Fight Aging!

It is not correct to view aging as set in stone, an immutable part of the human condition. Degenerative aging is just another medical condition, an unpleasant one at that, caused by biochemical processes in the body that are just as open to discovery, cataloging, and intervention as those of any disorder. The only thing that separates us from real, working rejuvenation treatments capable of restoring youthful vigor and health to the old is the same thing that once separated humanity from a cure for smallpox or effective management of infant mortality. In other words medical technology. Bringing aging under medical control and extending healthy lives indefinitely is just a matter of progress in applied biotechnology, and the research community is actually much closer to meaningful advances on this front than most people imagine to be the case.

However, precisely because the public are largely in the dark when it comes to the promising state of longevity science, that research community could very well simply remain ever close to promising advances for decades with little meaningful progress towards breakthroughs and commercialization. At the large scale, and over the score or more of years needed to forge entire new fields of medicine and bring them to maturity, funding and progress very much depend on public awareness and support for the cause. Currently the majority of the most promising scientific programs based on repair of the damage of aging, such as those coordinated by the SENS Research Foundation, are funded at exploratory levels only. In the broader research community it is still considered somewhat novel and adventurous to publicly back the strategy of treating the mechanisms of aging as a cause of disease rather than the traditional approach of engaging in ultimately futile attempts to patch over the diseases that are the end results of aging, one by one, and in isolation.

Thus while the stem cell and cancer research edifices include factions that are doing the right things and heading in the right directions for their slices of treating aging, there is definitely a way to go yet towards a research community and a public that are enthusiastically in favor of the most effective means to treat the causes of aging. That level of support will be needed if we are to ultimately remove from the human condition all of the pain, suffering, and death that aging causes. Getting to that point of widespread support is a slow grind: thousands of years of myth and tradition, and the modern education everyone receives both formally and informally, produce people who believe wholeheartedly that aging is a fact of life, something set in stone, a thing that is what it is. Yet that simply isn't true anymore. In an age of revolutionary progress in biotechnology, aging is as much a part of the human condition as we choose to let it be, and that starts now by choosing to support the right research programs.

"We should not regard aging as a fact of life"

The European: Dr. de Grey, for many years, people thought of human aging as inevitable, as part of our biology. Is that still true?

de Grey: I would not say that it is wrong. Aging is certainly a side effect of being alive. It is the accumulation of damage that the body does to itself as a by-product of its normal operations. In that sense it is exactly the same as the aging process of a car or an airplane. So really it is not even biology, it is just physics. The big mistake that people make is not in their understanding of what aging is, but in the misunderstanding of what the diseases of old age are: things like Alzheimer's, cancer, or cardiovascular disease.

The European: How are they mistaken?

de Grey: Most people think of those diseases as like infections - things that could be eliminated from the body using sophisticated medicine. An enormous amount of money and effort is being spent on that, although it is impossible to cure them because these things are part of aging and of being alive in the first place. The only way we can ever tackle those diseases is by tackling the whole package. By preventative maintenance against the damage of being alive.

The European: With stem cell therapies, for example?

de Grey: That is one part of it. But aging is not one single process but an accumulation of a lot of different types of damage in different organs and body parts as a result of different processes. In order to comprehensively tackle all of these types of damage, we have to do a lot of different things at the same time.

...

The European: Who would be able to afford these therapies?

de Grey: That's a good question. These therapies will not be expensive. They will be made available to everybody who needs them. Because unlike today's high-tech medicine which is very expensive, these therapies will pay for themselves. They will save us all of the money we are currently spending trying to keep people alive with medicine that doesn't work. This will also have an enormous number of very effective indirect economic benefits. One is that the children of the elderly will be more productive because they won't have to spend any time looking after their sick parents. The older but healthy people themselves will be continuing to contribute wealth to society instead of just consuming wealth. Any way you look at it, it would be economically suicidal at the national level for any country not to make these therapies available for everyone who is old enough to need them.

The European: How soon could these therapies be made available?

de Grey: In 2004, I first started making predictions about how quickly we would develop them. Back then, I said it would probably take around 25 years. But it was simply a 50/50 probability. I always acknowledged that there is at least a 10% chance that we won't get them ready for another hundred years in case we found new problems. But a 50/50 chance is enough to be worth fighting for. But what it really depends on is funding. At the earlier stages of the research, the funding is of course the most difficult to obtain, because people are not yet convinced that the research will eventually succeed. So over the past ten years, during which I would have hoped that we would have gotten to obtain a really decisive dramatic result, we only made about three years of progress. But that's about the amount of progress that I would have expected to make with the amount of money that we have actually received.

A point on the cost of treatments for aging: it is odd that many people believe that such treatments would be very expensive. Perhaps it is instinctive to associate great benefit with great cost, or perhaps people immediately think of the most expensive treatments available today, such as complex surgeries that need teams of highly trained professionals and lengthy aftercare. Those highly trained professionals are exactly why complex surgeries are expensive, however. You are paying for their time in a market that, for various reasons good and bad, has far too few highly trained medical professionals. Compare that situation with some of the most technically advanced treatments presently in widespread use, such as the so-called biologics used to control some autoimmune conditions. The cost of developing that technology was vast, yet infusions of mass-produced biologics cost a tiny fraction of a complex surgery, and that is because they are delivered in a half-hour appointment by a clinical assistant whose fee is a tiny fraction of that commanded by a surgeon. All of the complexity is baked into the research and initial development of a manufacturing industry, and so the eventual cost in the clinic is low and falling.

All of the potential treatments for aging, means to repair the cellular and molecular damage that causes degeneration, frailty, pain, and suffering, will be much more like the mass produced biologic infusion than the surgery. They will be drugs and custom proteins that clear out metabolic waste, replacement cells, gene therapies, and similar items. Everyone suffers the same forms of damage, and little customization of treatments will be needed. Where there is customization it will likely involve the use of your own tissue samples to generate a supply of your own cells that can be formed into the types needed to replenish aging stem cells and other diminished cell populations. That is a service that is even today in the process of becoming an industrial-scale industry, creating cells to order, and prices will fall just as for all other widely used biotechnologies.

So in short, effective treatments for aging will be expensive on the front end, in research and development, briefly expensive during clinical trials when the details are still being worked out and those costly and all too rare trained medical professionals are required in large numbers, and then cheap when mass-produced for the clinic.