The Mythical Merits of Mealy-Mouthed Messaging: Part One
Posted by Jeriaska on August 23rd, 2007
The central goal of Aubrey de Grey’s work is to expedite the development of a true cure for human aging. As a scientist with a training in an engineering discipline (computer science), he believes himself to be well placed to bridge this gap.
He attempts to do so in three main ways: by doing basic biogerontology research, by identifying and promoting specific technological approaches to the reversal (not merely the prevention) of various aspects of aging, and by arguing in a wide range of forums, extending beyond biologists, for the adoption of a more proactive approach to extending the healthy human lifespan sooner rather than later. His Transvision 2007 presentation, describing the recent advances of his anti-aging research was named “The Mythical Merits of Mealy-Mouthed Messaging.”
The following transcript of Aubrey de Grey’s 2007 Transvision presentation “The Mythical Merits of Mealy-Mouthed Messaging” has been corrected and approved by the author.
The Mythical Merits of Mealy-Mouthed Messaging
Thanks for having me back. As Charlie said, I probably give thirty talks a year, but this is one of the hardest talks to give, because you guys mostly know what I do. And I can’t exactly say stuff that’s going to send you all to sleep because you’ve heard it all before. So I’m going to try to pack in as much news as I can into this, and try to make it more interesting than it might otherwise be.
I hope that I can persuade you, if you haven’t been persuaded already, that my somewhat hard-hitting approach that I tend to take in terms of outreach has some merits, and that the more mealy-mouthed approach that some more mainstream proponents of the combating of aging have taken is not a promising approach.
I’m going to start with a couple of shameless plugs. I have a conference coming up in September and it’s in Cambridge, in England. It’s a great time of year to come to Cambridge. But, of course, the main thing is, it’s a unique combination of scientific fields being brought together under the banner of discussing negligible senescence, and what makes it absolutely unmissable are two specific things. On the last day, there is aquatic entertainment. If any of you know what punting is in Britain, as opposed to having to do with football, then you’ll know what I mean. And of course the other thing is that all the alcohol is free.
The other shameless plug is for my book, which is coming out in the same time frame, just a couple of days before the conference. It’s been written by me with my co-author and research assistant Michael Ray, the technical guru of the calorie restriction society, whom we were absolutely elated to take on a couple of years ago. He was the first person who was actually paid full-time by the Methuselah Foundation. Without him I certainly could not have done this, and we’re very happy with it. If you think Brief History of Time, it’s like that. It’s not cutting any corners of the science, but it is written for as general an audience as possible within that constraint. It’s coming out courtesy of St. Martin’s Press, so it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon. All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the Methuselah Foundation, and therefore to the research that the book discusses. So, of course, I’m very hopeful that it will be very successful.
Ending Aging: out September 4
So, by way of a little bit of background, before I get going, it seems to me that the bulk of gerontologists, even those who feel in their heart of hearts that it would be a good thing to do something about aging, which to be fair to them is most gerontologists, they have more or less given up on actually changing public opinion, and especially public opinion as reflected in public policy in regard to the actual saleability of the concept of doing anything about aging. Even doing something small about aging, slowing aging, which is of course a good deal less ambitious than what I talk about.
This happens to come out of a paper which sharply criticized the SENS project, but that’s not the point I’m making here. This was written by 28 very eminent mainstream gerontologists, and they were pretty uncompromising about the idea that it is not politically expedient to talk about aging as something we need to fix. So I regard this as the main outreach challenge for our generation. We can put it in a little more of a historical perspective, because the idea that we ought to take a more softly-softly approach to the promotion of research to combat aging is not a new idea. It’s been around for a very long time.
The oldest and most distinguished journal focused on the biology of aging, The Journal of Gerontology, was founded in 1946. And the slogan on the front cover of the first issue of that journal was “Giving Life to Years, Not Just Years to Life.” A spin-laden way of saying, Let’s not think about this terribly scary thing of life extension, let’s just talk about health. So it’s a long time that people have been saying that, and this been the absolutely uniform message that people have been giving. It has not delivered adequate public funding. Of course the founding of the National Institute on Aging about 30 years ago was a success, but in terms of actually delivering a proportion of public spending on biomedical matters that is justified by the science, namely by the potential bang for the buck that would be achieved by successful intervention, even mild intervention, in aging, it’s absurd the amount that’s going in. It’s like 3%, even by the most generous estimates of biomedical funding, goes to research in combating aging.
This has led over the years to somewhat desperate exaggerations of the message “health rather than life.” The first exaggeration that many of you will have heard about is the concept of compression of morbidity- that gerontologists are about postponing the age at which people become frail, disabled, diseases, and dependent, but not comparably postponing the age at which they die. In other words, compressing the interval between the two. And this would be great in the sense that it would save a lot of money, and all that sort of thing, and maybe it would save an amount of suffering. There are arguments that say it would not be terribly great because even people who are quite frail don’t seem to want to die, and they should really have a say in the matter. But the fact is, even to the extent that it would be a good idea, it hasn’t actually persuaded politicians to give more money to interventive gerontology research.
The same applies to messages which abandon all sense of logic when describing the goal of this thing. So one very famous phrase that’s used to describe the goal of gerontology is “healthy aging.” How obvious is it that aging, by definition, is unhealthy? “Successful aging” is another example. Everyone knows full well that aging is no more or less than a system failure. The idea of successful aging is obviously a contradiction in terms. The idea that aging is not a disease is a similar concept, of course. It’s a similarly ridiculous idea. The purpose is transparently clear that the concept of aging is a topic of study that is independent of the study of particular diseases. Of course, the perfectly obvious outcome has been that when people want reasons not to give money to something, which of course all politicians are about, because they have too many things to give money to, then they will say to themselves, and indeed to anybody else, ‘Well why give money to it if it’s not a disease? What’s the point?’
This has been going on for far too long. It’s ridiculous. Something else has to be tried. Now the focus of the pre-conference that some of you were at yesterday, I thought I would mention the longevity dividend, which is to my mind an extremely constructive and well-intentioned approach to this problem. Something that goes a little way toward acknowledging that actually extending life at the same time as extending healthy life, isn’t actually such a disaster. Looking at the actual numbers, in terms of pure money of what you would save, as well as looking at the humanitarian benefits of let’s say extending healthy lifespan by seven years, and also extending total lifespan by seven years, it’s pretty easy to argue that this is in fact extremely worth doing.
So, four of my distinguished colleagues are spearheading an initiative with this rather splendid name (Securing the Longevity Dividend) in congress. One of these people is an experienced veteran lobbyist in congress. I’m sure he knows what he is doing. As those of you who were there yesterday are aware, I am not terribly optimistic that it is going to work. But at least somebody in the mainstream is trying something. I however feel that really what we need to do is not be so mealy-mouthed. I feel that we ought to talk about aging as something that will not be any less bad when we postpone it by a little bit. By seven years, or whatever. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that our ultimate goal, however realistic, is to eliminate aging. Just as our ultimate goal with regard to cancer is to eliminate cancer, not just to knock it back by the odd little bit.
Of course, there is a problem with this, which is credibility. I think that there are fundamentally two credibility challenges that stand head and shoulders above the others. One is what philosophers for many centuries have been calling the argument from personal incredulity, which basically says, ‘This is obviously impossible, therefore I refuse to listen to arguments for why it might not be impossible.’ Or ‘This sounds impossible, therefore it is,’ shall we say. The other one is the argument from selective authority. In other words, someone who believes something and they want to carry on believing it, so they find an expert who believes it and say therefore it must be true.
I think that the solution to the argument from personal incredulity comes into two parts. I won’t have time until the second half of the talk to address the issue of selective authority. But I will come to that. If you can explain, in terms that are not just comprehensible but are common sense, why something that might initially be considered counterintuitive is actually bound to be true, then you make it difficult for people to cling to the argument from personal incredulity. The other thing is, if you start to actually take the initial steps toward actually achieving the thing that they think can’t be achieved, even if you are only making the initial steps, you are still showing that it might not be so impossible, because there are fewer steps left to achieve. The Methuselah Foundation has been making quite a lot of headway in both of these areas.
So, this is the structure of the rest of what I want to say today. I’m going to whip through a lot of different things. I’m going to emphasize a lot of what’s new, since you guys know so much about the more distant history of this work. And a lot of the reasons why I thought that would be appropriate today is that I thought the Methuselah Foundation has rather failed to keep its supporters, and the general public, updated adequately, on what’s happening. We are changing that, and that’s why I’m going to start there. We’re going to have a new website, quite soon. Mprize.org has been a bit of a mess for quite awhile. Like most websites, as it has evolved it has been allowed to become ridiculously cluttered. And it does its job if you are familiar with it, but people coming into it for the first time are a little bit daunted, and I guess rightly so.
We’ve been getting a lot of offers to help. I’ve taken up a good deal of those offers. We’re getting our act together, finally, and you will be seeing a brand-new website. In particular, you won’t be looking just at the Mprize website. We are folding in the mprize.org website and my personal site, sens.org in a more intelligent and appropriate way into the foundation website. And that’s what I’m showing here as a sort of preliminary version of what we’re doing. The Methuselah Foundation forums is something that will be given pride of place in the new website, but it already exists. And so I very much encourage you to look this up: methuselahfoundation.org/forums. You know what to expect from a forum. It’s got a lot of active, vibrant and indeed highly intelligent discussions on all manner of things. Stuff about science, the news, events, fund raising… you name it, it’s there.
This is something that we sent out. Those of you who are generous enough to be giving us $1000 a year or more will have received an email newsletter from me, which gives you a little bit of a clue as to some of the things that we have been doing. We intend certainly to make this a regular feature. This will be just one example of what we do to reward our faithful, so-to-speak, those who have kept faith with us, by keeping them up to date on what we’re doing. With regard to justifying the whole concept of radical life extension, and in particular the concept of longevity escape velocity, with which I know many of you are familiar, this is a large part of what I have been doing in the category of demystifying the goal of radical life extension. So, for those of you who are not familiar with longevity escape velocity, I shall just briefly whip through it.
This is something that I say quite often, that the first 1000 year-old is probably less than twenty years younger than the first 150 year-old. It’s a pretty radical statement. It’s very in-your face. It’s not mealy-mouthed. But I think it’s probably true, because the goal of getting to 150 years-old is a difficult goal, but once we’re there, the longevity escape velocity logic tells me with great confidence that it’s going to be all downhill from there. It’s going to get progressively easier.
The simple logic of longevity escape velocity is depicted very schematically on this graph, where I talk about the reserve capacity that exists in the body. Those who are familiar with my presentations might be a little more familiar with the reciprocal of reserve. The concept of damage, that I often talk about, is something that accumulates throughout life. It’s an ongoing side effect of our metabolic processes.
Once it reaches a sufficient abundance, it starts to cause frailty, debilitation and disease. Reserve is simply the opposite. It’s the amount of additional damage that the body can afford to accumulate before frailty starts to emerge. So the red line is just a completely schematic indication of the natural course of events in aging. Once the frailty threshold is reached, things spin out of control, and there’s basically not a lot you can do to keep things going, which is why the geriatrician’s approach to postponing aging is such a losing battle.
So, the blue line indicates what would be the result of a therapy applied starting in middle age that would be able to slow down the accumulation of damage and the loss of reserve by a factor of two. You would get a modest increase in healthy lifespan. Eventually the frailty threshold would be arrived at anyway, and the slope would revert to the natural rate of decline because things were spinning out of control in this post-frailty situation. The pink line indicates a typical scenario when you are applying a therapy that, rather than slowing down aging by a factor of two, actually repairs half the damage that is accumulating. And this has a much more dramatic effect because, of course, it applies equally to damage that is happening now and to damage that existed previously, before the therapies were necessarily even developed.
The slope of the line when damage is occurring is not altered in this scenario, because we are not interfering with metabolism itself and the process by which damage is created. But progressive, periodic applications of therapies that repair some of that damage leads to this sort of situation.The reason we have these diminishing returns is because the therapies can only fix some of the damage, and the types of damage the therapies don’t work on are still accumulating. And eventually on their own, even without the augmentation by the “easy” types of damage, they will take one over the frailty threshold. And the longevity escape velocity concept simply says that that’s okay.
If we were mice, that would be the end of the story because the x-axis would be on the scale of a few years. But since we are humans, we are looking at maybe a 20 year interval between successive applications of these therapies, and 20 years is a long time in biomedical technology. So, we can expect that the second application of the therapies will be able to repair a higher proportion of the damage. It will be able to repair the types of damage that it already could 20 years previously, and also, in this particular illustration, half of the damage that it could not repair. And this leads us rather splendidly to the scenario where frailty is avoided indefinitely because the therapies are being improved at a rate greater than the rate at which things the therapies can’t fix are accumulating.
So, I invented this phrase, robust human rejuvenation, to describe how good the first iteration of these therapies needs to be in order to get this process going. And I proposed the phrase ‘longevity escape velocity’ as the rate at which rejuvenation therapies need to improve following the achievement of robust human rejuvenation in order to outpace the accumulation of damage that they can’t yet repair. The argument that this is feasible, of course, comes down to actual data. Not data from gerontologists or science per se, at all. Because that is actually not the relevant data. But rather, data from the history of technology. I have here an illustration of the history of powered flight. I don’t think that the Wright Brothers would have expected that only 24 years would be needed to go from their invention to the ability to fly across the Atlantic, but that’s what happened. The progression continued until such time that commercial interest was insufficient to provide further impetus. That’s of course why we don’t have flying cars now. We can’t be bothered.
So this is the sort of reasoning, and this is just one example. We can look at computers, the combating of infectious diseases, many examples that show the same pattern that lead me to a good degree of confidence that longevity escape velocity for humans, though certainly not for mice, is a very attainable rate of progress. However, just to ramify that, and this is getting on to the first new thing that I want to tell you, I’m working with Chris Phoenix, whom many of you know. He is one of the principals for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. He got interested in quantifying this concept, and he and I had a very productive correspondence a year and a half ago, which led to him putting in quite a lot of time to write a rather sophisticated simulation of aging as the accumulation of damage, which allowed us to explore in silico the result of applying a certain schedule of progressively improving therapies.
So we basically invented a simulation that was very strongly based in the actual biological reality of aging. This is the simulation. I’m quite sure that no one in this room quite wants me to go through it right now. But the thing is, it worked. This is a validation that this is a simulation that reflects reality in terms of mortality distributions. The orange line here is actual data: the distribution of ages at death in 1999 in the USA. The yellow line is the best fit to that data from what is called the Gompertz equation, which is quite often used by demographers to describe the rate of aging of populations. And, as you can see, it’s fairly good, but it misses by quite a bit. The green line is the best fit that our simulation can get, which is considerably better. And this is also reassuring. This is the trajectory at which damage accumulates in typical people in this simulation, and one thing that reassures us is that the rate of the accumulation of damage, the slope here, is roughly double in old age what is in young adults. That seems realistic.
Continued in “The Mythical Merits of Mealy-Mouthed Messaging: Part Two.”
Related articles: Popular Arguments For and Against Life Extension. George Dvorsky discussed mainstream memes found in association with the issue of radical life extension.