Timing really may be everything, and I’m not too happy about it. Human life expectancy has been steadily increasing courtesy of medical science for many decades now. We’ve blown past the biblical three-score-and ten, and there are more than a few reasonably healthy centenarians around these days. If we don’t mess up the efficacy of antibiotics with promiscuous overuse, and if we keep progressing in the antiviral area, we will soon say goodbye to mankind’s’ oldest and most ubiquitous killer — infectious disease. (Do I think COVID is a hiccup in this evolution — yes I do.)
I’d like to focus my attention on the big dog, the ultimate biological challenge — ageing itself.
What is Ageing?
It is not as easy to find a succinct, coherent definition of ageing as one would think it should be. I will use Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s definition, one of the clearest I’ve found. Ageing is naturally accumulated damage and wear. It occurs during the normal operation of any complex system with moving parts. We are such a mechanism whatever else we may also be. We live, we sustain damage. Our bodies have marvelous capacities for self-repair, but eventually damage overwhelms these capacities and becomes pathology. It would seem that ageing is not a disease in the conventional sense, but a problem in physics as much as biology. If my car mechanic were a philosopher, he’d remind me that wear is intrinsic to all systems with moving parts as he handed me my outrageous bill.
No Death Switch
There is no death switch that turns us off when some cosmic force decides enough is enough. The challenge of ageing is both incredibly daunting, and at the same time, mundane. Let me explain what I mean by mundane. Dr. de Grey provides us with a typology of the damage we incur through the normal course of living as follows:
- Cell loss, cell atrophy
- Division-obsessed cells
- Death resistant cells
- Mitochondrial mutations
- Intracellular junk
- Extracellular junk
- Extracellular matrix stiffening
Dr. de Grey insists that this categorization is exhaustive, that everything that happens to us physically as we age can be subsumed into these seven areas. I have found no expert who challenges this statement.
Is Ageing Inevitable?
I am no geneticist or gerontologist, but I don’t have to be to pose the following question for your consideration. Do these categories of damage seem like an insuperable barrier embedded in the nature of things, like perpetual motion or faster than light space flight? Or do they seem, complex and interrelated as they no doubt are, to be bio-technical problems amenable to the remorseless application of human/artificial intelligence and scientific method?
Ageing is not a disease with a cure. But there is no reason to believe that we can’t enhance and augment the repair capacities of our internal systems such that damage does not become pathology for a much longer time than is currently the case. There are one-hundred-year-old cars puttering along on our back roads today. They were not originally designed to last that long. But there they are with almost all of their original parts swapped out.
Multiple Challenges ~ Multiple Responses
No one who knows me would call me a feckless optimist. In fact, I’m more of a through the glass darkly type. But in the area of human life extension, I can see a convergence of scientific discoveries and technical applications that makes a reasonably powerful case for optimism. Let’s put some of these on the table:
- The sequencing of the human genome
- Gene-editing (CRISPR) technology
- A more mature understanding of what roll telomeres play in cellular senescence
- Nanotechnology (the insertion of molecular machines to help repair damage, viz arterial wall scraping)
- Brain to artificial limb communication (a true bio-technical wonder)
- Research on animals that age more slowly than we do.
- Cloning
- Cryogenics
- Hybrid bio-mechanical organisms, robotics technology
- Consciousness transfer (please read more science fiction)
Perhaps the most exciting of these research areas is work on stem cells. Once we can shape these pluripotent origin cells into growing new organs, and repairing existing cell dysfunction, some of those seven damage categories will cease to inflict pathology for a very long time.
In another startling development, Harvard researchers have used the fact that the body stores a record of chemical changes to DNA and histone proteins to reverse ageing in mice. This is called epigenetic manipulation — a very impactful prospect which caused a media buzz for the short time that the media can buzz about anything given its chronic attention deficit problems.
Of course, looming on the horizon, is a new player in the Game — artificial intelligence. With all due respect to ChatGPT, AI is still in swaddling clothes. It’s advance will be inexorable and possibly exponential. The complexity of the problems that cause us to age may require greater than human intellectual capacity to solve. Well, if we can just convince the AIs to help us out here before they decide they don’t need us at all and put the human race in a quaint reservation in New Zealand, it should make a huge difference.
Economic Optimism
Another, somewhat perverse, reason for optimism is the resource allocation issue. The human race is capable of extraordinary achievement when it concentrates effort and resources on a specific problem. John Kennedy got the jitters when he saw a Sputnik orbiting over his head, and, Bob’s your Uncle, a few years later the Americans were on the moon. Wealthy western countries have an odd penchant for denial and repression on the subject of death and what leads up to it — almost a fatalism more usually associated with eastern spiritual thought. We can barely bring ourselves to fund palliative care properly, much less anti-death research. You would think there would be a massive resource allocation focus on the somewhat pressing issue of keeping us alive and healthy longer. In fact, this has not been the case, at least on the part of governments. But this can change, and will change, when enough progress is made to make the public sense that this science could actually be, literally, life changing. (I’m sure more than a few ageing billionaires are quietly funding work in this area, mind you. What are you up to, Elon?)
I have not spent the last six months perusing scientific journals with layman-friendly abstracts; so I’m sure I’ve missed something with either direct or indirect relevance to healthy life expectancy extension. But, in this regard, given what I see around me,I am an optimist.
To one not meaning the other...
― Andy Rooney
A Glimpse of the Future?
What does this all mean ? Is a couple of hundred years a reasonable lifespan for future homo sapiens, or more probably, the composite beings that we will likely become — homo deus as the historian/philosopher Dr.Yuval Harari suggests we will transform into. I can’t see why not. I don’t much care if I were to become a sort of composite cybernetic organism, partly organic, partly bio-mechanical. I would prefer not to look like Locutus of the Borg, but what I really care about is my consciousness — that which makes me, me.
The social and spiritual implications of such a dramatic extension of healthy life expectancy are a fascinating subject, but so speculative. Perhaps another time, I will have a go at that. Here is what makes me sad. I’m going to miss this train, and I would prefer not to. I’m a moderate materialist and a romantic humanist, but I don’t want to return my essence to nature. I don’t believe in reincarnation, and if it turned out to be true, I’d just come back as an orange traffic cone, so who cares? Nor do I want my quirky individual consciousness to merge back into the Great Mystic Oneness – I like it just where it is — in my music studio where I could use that extra time to find ‘the secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.’ I want to know my grandchildren’s grandchildren and preside over a family dinner that requires seating for ninety-two. I want to leave this planet, and look back at it through a veil of stars. I want to keep working on my dance moves,and read more absurdly abstruse books. I want to swim in the ocean until I’m encrusted in salt. I want to attend far more weddings than funerals. I want to write better poetry and prose. I want to see what homo deus can do in a world that has conquered economic scarcity, and in which HD has suppressed some of its ancestor’s baser instincts. I want, I hope, I feel, I experience, and I am aggrieved that it will all stop too damn soon. Go away, Great Mystic Oneness! Find an enthusiastic Buddhist. Let me continue to be …… me!
Let's Move
It is an ancient idea in the history of thought that Man has a specific, fixed place in the Great Chain of Being(1). Maybe we do. But the human race is not notable for quietly accepting stasis — we get antsy, gotta move! Perhaps it is our nature to end,at least as entities built of blood and bone, and either cease to be, or go on to some other metaphysical state. I have my own views on whether I am going to go through door number one or door number two, but I’d prefer a third option. Let me be clear. I am perfectly fine with the prospect of ending, although I may want to renegotiate when I turn two-hundred and sixty-eight. Immortality, if that idea is even comprehensible, might indeed leach all consequence, all drama out of the choices we make — turn life dreary indeed. But that is not what we are dealing with here. We are considering the gift of more time, not wrestling with the equivocal prospect of time without end.
It is easier to be philosophical in the face of necessity. Life is what it is, yo. Deal with it! It is not so easy to be a good Stoic while brooding that one’s timing is just a few decades off. Perhaps I’ll investigate cryogenics next. The Iceman Cometh. Be there for my 180th birthday.
- (1) For those interested in the history of ideas, and specifically the Great Chain of Being, see Arthur O. Lovejoy’s eponymous book
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