Arguing the Scientific Feasibility of Anti-Aging
Posted by Jeriaska on March 9th, 2008
Aubrey de Grey is the editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research, a medical journal which publishes cutting-edge work on anti-aging therapies in the laboratory and clinic. At the “Securing the Longevity Dividend” event in Chicago organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he argued the scientific feasibility of anti-aging therapies by exploring the concept of longevity escape velocity and sharing interim results from research funded by the Methuselah Foundation.
The following transcript of Aubrey de Grey’s July 23, 2007 IEET talk “Arguing the Scientific Feasibility of Anti-Aging” has not been approved by the speaker. Audio is also available, courtesy of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Arguing the Scientific Feasibility of Anti-Aging
Jay asked me to present a case for the feasibility of defeating aging, but of course within the context of the discussion that we are having today overall about the longevity dividend and perhaps more generally about the way we might influence political thinking and public policy in this general area. There is a good deal of dispute among mainstream gerontologists not only as to whether the things that I think are feasible are feasible, but also whether–even if they are–we should really talk about them. I’m going to try and address both of those issues today.
I thought I would start, however, with a couple of shameless plugs. I have a conference coming up this December in Cambridge, England which is the third in a series of so far extremely successful conferences essentially showcasing all of the various biological fields that are coming together to contribute to what I believe is a relatively foreseeable major onslaught on the aging process, initially in model organisms such as mice, and eventually in humans.
The other shameless plug is for the book that I have coming out that I wrote in collaboration with my research assistant Michael Rae. Michael, as many of you know, is sort of the technical brains of the calorie restriction society, and he has been working as my research assistant for the past year and a half or so. He spent most of that time working on this with me. It’s written for a general audience, but without dumbing down the science. 90% of the book is the science, as opposed to the social context and so on. You can think of it as like the gerontological version of A Brief History of Time. All the money that we get from sales of this book go to the Methuselah Foundation.
The concept that we ought to be focusing on healthspan and not be talking too much about life extension is a very old idea. The phrase along the lines of “Giving life to years, not just years to life” actually appeared on the front cover of the first issue of the Journal of Gerontology back in 1946. This policy has been overwhelmingly the face that mainstream gerontologists have given to the raison d’etre of the field. It has had some patchy successes, such as for example the creation of the National Institute on Aging, but I think you would be very hard put to find a gerontologist who would say that the amount of funding that gerontology receives at this point is adequate.
As someone said this morning, every scientist would say that–but it’s really fairly ridiculous in the case of gerontology. We all know the study of the biology of aging has consequences for biological disease and suffering. The amount of the bang for the buck, so to speak, that one would get by even very modest interventions to postpone aging is vastly in excess of what is represented by the something in the region of 3% of the public biomedical budget that goes towards the study of aging. If you have a more careful definition as to what is being done to understand aging with a view of doing something about it, then the proportion of public funding that is going toward that is absolutely negligible.
In perhaps subconscious recognition of this frustrating situation, gerontologists have over the past few decades resorted to what in my view were ill-advised exaggerations of the case that I have just outlined to you. First of all, there has been a great deal of promotion of the concept that if we were to extend healthy lifespan, we might well be able to do so without similarly extending total lifespan. In other words, we could compress the period at the end of life where you are no longer health. We could make you die sooner once you became unhealthy.
This makes no biological sense whatsoever. I’m very pleased to see that a number of the more thoughtful mainstream gerontologists in the world are beginning to fess up and genuinely point out, at least in meetings where gerontologists are not talking to the media, that the whole concept of compression of morbidity is a rather biologically unrealistic one, at least in terms of what gerontologists might achieve.
I think I might point out parenthetically here that the term “compression of morbidity” was first introduced by James Fries in 1980, he did so in a manner not discussing the possibility that gerontologists might be able to compress morbidit, but rather that in the absence of breakthroughs in the biology of aging that there might be progress in compressing morbidity through lifestyle changes, which is even clear from the abstract of his canonical paper in the New England Journal. He gets a lot of blame for this, but it is actually not his fault at all–it’s the gerontologists who jumped on this band wagon without really having any justification for doing so.
Here there is this concept of “healthy aging.” Now, what is healthy aging? Aging is by definition unhealthy; it’s bad for you. An uncontroversial definition of aging is that it’s a system failure. The idea of using these terms is an implicit admission that you refuse to admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Also, the concept that aging is not a diseases is a popular thing that gerontologists have liked to say, perhaps with a sort of well intentioned view of SENS funding for gerontology as separate from the funding of intervention-specific diseases. Of course, what actually happened is people are looking for excuses not to give money for something so that there is enough to go around, and think that if aging is not a disease then there isn’t much sense in spending money on it, is there?
I feel all of these things have rather catastrophically backfired, especially in recent decades. It is really high time that we tried something different. To some extent, that is why we’re here. Jay and his colleagues have tried something quite novel with the Longevity Dividend initiative. It has, in a sense, drawn heavily on a number of themes that have come before, but it has put them together in a novel, highly provocative, and potentially highly effective way. What I want to discuss today is really my take on whether it will be effective and, to the extent that it might not be, what might work even better.
The bottom line is, I am actually not very optimistic. I’m extremely pleased that there are people with the prominence and erudition of Jay and his colleagues who are working on this and putting such energy into it, so I wish them absolutely the best of luck and will do anything to help them. But, in practice, I have to be honest and tell you that I do not think it is going to come off. This is the main reason I don’t think it is going to come off. We have had some increases in life expectancy before. Let’s take the U.S.A. If you go back and ask how long ago life expectancy was roughly seven years less than it was today, it’s somewhere in the mid-60’s. If we compare the situation then with the situation now, then we have got all the characteristics that Jay put up in his talk: improvements in public health, extension of the period of health and vigor, and reductions in frailty and disability at all ages.
Even though there have been some lifestyle-related compression of mild levels of morbidity, there has been no compression of severe morbidity in the U.S.A. As was pointed out by the last two speakers, there has been a longevity dividend, a very definite one, in the sense of wealth having come to the U.S. economy as the result of people living longer. But that is a considerably subtler concept than the concept that one might be able to make if the idea of compression of morbidity was actually realistic. I think it is rather important to point out that the way that the longevity dividend has been presented so far may be making a rod for its own back, so to speak, by people who start to think closely about the shortcomings of these arguments. I was very pleased to note that the actual statement that went to Congress had quietly removed the phrase “compression of morbidity” from the text. That was definitely a step in the right direction in my view.
As Jay also mentioned in his talk, there is a question of feasibility. Len Hayflick is known to be the world’s most pessimistic gerontologist in terms of the prospects of our actually doing anything serious about aging in less than geological time. I’m quite sure that when Len came up to Jay, he was actually being somewhat sarcastic and rhetorical when he was asking this question, because he knew perfectly well that Jay would not be able to give any answer.
Jay’s answer to this I somewhat agree with. Sure, we don’t know exactly what therapies are going to work. The plan for defeating aging that I will briefly allude to shortly, which I have of course been working on over the course of the past several years, one of its strengths is that it is a multi-component plan, each bit of which is essentially modular. Some new problem comes up, it’s not going to effect whether the rest is going to work–you only have one part to replace. That’s actually a rather useful feature of SENS.
However, I want to make a more fundamental point first, which is that that’s only true when it comes to the details. There are scenarios which are so different from the scenarios that most people might be thinking about that actually we do have to think about the possible range of feasibilities now.
First of all, I want to make sure that people understand the situation with regard to the authority of the people who are spearheading the Longevity Dividend initiative. I think that it is great that they have managed to be so persuasive so far. The fact is, the four people who are spearheading this consist of only one gerontologist. Jay’s a demographer, of course, Bob Butler is a geriatrician, Dan Perry is a lobbyist. They’re all extremely good at their jobs, but they are not biologists. The only biologist who is in the team, Rich Miller, is someone who I am not alone in having criticized somewhat for having been a little too sure of his own opinion. He has had a reputation for over-dogmatism for a very long time indeed, which is absolutely pervasive within gerontology. It might therefore be a little bit unwise for the demographer, the geriatrician and the lobbyist to put all their eggs in the basket of trusting their one co-author.
What I am going to talk about is an idea which is certainly not only disputed by this one gerontologist, Rich Miller, but also by most of the contemporary mainstream gerontological community. So I am not trying to say that this is sort of a fatal error in the strategy of the longevity dividend authors have been adopting, but it is something nevertheless that needs to be borne in mind in terms of our confidence of the approach.
To cut to the chase and to talk about my own ideas, this is something that I have been saying for quite a long time–a lot of people in mainstream gerontology wish I would stop–but it is something that I claim is true. The evidence as we have it is more consistent with the hypothesis that the first 1000 year-old human is actually less than twenty years younger than the first 150 year-old than the evidence is with the contrary hypothesis–that the first 1000 year-old human is more than twenty years younger.
Today we are not talking about outliers. We’re not talking about world record holders. We’re talking about economics, and that means populations. Here is what I would say in terms of the population level. The first cohort, in other words the first birth year whose average age at death (let’s say in the U.S.A. for the sake of argument) is over 1000, it is likewise probably in my view less than twenty years younger than the first 100 year life expectancy cohort.
This is a statement which is certainly very provocative, but the good thing we can say about it is it’s constative. It’s actually got numbers in it, so we can actually argue about it. Incidentally, this is just like the longevity dividend headline statement, the idea of giving a particular amount of life extension. The only number that is to my mind unfortunately missing from what has been done with the longevity dividend so far is a target date by which a seven year life extension might be aimed to be achieved, but that’s a detail, really.
So, radical life extension. I want to talk about credibility and feasibility. That is what I have been asked to talk about today. Ultimately feasibility, when it comes to something that has not been done yet and that even its proponents is saying is decades away, comes down to credibility. It comes down to whether the evidence available today does indeed more strongly support the assertion than the opposite of the assertion.
There are two main types of arguments that are generally put forward to reject the sort of statements that I gave on the last two slides. I have slightly caricatured them here, but these phrases are of course not mine. First of all, I want to talk about a way of undermining the argument that says, This is obviously impossible, therefore I refuse to think about it. Or perhaps, I cannot believe this could be true, therefore it isn’t true. One way is to demystify the achievement of the supposedly achievable task.
I regard aging as straightforwardly describable. This is not controversial; any gerontologist would agree with this. It is describable as a two-stage process, an ongoing process throughout life, where metabolism has side effects and some of these side effects accumulate in the body at the molecular and cellular level throughout life, even starting before we are born. I am defining the word “damage” for today’s purposes as the set of all of those things that are caused as side effects of metabolism and accumulate in the body, and that eventually, once they are sufficiently abundant, make metabolism work less well. We know that this threshold exists because fundamentally not much does go wrong in terms of the function of the human body until the second half of life. Of course that is the same with the function of the bodies with other organisms.
This is aging. Those of you who are even slightly familiar with my work will know, I regard this as quite a useful way to look at aging, because it identifies three main themes that one might look at with regard to how to do something about aging. There is the geriatrics approach, which is to wait until the damage is beginning to translate into pathology and to address the pathology directly. That has the advantage that you can see what you are aiming at. You can see your enemy, so to speak. But it has the disadvantage that it’s too late in the day. Prevention is better than cure. Things are spiraling out of control at this point. As all gerontologists know, the geriatrician’s approach, while better than nothing, is a losing battle.
What I am calling here the gerontology approach is to be preemptive–to try to clean up metabolism and slow down damage, and thereby similarly postpone the age at which they become abundant enough to cause pathology. That is all very well, but it’s taking the concept of prevention being better than cure too far. Metabolism is so complicated and we understand it so poorly that interventions which are intended to improve metabolism and to do better than evolution has done in keeping us going for as long as we do are not likely to work. They are likely to do more harm than good.
The engineering approach is to intervene to repair, or in some cases make harmless, the damage itself. This is to let metabolism lay down this damage at the rate it normally lays it down, but to attack it while it is inert, before it has reached the level of abundance that causes pathology, or in principle to do it in concert with a geriatrician’s approach so as to restore someone who has already got some pathology to a more youthful state.
The idea here is that this might work rather well and rather soon, relative to the others. That is described in this graph, which I have been showing quite a lot recently, that depicts the concept of longevity escape velocity. I am introducing what looks like a new concept here: the concept of reserve. But reserve is not a new concept–it is simply the opposite of damage. Reserve is the amount of additional damage that someone can afford to accumulate before pathology starts to emerge. This dotted line down here is what I am calling the frailty threshold, where pathology does start to emerge, because damage has reached a specific abundance.
If we think of the natural course of events very schematically by the red line and then if we hypothesize a therapy that slows down the accumulation of damage by a factor of two and is applied to someone who is already middle age when we start, then that might be depicted by the blue line here. This is at half the slope until the amount of damage reaches the frailty threshold, at which time things spin out of control anyway, and the therapy doesn’t really work much anymore, so the line resumes its original slope.
The comparably effective alternative of repairing the damage, as opposed to simply slowing down the rate at which it accumulates, is much more effective. It is depicted by the pink lines, in which there is no impact being made on the slope of the lines that depict the accumulation of damage but in which there is periodic repair of half the damage. That is what I mean by “comparatively effective” to what the blue line was. That works a lot better, as you can see. The overall age at which the person gets to the frailty threshold is greatly increased relative to the blue line because the therapies can be applied multiple times and can get rid of damage that had preexisted before the therapies had been developed.
That’s pretty good news. The reason you get these diminishing returns is because the damage that the therapies does not work on is still accumulating and eventually on its own, even with an arbitrarily thorough removal of the easy damage you still get an amount of damage that tips the person over the frailty threshold and gets pathology to emerge. The final ingredient, which is the longevity escape velocity concept, is the layering onto this idea of the progressive advance in the efficacy of the therapies as technology is applied to refine them. What we are showing here with the brown line is the second time that the therapies are applied to this person who was in middle age when the first therapies were applied, it can still fix all the types of damage it could fix before, but it can also fix half the damage that it could not fix before. That is because, let’s say twenty years have gone by, since the original application of the therapies.
The result, as you can see of course, if this result is continued is that you don’t get diminishing returns. Over the long term, the amount of damage in the person’s body is actually progressively reduced, even though the person is continuing to get chronologically older. That’s very nice indeed, and that’s why we can talk about maintaining a healthspan indefinitely, which, as all demographers know, would lead to something in the region of four-digit lifespans, assuming the risk of death from aging depends on causes that we see today in the Western world.
I invented this term, robust human rejuvenation, to describe the amount of impact repair of damage in the body at the molecular and cellular level that would be required to get that graph going, to get this 50%, or thereabouts, repair of damage. As you can see, if you only repair, say, 10%, then you haven’t got long enough for the technologies to improve. You have to have a pretty comprehensive therapy to get it going.
Longevity escape velocity is very simply the rate at which rejuvenation therapies need to improve after the achievement of RHR, in order to outpace the accumulation of damage that those therapies cannot yet repair.
Is it plausible? Well, I say so. I say so because I look at data. I look at the rate of progress of other types of technology. This is powered flight. The Wright Brothers probably didn’t think they were going to be flying across the Atlantic only 24 years later, but that’s Lindbergh. The first commercial jet liner was only 23 years later. Then we have Concord. Of course we can make the same argument with computers, the combating of infectious disease. This is data from a completely different area, it’s not even really scientific data, it’s data from the history of technology. But that’s the relevant data at this point.
I have worked recently with one of the people at the Center for Responsible Technology, Chris Phoenix, who is a fantastic programmer and got very interested in this idea. He dragged out of me some subtleties of this that I had not really articulated to myself very well, and the result was that he was able to write some software that very thoroughly tested by simulation purposes this general concept to look at how rapidly these therapies would have to improve in order to give eventual escape from age-related death.
Here is the simulation. If you look at the black line you will see the survival curve of a normal population that does not have any therapies. It is just a straightforward Gompertz curve. If therapies come along when some cohort is 80 years-old, and that’s the first therapies that come along, and then after that the therapies get better and better but at this rate, doubling in their efficacy every 42 years, then nobody really gets much benefit. There, half the people are dead before the therapies even arrive at all, and there are too many types of damage that could kill the person. Even though in principle people could just have survived, they are in too frail a state for too long for anyone to survive.
If you are only ten years younger, if we are talking about people who are 70 years-old when the first therapies arrive, then they get a bigger benefit. By the time 10% of them are still alive, all the therapies are coming along at a rate that is beginning to reduce the overall amount of damage in the body. Therefore, they are able to achieve longevity escape velocity and the rate of death from aging becomes absolutely negligible. This is only talking about death from aging, not aging-independent causes.
The thing is, this logic is pretty simple. I tend not to take very long to get it across to people, with one rather glaring exception. Mainstream gerontologists tend not to want to think about this sort of thing. I tend to get laughed at a lot when I talk about these things, but when I point to this logic, no one can actually point to any concrete problems they have with it.
This leads me to a bit of a quandary. I myself have to answer this question: Should I be acquiescing in this ridicule and simply ignoring or suppressing what I know to be extremely straightforward conclusions from this sort of analysis, or should I actually point out that rejuvenation therapies are not just going to be more effective than retardation therapies, they are actually going to be infinitely more effective, because they will be able to indefinitely postpone frailty.
The more modest goals exemplified by the longevity dividend initiative have some problems. I mentioned one or two of them earlier that I think underlie how successful it has been so far in getting nice, warm words out of quite senior politicians. It sounds quite realistic, but also, it does not sound very scary. Seven years, it’s not going to change the world. Politicians can believe that they could adjust things like pension plans or whatever to cope with that. But maybe it’s not quite un-scary enough. We will have to see. It seems to me that the proof of the pudding will be in when these things get debated by people who are actually committing to the spending of money, and of course that has not happened yet.
I wanted to come to interim results. So far, as Jay most correctly pointed out, I have just talked about conceptual stuff. I have tried to demystify the thing and make it clear that this is just something that you would think of as common sense if it were in any other field that you did not have a hangup about: the pro-aging trance that I talk about so much. It is also important to have concrete interim results to actually demonstrate that the whole nuts and bolts to the approach to getting to robust human rejuvenation, let alone getting to longevity escape velocity, is not pie in the sky.
As many of you know I have this seven point plan that I have been developing, promoting and defining for some time now that defines what I think are the major categories of this concept of damage that I described earlier. It also describes ways in which I think we can go about repairing, or in some cases, just making harmless those various types of damage. Some of these things are rather well advanced. The whole stem cell therapy research more-or-less is focused on this one problem here of reversing cell loss and cell atrophy. Other ones toward the bottom here are more ambitious, but I feel that they are probably only about ten years away from proof of concept in mice. So it’s all going quite nicely.
The key point I wanted to make of course today is the interim results. I’m pleased to say that even with the very modest quantity of funding that the Methuselah Foundation so far has been able to attract, we have been able to get a bit of work done. We are funding a number of graduate students around the world. This comes from a group working in Arizona at Arizona State University in Tempe. This is a photo that was presented at a meeting a couple of months ago. In fact, this group has just submitted the first paper from this work, which is looking at the discovery of enzymes that can break down the substances that cause atherosclerosis by accumulating in the artery wall. That paper is in review at the moment. We are pretty happy about that important milestone.
This is where I get a bit more personal, though not about anyone in the room. As has actually been mentioned by a few other speakers, we do have to take into account if we are talking about the politics of getting life extension research funded, we do have to take into account the internal politics of the biogerontology community. There are three statements here that could have been made about my work by mainstream gerontologists and which certainly characterize the attitudes which some of my colleagues have to my ideas, but actually only the first one was made about me.
This is something written by Tom Kirkwood a couple of years ago, that this is a laughable claim. Since he has taken the word “probably” out of what I’ve said, it’s a bit more laughable than what I actually say, but only a little bit more, I suppose.
This is not something describing me. It comes from a quote by J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who pointed out that ideas that are actually quite valid and indeed revolutionary and important tend to start out being rejected rather forcefully by the existing establishment. Of course, he wasn’t the only person to say that. Arthur C. Clarke a few years later, the well known futurist and extremely accurate predictor of time frames for technological advances said a similar thing. You get the idea.
The question, of course, is–which is it? Is SENS, the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, one of these ideas which is just being irresponsibly rejected and ridiculed by people with vested interests, or is it in fact like a perpetual motion machine which can indeed be rejected? I regard that as an important hypothesis that needs to be tested. This hypothesis was articulated rather well by about 28 of my colleagues a couple of years ago. “[T]he SENS agenda is easily recognized as a pretense by those with scientific experience.” This is a quote from a paper that came out generally describing my work as about as useful as creationism.
I decided that something needs to be done to establish whether this was true or not, so I got together with a gentleman whose name came up earlier, Jason Pontin, who has been utterly unrepentant about accusing me of drinking too much beer, but has been much more repentant about the fact that his profiles and editorials on me and my work in the foundation did not talk about the detailed scientific flaws, such as they might be, of strategies for engineered negligible senescence.
So the experiment was to set up a challenge: to ask critics to give their reasons in writing. The inducement was $20,000–$10,000 from Technology Review and $10,000 from the Methuselah Foundation. It was important that the critique that was given be given a fair hearing, so anything submitted I would be invited to write a rebuttal, and then both documents would go to the panel of judges. Furthermore, the judges themselves had to be people who had the appropriate expertis, at least between them, and yet had no vested interest in either of those schools of thought or people involved in those schools of thought.
These names are all rather familiar. Craig Venter, obviously, needs no introduction. They all thought that this was an important enough thing that even though it was a rather unorthodox way to investigate a scientific question, nevertheless it did make sense in this case. Somewhat to my surprise, a group of nine of my colleagues did actually have the nerve to send something in. They were no less kind about my work than the 28 authors of the report had been, and said lots of things about SENS being pseudoscience and its notoriety being do almost entirely due to its emotional appeal, and so on.
The judges didn’t think much of that. They said that these people were too quick to engage in name-calling and they had not demonstrated that it was pseudoscience. It is a collection of hypotheses that are not scientifically verified, obviously, but by the same token has not been disproved. One of the judges made this rather eloquent quote: “I have no confidence that they understand engineering…” in other words, goal-directed technology, as opposed to purely curiosity driven hypothesis testing, “…and some of their criticisms are poor criticisms of a legitimate engineering process.”
That was so comprehensive a falsification of the original hypothesis that the SENS agenda is “easily recognized as a pretense by those with scientific experience” that my most strident critics have mostly become considerably less strident. In fact, some of them have begun to become really rather constructive in describing and exploring the details of SENS and determining whether it actually holds up or not.
This is a lot of very bright people with PhD’s that ought to have known better. Why did they do this? First of all, we have established that it was not for scientific reasons. They do not actually have scientific reasons for rejecting SENS, because otherwise they would have written them down and they would have been recognized as probably valid. It seems to me, I am afraid to say, that there is a somewhat deliberate reluctance to find out about the details of what I am actually saying. I feel there is a deliberate refusal to learn the key data. For example, none of the authors of either of these publications that I mentioned a moment ago came to my last conference that I ran two years ago, which they could have done, and they would have found out quite a lot of data that would have been to their advantage.
I think a lot of it is very much as Bernie Strehler wrote in the article that Jay quoted at the end of his talk: straightforward vested interests, career driven cleavage to the establishment orthodoxy that perhaps the senior scientists were responsible for creating in the first place. It’s very difficult to do anything about that. Even though ideally science is all about falsifying hypotheses and coming up with new explanations about things, in fact, to be perfectly honest, it often works in the opposite direction. It often works to promote the longevity of ideas that are past their sell-by date. I don’t really have a solution to that.
From the point-of-view of people who are not grandees themselves, not supposed to be experts or authorities in this area but who are nevertheless interested in what the expert community in this particular area thinks, the problem is that there may be a certain amount of what I called earlier “selective authority.” The argument from selective authority, where one looks mainly at the people who espouse the views that one has already.
If one looks at the last five or eight years of Jay’s work, I think that one thing that is a great step forward is the fact that five or eight years ago he was hanging around Len Hayflick as his main biogerontologist colleague. I think this is an improvement, because you will not find a gerontologist who thinks Len is up to speed. This is an example of how it helps to get a more rounded view by making sure that one does actually consult a wide range of supposed experts.
This sort of thing often happens when I talk to scientists about this, and they know that they have not actually got the detailed knowledge to address what I am saying. They say, “Where’s my data?” And I say that I can show you my data about the history of the development of powered flight or the interim data. And they say, “That’s not relevant data.” And I say, who says? And they just sort of retreat and say, “I want lifespan data. That’s the data that counts.” And I say that’s the argument from personal incredulity, really, and the argument from superficial authority. I’m getting rather bored of this kind of exchange, but it does seem to happen quite a lot.
There is a bit of a problem if we compare 40 years ago to now, then medical expenditure has not exactly fallen. The postponement of aging is perhaps the main reason, albeit perhaps through cohort effects rather than through treatment why we have seen an increase of seven years in the last 40 years. A key point that I did mention toward the beginning of the talk is that we need to try a diverse range of different approaches that some people think are going to work and some people do not, rather than being too parochial and narrow about what might work and trying to disparage each other’s approaches. I think we need to be very constructive about this.
I showed this slide before about the vulnerabilities of the longevity dividend initiative. I think I just want to finish by saying that maybe we ought to go back a little bit to first principles. We can start with this. We have these useful facts that really are not terribly controversial or disputable. Aging kills people; it kills people really horribly. The faster we do something about that the more lives we will save. If it turns out that an approach involving repair or reversal of aging really is effective, we ought to be trying it now rather than just trying something some other people think is going to be effective.
Another thing which is of course absolutely important is that when we get our seven year increase in life expectancy, aging will still be just as bad. We still won’t want to do it; we’ll still want to push on. The idea that an anti-longevist, pro-deathist might want to push forward, even in Congress, as an argument against the longevity dividend initiative as it stands today is that it’s the thin end of the wedge. Who knows what will happen when they get those seven years.
I think Jay and indeed everyone else involved in the longevity dividend is acutely aware of this, but nevertheless it bares saying once. At the moment, all we have is words. All we have is nice, warm phrases from politicians and no actual commitment to getting any money on the table. We have got politicians and committees saying to each other that this is a good idea. That is totally better than just saying to us that it’s a good idea, but it doesn’t pay any bills.
I have a fear that the ultimate truth about politics, which is that politicians only actually want one thing in life, which is to get reelected, may actually be the dominant force in the dynamics that the longevity dividend experiences. Unless the general public starts to state its view of the acceptability of all this, politicians may be very nice to everybody who is trying to push this forward, but they are not actually going to do anything that they think might lose them votes.
Finally, I just want to emphasize yet again that these logically fallacious arguments, such as the argument from personal incredulity, are highly counterproductive in all this. Most people are irrational about aging. We know that people have come up with the crazy arguments, only a subset of which George just gave us in the previous talk. We also know, and I think this is something that we frequently forget, those of us who have known since we were kids that aging was a bad idea, we sometimes forget that historically when the defeat of aging was not in sight at all, this was a good psychological thing to make peace with aging. That was the way you could put it out of your mind and make the most of your short lives rather than being preoccupied by it all.
Now, of course, what I call the pro-aging trance is an enormous part of the problem, so we have to break it. We have to find some way to get people to realize that they are not being rational about aging, even though they have built up all these psychological defenses against such attempts. That means we need to be forceful. Mealy-mouthed messaging is not going to work on the public, even though it may work very nicely in Congress. There is a lot of argument in favor of giving an extreme message that is logically coherent, rather than giving a moderate message that is logically incoherent, talking about things like “successful aging” and so on. What I am saying about demystification is exactly that–saying this is why these initially highly counterintuitive conclusions are actually no-brainers. That will be hastened if we are all objective about the feasibility of these things and don’t let vested interests get in the way.
I couldn’t resist putting this in. Jay said this in an interview that was included in a documentary on me that was broadcast in the UK a few months ago called “Do You Want to Live Forever?” That annoys me as well. Everything, of course, that is published about this sort of work, uses the word “immortality” or “living forever” in the title as a sort of way of selling papers, of course. Why does it sell papers? Because it makes the thing look faintly ridiculous, and therefore it reinforces the pro-aging trance.
So, this is what the old Aubrey could be described as–a harmless theoretician who was not publicly thinking about intervention and so he wasn’t threatening anyone, and so all the establishment could have a quiet life. This is my definition of what the terms “old Aubrey” and “new Aubrey mean.” I personally think new Aubrey is the person we need.
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