Humans Could Live For 1000 Years

Maajid wrote to mention an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education site about a biogerontologist who thinks he can kill death. From the article: "The 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer. Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels that medical advances will soon be able to prevent -- or even reverse -- allowing people to go on living pretty much indefinitely. We'll still have to worry about angry bears and falling pianos, but aging, the biggest killer of all, will cease to be a threat. Death, as we know it, will die."

Dying of old age?

This is great, but I've never known anybody who's died of 'old age,' but always from cancer, heart failure, complications of diabetes, etc.. Wouldn't you have to cure all of these things as well or are they mostly a result of an aged body? In this case, maybe this guy's discovery, if it's actually real (I give it a 0% chance) might slow down or stop the onset of these diseases.

Further more, would we all have to look like Yoda after awhile?

Re:Dying of old age?

A human right now could potentially live to about 130 , we likely will succumb to another condition about 50 years before that though.

The chance of contracting many of these conditions is greatly increased with age , if we can limit the decay associated with that then chances of contracting these conditions is also limited .
Though the 1000 year target is not taking into account environmental damage , it seems reasonable figure for perfect conditions .
  limiting the cellular ageing will also help us to look a lot more youthful for a great deal longer

Re:Dying of old age?

I always presumed that a lot of causes of death were a result of an aged body, among other things. As far as I know the most common types of death happen to folks who are usually older instead of younger folks, like heart disease. So I think having a young healthy body prevents a lot of diseases from occurring, but as far as I know cancer doesn't depend on your age at all. Judging from what I read from TFA, it appears that he has specific goals to prevent many kinds of diseases with his therapy, like Alzheimers.

As far as cancer goes...since cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell division (and the fact that these cells can invade other tissues) and in my understanding, pretty much sporadic or random if outside environmental issues (smoking, etc) are ignored, it seems like it is only a matter of time before someone gets cancer. If you could actually live to be 1000 until your body just gave out, the likelihood of having cancer in those years would have to be extremely high. However, it appears that curing cancer is one of Aubrey's goals...so that's not a problem either.

Interestingly enough, before he started working with biology, he was trained in computer science. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Dying of old age?

Well, cancer, heart failure, diabetes come with old age. There is no medical "old age" diagnosis. The claimed ability to reverse cell damage will also reverse cancer since it is technically a damaged cell with the celluar replication mechanism gone out of control.

That said, at the expense of burning my karma I will call "bullshit" on this story. Claims for aging cures are made every year by someone, and yet we still "kick the bucket" like everyone before us. Better hygiene and better drugs and procedures is what helps us live slighlty longer than our parents and grandparents, not some kind of magical cure-all aging panacea.

But of course the thought of death is a terrible thing so people buy into all these "finally we found cure for aging". It is like selling penis enhancement pills, it is just a clever play on people's insecurities and fears. If someone does want a good cure for aging, better try Alex Chiu's site [insolitology.com]. You can just buy yourself two nice little rings and of course live forever (...until you die of stupidity or cancer, of course).

Put up and show it is "bullshit"?

I will call "bullshit" on this story.

Put up, then.

If it is garbage (and YOU aren't full of it yourself!) what are the errors in the arguments??

Just that something hasn't been done is not a serious answer; there has been literally hundreds of "firsts" the last 150 years.

Some of the proposed solutions aren't exactly trivial -- e.g. "simply" moving genes from the mitochondria and then move back finished proteins would be a large change! (Sure, some proteins are made in the cell kernel and moved to the mitochondrias already, but to get the right levels of manufacturing, etc, etc. Not easy.)

To do that modification in living bodies seem ... well, a factor of ten harder still!

But is should be doable theoretically. And probably practically. I haven't read that much biochemistry, but I can't say that any of the points strike me as theoretically impossible.

So what is wrong?? Is the list of needed fixes incomplete?

A serious answer would be appreciated. I'm curious and you seem to be certain in your opinion. You should know, yes?

Re:Put up and show it is "bullshit"?

So what is wrong?? Is the list of needed fixes incomplete?

My guess is yes, it is. One theory of aging is that we are carrying around many genes which are harmful, but have a serious effect later in life. Such genes were never selected against when expected lifetimes were 35 years or less. Now that we have cured many things that prevented people from getting to 30 or 40, we are seeing new problems that prevent people from getting to 100 or 150. But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years? It seems shortsighted to assume that the aging processes that are a problem now are the only things we need to overcome in order to live thousands of years.

I also think that a lot of the items on his list amount to replacement of body parts, whether whole organs or DNA. That isn't really reversing aging... That's just repair work which is likely to be needed more and more frequently as the person gets older. It also doesn't address the non-replaceable parts like the brain. Neurons continually die off during a person's adult life, and you don't grow new ones... that's going to be significant after a few hundred years.

If ageing is really to be solved, I think it will be done from the inside, by understanding and altering the functions of harmful genes. That's a long ways in the future, though.

Uhm, isn't that already discussed?

But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years?

That is quite likely.

The argument is that the known list of problems can be solved in a few decades. The next bunch of problems will be solved faster, when there is functioning gene therapy on living humans(!). (-: There might be continous attrition amongst the oldest people living... :-)

I haven't read too carefully (one of the previous times it was posted), but I think that is the "of

How many times...

How many times do you think you'd be able to say "B.S." in 1000 years.

Sure we will...

And we'll be driving our flying cars all the while.

Got more to worry about than disease, Old Age

In 500 years, you've got a 100% chance of being struck by a bus.

Re:Got more to worry about than disease, Old Age

In 500 years, you've got a 100% chance of being struck by a bus.

Ah, you too have foreseen the murderous roboBus revolt of 2505!
The horror...

Re:Got more to worry about than disease, Old Age

Though the parent was modded funny, there is a lot of truth in that sage comment. At present time, the average person in the first world has about an annual lifetime risk of dying due to accidental trauma in the range from 1 in 500 to about 1 in 1000. People who work in certain professions/occupations have a higher risk as well. Infantrymen in Iraq might have an annual risk of violent death of about 1 percent, but people who work as commercial fishermen, in construction trades, drive trucks, or work as policemen or firemen also face above average risks as well.

Another factor not to be discounted lightly is the risk of disabling injuries. I saw few if any grey heads working on the roof of my recently constructed house in the crew of about 8 or 9 guys out there. People tend to abandon risky occupations as they get older if they can, either they suffer physically disabling injuries themselves, or see enough of their friends get hurt that they decide to find a safer way to make a living. Even as lifespans have increased by the relatively modest amounts over the last 50 years or so, one of the biggest problems will be finding help to put new roofs on their houses, take down overgrown trees, etc.

If life spans increase 10 fold, the amount of dangerous work will not go down that much, but the pool of people willing to do that kind of work will diminish to nearly the vanishing point. If people live to be 1,000, occupations such as truck drivers, roofers, cops, and many of the construction trades will either be a death sentence, or something that most people will be unable to do for more than a few decades before being disabled or forced to seek safer employment. People may become too risk-averse for society to function.

exactly so

OK, hot from the CDC we learn the following average death rates (in persons per 100,000 population per year) from causes that have nothing to do with old age:

• accidents: 30.4
• infectious disease: 28.0
• murder: 8.5

Grand total, 66.9 per 100,000 per year. From which it follows that the average person has a 0.0669% chance of dying each year from some reason other than old age. The rough estimate of your life expectancy is then reasonably close to the inverse of this number, i.e. 1500 years.

Nice enough, but hardly forever. More troubling, however, is that these rates are for a population that is quite young. Suppose instead we use the results for old people, 85 and over, who are unfortunately far more susceptible to accidents and disease:

• accidents: 276.2
• infectious disease: 1183.6
• murder: 3.

Grand total of 1462.8, which means your average 85-year-old has a 1.46% chance of dying each year from causes unrelated to chronic "old-age" diseases like heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. The inverse of this is 68 years, for a grand total lifespan of 153 years. Lots shorter. And wet get intermediate results if we use the results for other older age groups, but not the oldest.

Which is to say, you can only get a 1000-year lifespan if you not only defeat the usual diseases of old age (cancer, atherosclerosis, etc.) but also stop the clock on practically every consequence of aging from fading vision to slowing reflexes to slower healing to more brittle bones. A very tall order indeed.

For me and mine

I'm absolutely fascinated by the idea, but it raises several important questions...

Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?

How could we possibly provide the resources necessary to feed an effectively undying yet still growing population? Would famine become the determiner or longevity?

Can the human brain retain the sheer volume of information and experience achievable in a millenia of living? Would we forget the past, or become unable to learn the future?

Not all of the questions are negative, either. Would longer-lived decision makers take longer-term factors into account? Would humanity be more inclined to space travel if time were no longer the limiting factor?

Realistically, we do not have the capability as a civilization to cope with this sort of thing as we stand. Individuals could take advantage of it and live long, and believe me when I say that I'd be the first one in line, but to provide something of this magnitude to the masses would be suicidal.

Ideals aside, I would want this for myself, but not for my neighbors. Selfish, yes, but better some than all or none.

Of course, scientists have said as much before, and little has come of it, so it may be a moot point for centuries yet to come.

Re:For me and mine

IMHO, the real problem is that our societies would stagnate. You may think that you're hip and forward thinking, just as I'm sure Francis Bacon did back in 1584 (though he probably was, "hippe and forwarde thinking"), but how will you be, comparitavely in 2385? Death doesn't just get the physically old out of the way, it also gets the old ideas. Sir Francis lived in a world of absolute monarchs where torturing and killing people over interpretation of the same scriptures was considered acceptable and desirable. Picture a world in which a man who amassed billions using 1970s technology in the 1990s, still had enough money to control computing in 2200. Picture Richard Nixon at 324, still with a secret plan to end the war on Proxima Centauri, the 600 year old Fuggers understanding money only in the sense of little disks of gold, or Benedict the 16th, worried in the 24th century that the church will have surrendered its soul if it accepts the social mores of 1974.

Personally, I'd be much happier if these people would work on a way for people to be healthy and capable (physically and mentally) up until 70 or 80, then still die. The 1000 year life span, besides being a nice round number, is about 10x our maximum current age. What's the point of outliving Methusaleh if the last several centuries are spent in a wheelchair (even if it is Luke Garner's flying one) ogling the cute, young, 300 year olds who sashay by and pat you on the head occasionally?

I cannot find the author, so insert someone suitably cynical, "all wish to live long, but none wishes to grow old". I think we should be working on improving the quality of our life, rather than extending it out of some fear of dying. Let's get cancer and heart-disease first, and deteriorating immune systems first, then worry about outliving Methuselah.

Re:For me and mine

Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?

Speaking from an economics standpoint, there will always be people who need things, they are called consumers. In order for consumers to acquire the things that they need, they must produce things that others need, etc... Perhaps one day there will be a small subset of humanity that can produce enough goods and services to s

cancer and the effect on the human mind?

I accept that we could, in theory, mitigate the cellular damage that leads to aging, and humans could live much longer than they do now. There are, however, two BIG problems, in addition to the overcrowding that everyone else has mentioned.

First is cancer. Cancer is caused by DNA damage which causes cells to begin dividing uncontrollably. Humans, over our mere 100 year lifespan, face a very high risk of dying from cancer. Over a thousand years, it becomes a virtual certainty that at least a handful of your cells would have a very harmful mutation. Unless we also have the technology to periodically "refresh" all the DNA in your body (hint: unlikely), the simple fact is that after a thousand years you would have developed every kind of cancer known to man. I don't believe any medical technology could keep one of us alive that long -- if and when humans manage to extend our lifespans to the thousand year range, we won't be doing it in our current bodies.

Second is psychology. The human mind did not evolve to last a thousand years, and asking it to operate so far outside of its design parameters is bound to have some surprising (and likely unpleasant) effects. In fact, I am very skeptical that anyone could even hold on to sanity for that length of time. We just aren't built for that kind of time scale. We obviously don't know the effects of a truly long life on the human mind, but I just can't imagine an ordinary human lasting for a thousand years without becoming seriously disturbed.

Start small, cure cancer

We can't even cure hunger and this guy wants to talk about curing aging? One thing you discover about the living human body is that it is extraordinarily complex and, at best, we are tinkerers playing at the edges. Whenever we attempt to alter body chemisty in any way we are inundated with "side-effects" which are just nature's way of saying "you don't know what the fuck you're doing".

Please don't mistake this for some anti-science rant--it isn't. We are at the point where we can see, pretty clearly, a lot of the things that go wrong with a human body. However, for the most part, we only know they are bad because of differential comparison to "healthy" people. In certain areas there has been astounding success; certainly the development of antibiotics comes to mind and that has been great. Where we often get pimp slapped is when it comes to diseases caused by natural bodily functions. In cases like this, medicine is all too willing to look at simply interrupting one of the chemical reactions in the body as though that will cure the problem.

Statins, as a class of drug, are among the best selling drugs in history. An interesting thing about statins, which are prescribed for hyperlipidemia, is that patients might wind up, on average, getting a few more months before they drop dead of CVD anyway (or cancer or something else).

Re:Start small, cure cancer

We can't even cure hunger

Yes we can. Eat.

Seriously, hunger as you refer to it is not a disease but more of a political problem. Food and other resources are controled and dispatched in such a way that some people do not get any. But we're not lacking food and, again, hunger itself is not a disease.

...diseases caused by natural bodily functions. In cases like this, medicine is all too willing to look at simply interrupting one of the chemical reactions in the body

Again, we're facing and finding solutions to symptoms. Often, we do not have to cure anything as if it's a natural reaction, it will go away. It's the people making the choice of being treated or taking this or that pill so as to not endure the pain while it lasts. And what disease are caused by natural bodily functions?

Great....

That also means that they will be married to their "ball and chain" wives for 970 years. Have in-laws for that long too. And just how long will your slashdot reading, basement dwelling kids stay with you... gads...

But on the bright side, I fully expect to play Duke Nukem Forever....

Netcraft confirms it.

Netcraft confirms it - Death is dying.

Re:Slashdot Could Give any Crazy Credit!

It's so easy to talk like you did, isn't it?

The fact is that Aubrey de Grey is a respected biologist (despite having a degree in computer science), and participates in many important conferences, according to what I've read. If you find information which contradicts this, please give me a link. In the meantime, perhaps you should check your facts better before posting such things.

Re:Slashdot Could Give any Crazy Credit!

What you just did is nowhere near what this man has done. He identified the major physical reasons behind aging and is working on proposing and coordinating new ideas to fight the causes of aging.

Is he crazy? Probably. Is he wrong? Probably. At least he's got a goal and is formulating a plan to achieve it. If he is wrong, science will probably learn a lot about how the human body works, and other scientific achievements will be made in the process.

By the way... these treatments will only really be available to the extremely wealthy. Considering how difficult it is for many Americans to get basic health insurance as it is, and the fact that most medical treatments are financially out of reach for those who are not covered, this will probably only exaccerbate the situation unless some great social or technological discovery is made which allows anyone who desires it access to this longevity. Is this evil? Not really. Denying something to a priveleged few people simply because the masses (of which I consider myself to be a member) can not achieve it isn't right. Denying this longevity because it causes an undue burden on the rest of society, however, is not morally outrageous.

Re:Slashdot Could Give any Crazy Credit!

I happen to believe de Grey is right - the human body is just a machine. It happens to be an incredibly complicated machine composed of many smaller machine (which, in turn, are supported by even more, even smaller machines) that we barely understand as yet, but overall the body is just a machine.

His major point (as I understand it) is that we don't necessarily have to know the WHYs of the body, as long as we know the WHATs and can correct them when they change. Watch what changes in the body over time (a

Re:It's simple...

MAYNARD: It reads, [reading] "`I've been feeling so streesed late....HEEEURK! bleaugh...'"
ARTHUR: What?
MAYNARD: [reading] "HEEEURK! bleaugh..."
BEDEVERE: What is that?
MAYNARD: He must have died while typing it.
LAUNCELOT: Oh, come on!
MAYNARD: Well, that's what it says.
ARTHUR: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to type 'bleaugh'. He'd just say it!
MAYNARD: Well, that's what he posted!
GALAHAD: Perhaps he was dictating.
ARTHUR: Oh, shut up.