Fight Aging!

The next Humanity+ conference will be held at Caltech on December 4th and 5th, just a couple of days from now. The second session is on the topic of radical life extension, and will feature researchers Michael Rose and Aubrey de Grey, amongst other familiar faces. I see that h+ Magazine is running a selection of promotional short articles on the conference, including one covering the radical life extension session:

The term "biological immortality" doesn't mean what you may think - it doesn't mean living forever, but merely "the absence of a sustained increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age." That is, you've reached biological immortality if your "personal death odds" - your chance of dying during a given random day, month or year - has stopped increasing.

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Professor Michael Rose from the University of California at Irvine suggests that humans and other animals generally reach a plateau of biological immortality after a certain age - after this point, they're not really "aging" any more, as their personal death odds [remain high but constant]. ... He suggests that via doing research combining experimental evolution on model organisms (such as fruit flies and mice), genomic data analysis and artificial intelligence, one may be able to figure out personalized medicines and other therapies that will help one reach the plateau even sooner [and thereby live longer in good health].

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On the other hand, Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Foundation (SENS = Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence) is unsure that the biological immortality concept is all that relevant to human aging. Like many biologists, he suspects that the data apparently supporting an immortality plateau in humans can actually be explained via the heterogeneity of data regarding aging and death from different populations. This is a subtle statistical issue, but it has practical implications. Dr. de Grey suggests that a large percentage of aging is due to accumulated damage in the body, and he describes an impressive variety of methods for alleviating or preventing this damage.

If accumulated damage is the main culprit behind aging, then one would not expect to see an immortality plateau - naively, one would probably expect to see the individual’s personal death odds keep increasing, as damage accumulated. So de Grey's focus on accumulated damage fits perfectly with his skepticism about the relevance of biological immortality to human aging.

On the issue of biological immortality as a steady mortality rate in old humans, I have a foot in both camps. I think there is good reason to believe that this fascinating phenomenon does exist, but it is absolutely irrelevant to the long-term future of longevity science. If we are focused on repairing the biological damage that causes aging, which is the only approach likely to meaningfully extend the lives of those of us reading this today, then we don't really care all that much about the demographics of the extremely old. Instead we just work as fast as we can to build the technologies that can safely reverse the state of being age-damaged and frail, and refrain from stopping to smell the flowers along the way.