SU Update: De Grey Talks About Living to 1,000

SENS Foundation co-founder Aubrey de Grey described his work on extending the human lifespan to Singularity University students during a lunchtime talk at NASA Ames on Thursday. Although this is a bit off topic for a space blog, the subject is fascinating.

The SENS Foundation is a U.S.-based non-profit that conducts research on human longevity. Roughly 100,000 people die each day of age-related diseases. SENS focuses on regenerative medical therapies that will slow down biological aging to the point where people never reach the pathology stage.

De Grey,  author of the book “Ending Aging,” said there are two mainstream approaches to dealing with the problem, both of which are inadequate. One is Geriatrics, in which doctors look at what’s going wrong with the body and attempt to treat it. This involves dealing with the problem after all the symptoms have appeared.

The second approach is Gerontology, which focuses on dealing with the damage done to the body by metabolism. De Grey said that the major problem with this approach is that we know so little about metabolism that it’s extremely difficult to be effective in this field.

De Grey’s maintenance approach is to let metabolism do its damage but to repair it periodically with sophisticated regenerative therapies. The goal is to intervene early enough so that the damage is repaired, much as you might perform maintenance on a car ever 5,000 miles. He showed several photos of 50 year Volkswagens that are still being running because their owners have maintained them.

SENS has an institute near Phoenix where it is researching cell, gene and other therapies. The foundation also provides grants to institutes and universities around the world.  The research focused on seven problems related to aging:

• junk inside cells
• junk outside cells
• too many cells
• too few cells
• mutations in chromosomes
• mutations in mitochondria
• protein cross links

To develop regenerative therapies, SENS is borrowing from the field of bio-remediation – which is used in the environmental field that clean up contaminated areas. There are abundant, energy-rich organic material that is used to degrade contaminants, thus making land usable again. Over the last few decades, bio-remediation has gone from being an academic theory to a thriving commercial business, De Grey said.

One promising research area is the study of microbial life that break down the human body after death. Research into these organisms could lead to therapies in a range of areas, he added.

De Grey said that a person could get regenerative therapy every 20 years, which could add 30 years to his or her lifetime.  “I think we can do it really, really well and fairly soon – within the next several decades,” he explained.

The approach would buy time – which De Grey sees as key to an almost indefinite lifespan.  By the time a person was ready for a second regenerative therapy 20 years later, the techniques would have evolved to the point where doctors extend the person’s lifetime even further. Over time, this could allow humans to live for centuries.

“The first 1000-year-old is probably less than 20 years younger than the first 150-year-old,” De Grey said.

One SU student asked how accessible such therapy would be to people around the world. De Grey responded that he thought it would be universally available because the costs of aging are so high in medical care and lost productivity. It would be in the interest of developed nations to make sure these medical treatments broadly available to prevent widespread discontent, he said.

Another student asked about the risk of overpopulation. De Grey said there are solutions, such as couples having fewer children and the better use of space and resources. However, he didn’t seem to have a lot of detailed answers to how the world would deal with a population with an average lifespan of centuries.

De Grey did say that we shouldn’t let our concerns about how to reorganization society to prevent us from moving ahead with this effort. The Industrial Revolution  was chaotic, but few people would want to go back to a pre-industrial time.