There's More Future in Your Future
http://www.techcentr...om/120203E.html
By Michael Fumento Published 12/02/2003
For millennia, hucksters have sold worthless baldness remedies ranging from yogurt to dung. You could also buy any number of longevity potions. But now there are two FDA-approved baldness drugs. Get ready for biotech drugs and therapies that will result in many readers of this article living well into the 22nd century.
Life expectancy has already steadily increased in the past century from 47 to 77 years. But that's measured from birth and is almost entirely because more people are living to become old, rather than older people living longer. Essentially, it's a measurement of a dramatic drop in infant mortality. But the new treatments will actually extend lifespan, far beyond the widely-accepted 120-year limit.
One approach to literally reversing aging involves telomeres. These are tightly coiled threads of DNA that form a protective cap on the ends of each of our chromosomes. The DNA shortens each time the cell divides until the cell cannot divide anymore. Then our bodies start to decline.
But scientists from Geron Corporation and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas showed in the lab that by adding the enzyme telomerase to human cells, they could make them into little Eveready Bunnies. They just kept on dividing and dividing.
Later they stunned the scientific community when they showed that telomerase restored the youth of aging human skin tissue that had been attached to the backs of mice. Consider that as you celebrate your 100th birthday you could have skin that's as clear and smooth as the proverbial "baby's behind" -- without the diaper rash.
But scientists are following many longevity paths. By my latest count, there were about eight sets of researchers working on eight different ways of manipulating genes to allow us to live longer. Far longer.
For example, Italian researchers have created what they dubbed "Methuselah Mice" after the person in Genesis said to have lived 969 years (and who personally bankrupted the Social Security and Medicare systems of his time.)
These rodents lived a third longer than normal apparently for no other reason than that one of their genes had been switched off. It's too early to say for sure, but it appears this particular gene tells the body's cells to die. It also seems to play a role in cancer, so eliminating it may independently reduce the risk of malignancies.
And in case you're wondering, flipping genes on or off is not rocket science. It can often be done with the application of a simple drug like tetracycline.
Will the Italian experiment lead to an approved human therapy? Most rodent successes don't survive the arduous journey through human clinical trials that must demonstrate the treatment to be both safe and effective. But with so many labs following so many paths and new paths being discovered, inevitably some will succeed.
Further, "I don't think a 30 to 40 percent [increase in lifespan] should be considered as some kind of maximum," according to Dr. Tomas Prolla, a geneticist specializing in aging at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Another route to the same end involves the long-observed phenomenon that creatures from worms to mammals live much longer if placed on a severely calorie-restricted diet. It's assumed this would work in humans, but to what avail in a country where two-thirds of us are overweight?
MIT professor Leonard Guarente, however, wants us to have our cake and live longer too. He's discovered a gene called Sir2 that appears to keep in check many other genes that promote aging. But Sir2 is also involved in metabolism, so overloading it with more than a bare minimum of calories keeps it from its anti-aging task.
Various methods tested in yeast, worms, and fruit flies, however, have kept Sir2 going strong even in the face of a Wendy's Classic Triple with Everything. One is to call in reinforcements, namely adding in extra copies of Sir2. Another is to give the test creature a drug that decreases an enzyme that also hobbles Sir2. This made fruit flies live as much as 50 percent longer.
The Sir2 thesis hasn't yet been tested in animals, but as University of California, San Francisco biochemist Cynthia Kenyon said regarding genetic regulation of aging, if "it happens in both worms and fruit flies, you have to be crazy to think it won't happen in vertebrates."
Don't expect any of the gene-related anti-aging therapies to be marketed for a decade, but there may be something you can buy right that could put off that date with the grim reaper.
A process called oxidation, in which loose electrons bouncing around our cells and wreak havoc, promotes both aging and cancer. "In essence, we're rusting, says renowned Berkeley biologist Bruce Ames. But do antioxidant supplements slow that process?
No one can say for sure yet, but many studies have shown antioxidants to be effective in warding off diseases closely tied to aging. One recent 16-month study of Parkinson's patients showed that those taking high doses of the antioxidant coenzyme Q-10 had an astounding 44 percent less decline in mental function, movement and ability to perform daily living tasks than the placebo group.
Ames himself has developed a supplement combining a powerful antioxidant plus an antioxidant promoter, sold under the brand name Juvenon. He concedes he doesn't know yet how much it will help humans but it's worked wonders in numerous rat tests. "They could get up and do the Macarena," Ames says.
Perhaps, though I've been taking Juvenon since it was introduced and still haven't learned the Macarena. But based on the available studies I also take the antioxidants coenzyme Q-10, selenium, vitamin B-complex, and vitamins C and E.
Moreover, we won't be spending the last third of our 150-year lives slobbering on ourselves in a wheelchair. This is a worry Francis Fukuyama expressed in his anti-biotech book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, aptly summarized in a Nature Biotechnology review as seeking "to arouse fear: fear of science, fear of individual choice, fear of the future."
Rather, each of the therapies described or alluded to in this article won't just extend life but also extend the period of time before decrepitude.
Because there's been so much talk of biotech anti-aging breakthroughs, it was probably inevitable that naysayers would pop up to say it's all bunkum. Nobody in our generation, or even our children's generation, will live significantly longer than they do now, they insist.
"A life expectancy at birth of 100 years, if it ever occurs, is unlikely to arise until well past the time when everyone alive today has already died," said S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago at a March 2001 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
France and Japan will not reach a life expectancy at birth of 100 years until the 22nd century, he said, while Americans won't hit the century mark until the 26th century. "The rise in life expectancy in the future will be measured in days, weeks and months -- not in decades, as some proponents of extreme longevity predict."
But making predictions about the condition of the human race in 500 years readily pulls you out of the "scientist" class and plunges you smack into the realm of Nostradamus. All Olshansky and his fellow nay-centenarians are doing is using circular reasoning along the lines of, "I've never been in a fatal accident; therefore I never will be in a fatal accident." More specifically, they're simply looking at past trends.
Imagine a similar projection of electronic technology from 40 years ago. Virtually nobody would have conceived of desk-top computers that double in speed every 12-18 months, or bandwidth that doubles far faster, or the Internet itself. Yet Olshansky is willing to make a prediction for half a millennium from now.
Similarly, Leonard Hayflick of the University of California at San Francisco, one of the leading figures of gerontology, wrote in Nature magazine in November of 2000, "There is no evidence to support the many outrageous claims of extraordinary increase in human life expectancy that might occur in our lifetime or that of our children." His evidence? Extrapolation of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Social Security Administration, and from a group of the world's industrialized countries. This says nothing more than "since there were no breakthroughs in the last 20 years, there will be none in the next 20 years." How many people must have said the same thing about baldness remedies?
And shortly after Hayflick's commentary appeared, researchers in Science magazine announced that by causing a gene mutation they succeeded in getting fruit flies to live as much as 85 percent longer. "What's exciting about these findings is that they suggest that there is a genetic system common to all animals that regulates aging," lead author David Gems of University College London told Reuters Health. "If we could just tap into the mammalian version of that system it might be possible to retard or even reverse human aging."
Claiming that all of the anti-aging work described here will pan out would be foolish indeed. But claiming that absolutely none will is far more so. In part, that's because lifespan extension is a goal that to many of us has an incredibly high value and offers research institutions and companies awesome financial incentives.
Oracle software CEO Larry Ellison's philanthropy alone, the Ellison Medical Foundation, is granting awards of about $20 million yearly to promising anti-aging projects. While most of the foundation's money goes to infectious disease research, Ellison has plenty of billions more to plow into both. Thus far, however, his limit is probably not his generosity but rather the size of the scientific community working on aging-related therapies. But that's changing.
"Aging [research] used to be a stepchild, but now a lot of good people are finally getting into it," Ames told me. As the population ages, longevity research will become more and more attractive to scientists. It all creates an expanding "virtuous circle." "Biology -- including longevity research -- is going like a rocket now with help from the genomics revolution and computers," says Ames.
"People tend to underestimate how fast the aging field is moving," adds MIT's Leonard Guarente. "We're uncovering the molecular basis of aging. No, we're not at a point where we can intervene in humans yet. But we have every reason to be hopeful that day will come."
None of this is to be confused with immortality, the quest for which greatly concerns Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. Kass says society should "resist the siren song of the conquest of aging and death." But his argument concerning aging really doesn't come down to much more than "It just doesn't seem right somehow."
As to immortality, Kass need not fear. Even reversing aging cannot confer eternal life. There are creatures that appear to be genetically programmed to live indefinitely, but something always catches up to them. With a tree it could be a disease, fire, or a chainsaw. With a lobster it could be a trap. Immortality means eternity, and as a subset of infinity 150 years is the same as 75.
But Kass is right to say that lifespan extension isn't inherently a good thing. Personally I'd rather see a therapy that compels people to make better use of the lifespans they have, rather than waste them watching each new "Meet Joe Millionaire for the 10th time" or "America's Funniest Home Autopsies." But like all biotechnology, lifespan extension is merely a tool. It's up to us how it's used.
Michael Fumento (fumento@pobox.com) is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service. He is the author of the new book, BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World. (www.bioevolution.org)
