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CLOSING IN ON IMMORTALITY
How much, in dollars and cents, is a day of your life worth? Millions? Billions? Too much to say? A group called the Methuselah Foundation has a slightly less grandiose answer: $2.75.
That’s the amount the Foundation is asking from prospective donors in order to create one of the world’s largest financial prizes in anti-aging research. The group has put out a call for three hundred immortality seekers to step forward and pony up $2.75 a day, or $1000 a year, to create a pot it will offer to the scientist who produces the oldest ever mouse. The hope is that the prize will help create an arsenal of biomedical techniques that can ultimately be applied to humans, to help us fight death itself, and win.
Some very heavy hitters within the scientific community not only think life extension is possible, they're actively working on it. One of the best known is Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which recently awarded the $10 million Ansari X Prize to SpaceShipOne for their two privately funded flights into space. A better idea of the caliber and extent of the interest in this growing field can be garnered by looking at the home pages of one of a half dozen groups including: The Methuselah Foundation, The First Immortal, Maximum Life Foundation, The Foresight Institute, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and KurzweilAI.net.
In the last decade, anti-aging science has matured a lot. At least one technique has proven effective in making test animals live longer, and several others look promising. And these measures amount to much more than curing cancer or wiping out heart disease. Anti-aging scientists will tell you that such actions, while undoubtedly valuable, only increase the average lifespan of humans as a population. New research in fact seeks to bump up the maximum lifespan—the age the oldest individuals can attain. In effect, pushing the limits of mortality.
The current maximum human lifespan is thought to be 122 years, the age at which the oldest known person passed on. So how close are we to beating this? According to numerous workers, the feat may be as easy as changing the way we eat. That’s because food and aging are thought to be linked in a manner something like the following: Eating delivers glucose, a common sugar, to our cells, causing the cellular machinery to work and create energy. But this energy-giving process also creates highly reactive molecules called free radicals that weaken and degrade our tissues; in other words, make us age. According to theory, by eating fewer calories, our cells would do less work, create fewer free radicals, and therefore suffer less deleterious effects. Aging would be slowed.
Experimental evidence agrees: a lower-calorie diet has indeed increased the lifespans of fruit flies, worms, fish, spiders, hamsters, and mice. Applying this measure to humans, however, is trickier business. Restricting calories too early in life would stunt a child’s growth, but the life-extending benefits of caloric restriction become less pronounced the later the dietary changes are adopted. It’s unclear where the optimal trade-off lies. Studies also show that, to prolong life, caloric restriction needs to be phased in over several years, and must be accompanied by a strictly balanced intake of nutrients.
In light of these difficulties, some researchers have attempted to create an anti-aging pill that mimics the benefits of a calorie-restricted diet without the attendant problems. Scientists from Baltimore’s National Institute on Aging reported in Scientific American that a compound known as 2DG, when introduced into cells, reduces the production of harmful free radicals. One small problem: 2DG is toxic to some animals. Still, the researchers hope that similar substances may be discovered that would be fit for human consumption. M.I.T. researchers have also found a gene in certain worms that slows cellular activity during times of starvation. If a similar gene can be found in humans, it could provide a way to trick cells into being less destructive.
Further-sighted anti-aging research focuses not on slowing the aging process, but rather reversing its deleterious effects. Dr. Aubrey de Grey, editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research and one of the people behind the Methuselah mouse prize, has written that genetic therapy could be used to program our bodies to purge themselves of damage-causing cellular by-products and even destroy old, weak cells. Some visionary researchers say we may not have to mess with genes at all, and that legions of microscopic robots can be made to patrol our bloodstreams, weeding out weak and damaged tissue.
Some naysayers have pointed out that the dream of an extended life could quickly become a nightmare if we’re forced to live out our bonus years wrecked by arthritis, diabetes, dementia, and other conditions associated with older age. But many anti-aging scientists believe their research offers a built-in solution to this problem. Such diseases, they say, are merely symptoms of the progressive weakening of the body, and will be duly wiped out when the aging process is stopped or slowed; a prophecy that makes life extension look that much more attractive.
And at two dollars and seventy-five cents, the whole package would be cheaper than a daily cup of coffee and (low-calorie) muffin. That could be the deal of a lifetime.
