By: Gennady Stolyarov II
If we make a deliberate effort to support breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine, we may become the first generations to attain lifespans without an upper limit. My illustrated children’s book Death is Wrong, available in both paperback and Kindle formats, seeks to inspire children to embrace the progress of science and technology and to challenge common justifications for resigning oneself to one’s eventual end. Instead of accepting death, we should fight it and attempt to live as long as possible. A concerted effort over the timeframe of even one generation could conquer humankind’s greatest problem: senescence and the tremendous body count it inflicts. Through April 23, I am working with the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE) to raise funds through Indiegogo to spread 1,000 paperback copies of Death is Wrong to children, free of cost of them. As today’s children learn more about the world, Death is Wrong will motivate them to become part of the solution to the perceived inevitability of death. If they become scientists, technologists, doctors, philosophers, and activists working on transforming both medicine and the general culture, then they could enable even us current adults to overcome the Dragon-Tyrant of death, as philosopher Nick Bostrom describes it in his ingenious fable.
Renowned biogerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey has pointed out that approximately 150,000 people die every day worldwide. Of these, a full two-thirds, 100,000, die of causes related to senescence, or the biological aging of the body. But chronological aging does not necessarily need to correspond to biological aging. The fact that human beings currently senesce and die of age-related causes during the narrow window of 70 to 122 years is an accident of evolution; there is no cosmic law dictating that it needs to be this way, and we see plenty of counterexamples in nature. Many creatures, such as giant tortoises, lobsters, the Ocean Quahog clam, and the rougheye rockfish, exhibit negligible senescence, where they age without becoming significantly frailer or more susceptible to injury or disease. These animals are not immune from accidents and infections, but, in safe settings, their maximum lifespans exceed ours significantly. A jellyfish known as Turritopsis dohrnii, formerly classified as Turritopsis nutricula, is biologically immortal; it can live without any upper limit by periodically reverting to its polyp stage through a process called cell transdifferentiation.
How can today’s children learn to fight senescence and extend human lifespans beyond any upper bound? It is crucial to recognize that living without bound does not mean becoming increasingly frailer and sicker; one cannot live indefinitely in a condition of perpetual decline. Indefinite life necessitates indefinite youth and indefinite health, or at least a periodic reversion to a youthful condition. Dr. de Grey provides a roadmap called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which identifies the seven principal types of damage constituting biological aging. Reverse these periodically, and humans can attain negligible senescence similar to the sort exhibited naturally by various other species. Dr. de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation directly pursues solutions to several of these types of damage, while significant medical research is devoted to others, such as cancer – the most dangerous type of nuclear mutation. The SENS Research Foundation works entirely on the basis of mainstream, peer-reviewed, non-controversial scientific research. A quick look at the chart of types of aging-related damage shows that all of these types were known since 1982 or earlier. In light of the amazing progress biotechnology and our understanding of the human organism have made in the 32 years since then, this is a strong sign that there are no other major types of age-related damage that occur in a typical human lifespan today. If we can reverse these types of damage in the next several decades and give ourselves a few additional decades through the first generation of rejuvenation therapies, this buys us time until the next generation of breakthroughs. If humans can reliably begin to live past age 120, scientists will be able to gather information and discover treatments for any other illnesses that we do not currently experience because we do not live long enough.
SENS follows an engineering approach to the problem of senescence. Instead of trying to spend decades understanding all of the intricate complexities of metabolism that lead to damage (the “gerontology approach”) or to simply slow down decline by fighting off individual age-related diseases and alleviating their symptoms as they occur (the “geriatrics approach”), the engineering approach aims to periodically get rid of damage before it becomes sufficiently widespread to result in critical failures of the body. Each type of damage has a distinct solution, so there is no magic pill or single treatment that will fix all the problems. However, Dr. de Grey has posited a 50% probability that engineered negligible senescence will be achieved by 2037, given adequate funding to researchers throughout the world who each attack distinct components of the problem. What would adequate funding comprise? Just a few billion dollars per year, specifically and deliberately devoted to combating senescence. This is a mere drop in the bucket compared to current spending on overseas military occupations and other destructive or wasteful activities.
In brief, here are the seven damage types that need to be defeated, and some possible tools to defeat them.
(1) Cell Loss and Atrophy: The failure of the body to replace cells damaged due to accidents and wear leads to loss of functionality and increased vulnerability to disease. The growing fields of stem-cell research and tissue engineering offer promise in solving this problem.
(2) Dysfunctional/Senescent Cells: Individual cells that become senescent and dysfunctional can be toxic to surrounding cells and prevent them from performing their roles. Destroying deleterious senescent cells could be achieved through drugs that selectively target only the senescent cells, or through stimulation of the immune system to attack these cells.
(3) Nuclear Mutations: The mutations that occur in the DNA in the cell’s nucleus increase susceptibility to cancer and other diseases over time. The most dangerous result of this within today’s human lifespans is cancer – fortunately, already a target of considerable research efforts. Emerging tools in nanomedicine and genome sequencing would allow much more targeted, personalized treatments for cancer, with significantly higher survival rates. Cancerous cells rely on the enzyme telomerase to be able to reproduce rapidly without their telomeres – the ends of their DNA molecules – eventually becoming depleted, leading to cell destruction. As a long-term solution, Dr. de Grey proposes an approach called WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres), which would deprive cancerous cells of the ability to make use of genes for telomerase.
(4) Mitochondrial Mutations: Mitochondria are the “power plants” of cells, converting nutrients from food into energy. The DNA of mitochondria are especially vulnerable to mutations due to damaging free radicals – toxic molecules that arise as byproducts of metabolism. The SENS approach in this area (MitoSENS) proposes exporting backup copies of mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus, so that the cell would continue to produce the proteins needed for energy production to occur normally, even if genes inside the mitochondria become damaged.
(5) Extracellular Junk: Misshapen proteins accumulating outside cells (mostly called “amyloid” and encountered in the plaques within the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease) could be removed through the development of antibodies that specifically target these deleterious aggregates. Significant efforts to develop amyloid-targeting vaccines are currently being pursued, including Genentech’s Alzheimer’s Prevention Trial.
(6) Intracellular junk: Waste products within the body’s cells accumulate when the lysosomes, organelles that typically break down the undesirable byproducts of metabolism, encounter materials they cannot fully tear apart. The SENS Research Foundation is directly funding research into enzymes that could break down these intracellular aggregates more effectively.
(7) Extracellular Crosslinks: The crosslinks form when two or more previously good proteins on the outside of cells bind together like handcuffs, preventing cells from functioning properly. Crosslinks are chemically quite distinct from the normally produced proteins and other molecules within the body, so the development of drugs specifically targeting the structures of the crosslinks is a promising approach.
Progress in combating senescence has varied by damage type. In 2010, the Campaign Against Aging (an organization that is unfortunately inactive now) published a detailed overview of anti-aging therapies at their various stages of development at the time. However, it has become clear since then that a more decisive push is needed to accelerate breakthroughs in each area of research. In 2013, Aubrey de Grey remarked that, during 2003-2013, approximately one-third of a decade’s worth of progress toward engineered negligible senescence had been made, largely because mainstream opinion continues to be apathetic or even hostile toward indefinite life extension. Consequently, anti-aging research receives only a tenth as much funding as would be ideal. (Still, achieving a third of the progress with a tenth of the money is promising, and a sign that additional research investments would be well-spent.) I asked Dr. de Grey about possibilities to make up the lost time, and his response was somewhat encouraging: we can catch up with much of the lost progress (except for about two years’ worth) by taking advantage of serendipitous discoveries made in the meantime by researchers who aimed at other goals. Furthermore, large-scale commercial investments into longevity research, such as Google’s Calico and Craig Venter’s Human Longevity, Inc., offer promise that the pace of research will accelerate soon.
However, it is clear that we still need a major cultural transformation in attitudes toward death and the feasibility and desirability of living without bound. I continue to be concerned about a future where amazing technical possibilities are rejected by the general culture because of ingrained attitudes of Luddism, change-aversion, unjustified neo-Malthusian fears, and acceptance of death from senescence as “normal” and “natural”. This is why, in addition to presenting some basic scientific facts about long-lived creatures, achievements in extending lifespans of simple animals, and the SENS approach, Death is Wrong also focuses on child-accessible presentations of the philosophical arguments for indefinite life extension and discussions of the many amazing opportunities for discovery, prosperity, accomplishment, and self-improvement that only a boundless lifespan can provide. By becoming exposed to these possibilities early, children will be able to maintain an open-mindedness toward technological breakthroughs that could remove the current limitations of the human condition.
Instead of viscerally rejecting the very prospect of indefinite life – saying it cannot be or should not be done – young readers of Death is Wrong can grow up seeking to contribute to the solution through both research and activism. Because of the generosity of over 80 donors, we have already raised enough funds for at least 720 free paperback books to be sent out, and we have shipped 140 of these books to longevity activists throughout the world – including the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Poland, India, and Indonesia. Help us make even more of a difference. I encourage as many people as possible to contribute to our campaign before the April 23 fundraising deadline. In addition, I hope that as many people as possible will join our efforts to spread the message that death is wrong and that we do not have to be among the last generations to die.
*Gennady Stolyarov II is an actuary, philosopher, amateur mathematician, composer, poet, and futurist. He has published The Rational Argumentator (http://rationalargumentator.com/), an online magazine for world-transforming ideas, since 2002. Mr. Stolyarov’s thousands of published works include articles, short stories, poems, videos, academic study guides, musical compositions, audio recordings, and fractal artworks. Mr. Stolyarov is the author of Death is Wrong, the illustrated children’s book on indefinite life extension, as well as freely downloadable fiction and non-fiction books such as Eden against the Colossus, Implied Consent: A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life, A Rational Cosmology, The Best Self-Help is Free, and the Guide to Stolyarovian Shorthand.
Mr. Stolyarov holds the professional insurance designations of Associate of the Society of Actuaries (ASA), Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society (ACAS), Member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA), Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), Associate in Reinsurance (ARe), Associate in Regulation and Compliance (ARC), Associate in Personal Insurance (API), Associate in Insurance Services (AIS), Accredited Insurance Examiner (AIE), and Associate in Insurance Accounting and Finance (AIAF).
