So, feel free to do that. Just go to the Foresight.org website and go to the Mission Weekend page there, and we hope you’ll join us.
For nanotechnology, per se, this Tuesday and Wednesday Foresight is launching its Technical Roadmap, it’s research roadmap for very advanced nanotechnology systems, in D.C. I’m going directly there after this meeting. If you want to follow up on life extension, per se, we will be talking about it at the Vision Weekend. Or you can go to my brand-new website called HealthActivator.com. I’m about half-time now on life extension. I’d love to talk with you more about that. I think that’s it for today. Thank you for your attention.
