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Aging for Life: Talk to me
Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University researcher, claims in this intriguing TED talk that the first person who will live to be 1,000 is alive today.
The science News flash: We age as we do because the very metabolic processes that keep us alive also cause microscopic damage to tissue. We don’t notice this damage for years – decades – but in our 40s and 50s, we start to creak, to sag, to weaken. That’s the toll of a half a lifetime’s ongoing microscopic cellular damage. De Grey and a raft of other scientists in the field of “regenerative medicine” are working to develop a new class of medicines, rejuvenation biotechnologies, which are precisely engineered to remove, repair, or replace the cellular and molecular damage caused by life itself. The promise is that with every round of therapy, our bodies’ tissues are progressively restored to their youthful integrity: that is, our eyes, hearts, arteries, and bones will actually become more youthful and healthy in their structure and function. Doesn’t that sound great? Where do I sign up? But . . . do I want to live to be 1,000? To be honest, the thought of living to 1,000 makes me tired! But maybe that’s because I can’t separate the idea of aging from the idea of eventual decrepitude. If I lived feeling (and looking) healthy and young for 1,000 years, then maybe! But . . . how on earth would I pay for it? And if everyone starts living to 1,000, where would the world put all of us? How on earth would natural resources stretch to accommodate everyone? And wouldn't it just be the rich people who got to live so long? And then there’s the little fact that death gives life its meaning, its beauty, its urgency – or, as Wallace Stevens said unforgettably in his poem “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty.” If you want to treat yourself to a nightmare, imagine a world in which nobody dies. Want to know more? De Grey and colleagues founded the SENS Foundation (SENS stands for “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”), which is dedicated to funding regenerative medicine research and building the industry that will cure diseases of aging. Their website is full of articles and videos that explain the work. Aubrey de Grey, with co-author Michael Rae, wrote a book for non-scientists called Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (published by St. Martin’s in 2007, but updated since then). If you want even more, check out the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in California. Their website’s less flush with information for amateurs and SENS’s is, but is still informative. And then of course there's the 1,000-pound gorilla of the anti-aging research community: Calico Labs, founded by Google and funded primarily by tech giants. This 2015 Washington Post article, "Tech Titans' Latest Project: Defy Death," is a terrific summary of radical anti-aging aspirations, and critiques of that vision. The authors quote Susan Jacoby in her book, Never Say Die (NY: Vintage, 2011): “Acceptance of the point at which intelligence and its inventions can no longer battle the ultimate natural master, death, is a true affirmation of what it means to be human.” PS – deGrey and his ilk are the consummate Denialists After writing this post, I read Dr. Bill Thomas’s book, Second Wind, and it changed my thinking about the attempt to “end aging.” It’s impossible, for one thing, and is savagely ageist, for another. Read about Thomas’s Denialist, Realist, and Enthusiastic stances toward aging here. This NYTimes opinion piece is an interesting meditation on the beauty of the brevity of life. Aging for Life: Talk to me
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AuthorTheresa Reid is the Executive Producer and host of "Aging for Life." Archives
January 2020
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