I don’t want this to be a poll, really just a thread for people to post their thoughts or opinions on this topic. Basically, when do you think we will start seeing radical life extension…or do you think we will never see it? Or that it’s centuries away? I’ll define some terms. Basically, what I’m getting at here for ‘radical life extension’ is the ability to exceed our current limitations, not just in longevity but in quality of life as well. So, let’s say the low end of this would be humans able to live past 150, but with a quality of life of people in their 40’s or 50’s until pretty much near the end. That’s the low end of what I think that means. Obviously, MMV and we could be talking about people living for hundreds or even thousands (or more) years wrt aging, only dying in an accident or voluntarily. This would entail (I’m speculating here obviously) not just slowing down, halting or even reversing the effects of aging but also stopping or preventing many age related diseases and degeneration effects.
So…think it will happen in your life time? In the life times of someone who is currently alive on the planet? In the lifetimes of someone who isn’t born yet but will be in a generation or two? Many generations down the road? Never? What do you think?
Based on what I have learned of human physiology, including neurophysiology, and having had a few chats with a friend who’s on the cutting edge of apoptosis research, I think it’s generations away yet.
A quarter century ago, there were proud announcements that Great Things Were About To Happen!!! Scientists had decoded the entire DNA genome!!!
Identifying specific genes for each disease meant that we would soon be able to treat everything!!!
No more mass-produced drugs…We would make drugs one at a time, matched to each individual’s personal genetic profile…
Some company took DNA samples from everybody in Iceland and announced that a cure for cancer was on the way… (since everybody in Iceland is related and genetically very similar, it would be easy to find the few differences that cause some individuals to get cancer and others not. Then, voila, its simple!–just engineer that single gene, and no more cancer.)
Lather, rinse, repeat.
So far,nothing has changed.
Recently, the latest buzzword is Crispr genes. But to me, it seems like the same news we heard back in the 20th century.
We don’t even have a cure for diabetes, which is a simple disease with one simple cause, from one part of the body. It should be easy—just flip a switch in a gene, and the pancreas will produce insulin, right?.
So when you ask me about extending life by genetic engineering,I’m not buying it.
Aging affects a million different organs and systems in the body.
I don’t know a single thing about biology…but simple logic says that fixing a million systems is much more complex than fixing just one.If they cant fix even one system, (like my example of the pancreas ) I’m not going to believe that we are anywhere near fixing the systems of aging.
It’s a lot more complex than that, frankly. There’s DM I, DM 1.5, DM II, Cystic Fibrosis related diabetes, the diabetes of end-stage pancreatitis, the diabetes caused by the removal of the pancreas, etc. etc. And each separate entity is quite complex.
but aside from that, I agree with your other points.
I think there is good evidence that most people are just plain worn out before they hit 100. A few go on longer, but it eventually catches up with them. So even if we cure most cancers, have functional artificial hearts and figure out dementia, there is virtually no chance in the foreseeable future to imagine life expectancy will go much beyond 90, if it actually gets there.
Literally never. It’s probably not solvable and it’s not really even a solution anyone wants. What they want is to be healthy until, and to make it to, the end of the current lifespan.
I don’t think that it will ever happen “retroactively” for living people, but in theory possible to customize gametes pre-fertilization. To have enough knowledge of how the mechanics of human genetics works to be able to do this would probably take at the least several more decades of research. But I suspect that civilization will crumble before then.
Even that may be optimistic. Neuroscientists have found evidence of a “genetic clock” that controls gene expression in the brain and central nervous system from infancy through elderhood. Even if we could arrest all of the aging processes in the rest of the body, degradation of memory and other neural functions will continue. There is considerable evidence that exercising the brain by learning new skills can slow or arrest age-related degradation, but ultimately people lose brain functions as they age even absent of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or cumulative brain trauma. Reversing that will literally require understanding and refactoring the gene expression processes in the brain which we are nowhere near about to do with any useful degree of fidelity.
Improving quality of life through the elderhood, on the other hand, is a largely tractable problem. There is considerable evidence that many of the chronic conditions we experieince as “normal aging” are at least in part a result of modern diet and sedentary lifestyle, including changes that affect the intestinal biome. Societies with the most per capita long lived people—the so-called “Blue Zones”—have commonalities such as a largely minimally processed plant-based diet (but in which whole animal products—not just muscle tissue but saturated fats, rendered connective tissue and bones—are also reguarly consumed, except the Seventh Day Adventists), regular and vigorous physical activity, and strong social and familial bonds are inherent aspects of life. These people don’t just live longer, either; they have fewer incidences of serious mental illness such as depression and anxiety, statistically lower incidence of chronic diseases such as many forms of cancer, and are generally physically active and mentally alert into their eightes or nineties as a rule.
While medical science has turned to largely pharmaceutical treatment to deal with the supposed afflictions of age with varying degrees of practical effectiveness and often side effects which require more treatments, significant lifestyle changes may allow most people who do not have any underlying illness or defect to live a health and active life many decades past what we think of as “middle age”. This is not to detract from the benefits of vaccination, antibiotic treatments, synthetic insulin for Type I diabetes,
and cancer therapies, among other benefits of modern medicine, but trying to treat poor lifestyle choices with drugs like statins and beta blockers is really just covering the underlying problem (poor nutrition, lack of exercise, ineffective coping mechanisms for stress).
With a combination of lifestyle modifications and gene or hormone therapies we could probably extend the typical lifespan to somewhere around 90 to 100 years, but at some point somatic and mental systems are just going to start degrading beyond any ability to treat them due to “preprogrammed” apoptosis. Extending maximum human lifespan to signficantly beyond 120 years will require a retooling of the genome and fine-grained control of the epigenome to arrest or reverse normal processes of aging. It isn’t clear that we could engineer human beings to live hundreds or thousands of years without aging with radical alteration of thousands of genes involved in nearly every aspect of the human body.
I think it’s solvable, and my guess is it will probably sometime in the next 50-100 years. The biggest obstacle is figuring out a way to manipulate genes in adult somatic cells. Once we discover a way to manipulate the DNA in an adult organism it should be relatively simple to figure out which proverbial switch to flip.
Speaking for myself, if it were possible to live to an age of 400 or 500 or longer while maintaining the physical and mental vigor of a 20 year old, I would be one of the first people to sign up for treatment.
If you are talking about the story (I won’t refer to it as a “theory” because it has no basis in fact) that the development of the oral polio vaccine by Hilary Koprowski somehow germinated the Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes Accquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), be aware that this is complete bunk. Lentriviruses are a very common type of virus that are able to cross related animal species, and the evolution of HIV has been dated back to well before polio or other vaccines were developed.
Antibiotics were an incredible development for their day. Diseases such as tuberculosis and bacterial sepsis were widespread with no effective way to treat them, and antibiotics exploited the natural immune systems of medicinal fungi and bacteria to harness their ability to damage pathological bacteria with similar structures. It is now well understood that bacteria can not only develop resistance but convey it by lateral gene transfer, and it has been expected since we’ve understood the structure of the genome and evolutionary modification that particular antibiotic treatments would become less effective over time. Much of the current research is now looking to engineered macrophage therapies to directly attack targeted pathogens and other abnormal cells, which is likely to provide the ability to resist large classes of pathogenic bacteria and treat many forms of cancer.
Just for the record, there are plenty of people who want this…and plenty of folks who are expending energy to find such a solution. Whether they ever do or not is certainly debatable, but I don’t think you are correct that no one wants this. I’d hazard a guess that, in fact, that most people want more time and for that time to be healthier longer.
Thanks for the views everyone. I’m not really surprised by the posts from many in the thread so far, but it’s always interesting to see how people answer these sorts of questions. FWIW, I think it is possible and I think it will happen. I think the first person to be 150 has already been born today, though I think they are very young…a baby, perhaps, or maybe a toddler. While I don’t think that we will see a lot of radical change, I think incremental change will happen, and we’ll figure out how to live longer and better in stages.
The was to manipulate a gene within adult somatic cells is straightforward; a viral vector containing the desired gene sequence within an RNA sequence to perform transduction on the target cells. The problems with this, however, are manifold; the body has a tendancy to reject foreign virions prompting an immune response that can end up with the immune system attacking the body itself. There is also the problem of insertional mutagenesis and other replicative errors, and just the essential problem of delivering the vector to all (or at least a vast majority) of the requisite cells in some way. And this isn’t just done to one discrete codon sequence like a gene therapy to correct an abnormality; an holistic anti-senescence treatment would have to affect thousands of genes and control gene expression in specific order. Even if the logistics of cellular delivery and tranduction were resolved, the vast quantity and permutations of “switches” to be adjusted and the uncertainty in the resulting effects are enough to make this a massively daunting exercise using any conventional computational model.
The problem with the assumption of an incremental imcrease in lifespan is that the mammalian and in general, all animals more complex than Cnidaria (jellyfish and hydorzoans) appear to have a lifespan that is inherently limited by an ‘epigenetic clock’ which is controlled by the gene regulartory network which is poorly understood because it is so complex and occurs at such a broad sysexpressive (between widely separated genes) level that it is impossible to observe directly or build a representative model, not just out of ignorance but because of the sheer multiplicity of potential inteactions makes it computationally prohibitive.
There is really no basis at this point on which to estimate when or indeed even if the human lifespan can be be significantly extended or by how much. However, if the kind of control over gene expression necessary to do so existed, there is little reason it should be able to extend lifespan indefinitely, or at least to some limit of replication error. Estimates of when and how long lifespan could be extended are really little more than hopeful pleading at this point.
IMO, we’re about 5-20 years away from adding a decade or more to human healthspan. So an 85 year old may have the health of a 75 year old.
I’ve been following longevity science for years. Back around ~2005 or so, I believe the only thing that was known was calorie restriction worked, but they didn’t even understand why it worked. Now we understand probably a dozen or more biochemical pathways involved in aging, and we understand the role of the SIR genes in calorie restriction and are finding ways to replicate that w/o starvation.
However aging isn’t universally distributed across the body. You may be able to slow your rate of heart disease or cancer, but your joints may continue to age like normal. So a 110 year old could have the cardiovascular system of a 70 year old, but still have the joints of a 110 year old.
I really don’t know when true life extension would happen and people’s entire bodies are perpetually 25. Probably several generations from now. Even if we did achieve ‘immortality’, I think life expectancy is calculated to be about ~5000 years. That is about how long it’d take before a person died from suicide, accidents, homicide, random medical problems (severe infection that comes out of nowhere, organ failure, etc).
It may exist now, we would not know of it. Beyond the medical, there are some things to consider such as is there a legal upper limit on the length of life, effects on wealth inheritance and societal reaction that most folks are never going to get any real life extension programs and thats in North America, the effect that this would have on the rest of the world to know that it exists and its unobtainable.
Then how do you price it, billion dollars ? Installment plan ? Personal security, your body is now a walking IP repository. How much is your blood now worth, assuming some genetic markers were not watermarked on what ever the treatment was.
So my bottom line is that the amount of grief that was caused by introducing stem cells by the religious polictical compact, there is no way some one is going to be publically selling a methuselah treatment.
I notice that some of the skeptical comments here assume that radical life extension has to take the form of somehow improving and patching up our admittedly fragile and highly imperfect biological substrate. There are probably definite hard limits to how far we can push that. Instead, I think it’s more likely that we move to incremental replacement of these vulnerable components with artificial ones, something we’re already doing. The ultimate accomplishment would be the transfer of the human brain to an artificial substrate, which I think is much further out that many futurists believe, but which, once done, assures nothing less than immortality. And that will be the end of the terrible waste of lifetimes of learning, knowledge, and wisdom turning to dust.