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Posted on Mar 21, 2006, 5 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey says the highly goal directed engineering effort which he calls the coming "War On Aging" will begin in about 10 years. Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge University, UK, has presented a cure for aging - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. The plan's focus is not to interfere with a person's metabolism, but to repair damage to the body over time, at the cellular level, rather than dealing with the aging process in its later stages.
Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey says the highly goal directed engineering effort which he calls the coming "War On Aging" will begin in about 10 years.
Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge University, UK, has presented a cure for aging - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. The plan's focus is not to interfere with a person's metabolism, but to repair damage to the body over time, at the cellular level, rather than dealing with the aging process in its later stages.
"My point here is just that this is goal-directed rather than curiosity-driven," de Grey said. "I view medicine as a branch of engineering."
De Grey calls the time during which the technologies will experience the most development the War On Aging.
"I use the phrase to describe the period starting when we get results in the laboratory with mice that are impressive enough to make people realize that life extension is possible, and ending when the first effective therapies for humans are developed," de Grey said. "I estimate that the War On Aging will start 10 years from now, subject to funding of research, and will last for 15 years, but this latter estimate is extremely speculative."
When he refers to a point when the War On Aging ends my guess is that he's referring to the point where we have achieved the ability to extend life faster than the rate at which calendar clock time advances. From an article of his published in PLoS Biology Aubrey says if we can extend life expectancy in a year by more than a year's time then Aubrey calls that point "actuarial escape velocity" which is the point at which we can repair aging damage faster than it accumulates.
...that in which mortality rates fall so fast that people's remaining (not merely total) life expectancy increases with time. Is this unimaginably fast? Not at all: it is simply the ratio of the mortality rates at consecutive ages (in the same year) in the age range where most people die, which is only about 10% per year. I term this rate of reduction of age-specific mortality risk ‘actuarial escape velocity’ (AEV), because an individual's remaining life expectancy is affected by aging and by improvements in life-extending therapy in a way qualitatively very similar to how the remaining life expectancy of someone jumping off a cliff is affected by, respectively, gravity and upward jet propulsion (Figure 1).
The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, if first-generation rejuvenation therapies were universally available and this progress in developing rejuvenation therapy could be indefinitely maintained, these advances would put us beyond AEV.
How can this be accomplished? Read about Aubrey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) for achieving this goal. Also, Aubrey and Dave Gobel founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize to encourage scientists to extend the lives of laboratory mice.
The prize seeks to encourage development of technologies that will also extend human lives. But its most important effect will be in terms of how those advances come to be viewed by the general public. The sooner scientists extend the lives of lab animals the sooner the public will wake up to the feasibility of radically extending human lives. This realization on the part of the public will eventually lead to widespread public demand for the War On Aging. Anyone who donates to the Methuselah Mouse Prize is helping to make the War On Aging begin in earnest sooner rather than later. Anyone who promotes the message that ‘actuarial escape velocity’ (AEV) is achievable via SENS technologies within the lifetimes of most of the people alive today also is effectively arguing for the coming War On Aging.
Stop being a pacifist where death is concerned. Join the supporters of the War On Aging. Time to go into battle against the Grim Reaper.
Update: Jay Olshansky, Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller, and Robert N. Butler, arguing for a more modest goal of decelerating the rate of aging say that the future costs of an aging population will increase so much that the costs of an accelerated pace of aging research are easy to justify in terms of potential future costs avoided.
Consider what is likely to happen if we don't. Take, for instance, the impact of just one age-related disorder, Alzheimer disease (AD). For no other reason than the inevitable shifting demographics, the number of Americans stricken with AD will rise from 4 million today to as many as 16 million by midcentury.4 This means that more people in the United States will have AD by 2050 than the entire current population of the Netherlands. Globally, AD prevalence is expected to rise to 45 million by 2050, with three of every four patients with AD living in a developing nation.5 The US economic toll is currently $80-$100 billion, but by 2050 more than $1 trillion will be spent annually on AD and related dementias. The impact of this single disease will be catastrophic, and this is just one example.
$1 trillion per year in future costs for Alzheimer's alone demonstrate the scale of the potential savings that could come from therapies to decelerate and even reverse aging. Already today's cost of diseases run into the trillions in health care costs plus additional even higher costs of lost productivity and strains on families and friends who help out the sick and invalid. Our spending on anti-aging research should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
