Cheating death has been mythologised in culture but is science any closer to helping humans live forever?

Fifty years ago a scientist called Dr Michael Rose did something remarkable with fruit flies that could one day help you live well past 100, and your grandkids beyond that. Dr Rose made the flies live longer. Not only did the so-called “Methuselah flies” live longer, but their bodies stayed healthier for longer: those flies were the equivalent of humans still capable of popping ollies in a half-pipe at 90. Dr Rose did it by forcing flies to reproduce later in life, providing a biological imperative to live longer and healthier to pass on their genes. Take his findings to their logical conclusion, by the way, and the modern trend of having babies later in life should lead to longer lifespans. Theoretically true, according to Dr Rose, but it could take centuries to have a real impact. Far more likely that science will step in first. “Ageing is an optional feature of life,” Dr Rose, now professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, told The New York Times. “Postponing human ageing is not like building a perpetual motion machine or faster-than-light space travel. It is a scientifically reasonable thing to try. “This doesn’t mean it will be easy, or even that it is the best thing to do with our medical resources. But it’s not a completely crazy idea.” Welcome to the global effort to find a way to live forever, or at least well into your hundreds. It is a world in which researchers take 100 supplements a day, Silicon Valley billionaires want to digitise your brain and you can pay for the privilege of having your body frozen when you die. Eternal life is a Hollywood staple, from the cryonics of Demolition Man to the genetic manipulation of Gattaca, the magical potion of Death Becomes Her, and Tron, in which a software engineer has his consciousness transported to a virtual world. But this science fiction is being taken seriously by some of the world’s most rich and powerful, among them Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and entrepreneur Dave Asprey. Dr Rose’s work is a key plank in longevity science, upon which an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars has since been built. Humans have already done a good job of boosting our lifespan through hygiene, diet and modern medicine that means we are unlikely to die at 20 from a simple cut. In Australia, a girl born tomorrow could reasonably expect to make it past 84, versus 51 if she was born in the 1880s. Today the most interesting solutions to extend human life can be broadly divided into efforts to keep the body healthy and alive, chiefly through pharmaceuticals or gene editing, and those who see the answer to eternal life in technology, whether that means enhancement or living on in digitised form. True believers who expect a breakthrough to significantly extend the human lifespan — or “healthspan” — will happen in their lifetime call themselves life extension advocates, transhumanists or body hackers. They can also, perhaps, be divided into two camps. In the first are scientists doing the work on how to stop or reverse the ageing process, tackle degenerative disease and apply technological solutions to biological problems. In the second are the keen amateurs who run the gamut from entrepreneur to cowboy and have money, influence or just a passion to prolong human life — often, specifically, their own. These include Bezos and fellow tech titan Peter Thiel, who have put a chunk of change into companies like Unity Biotechnology, an operation developing drugs to target age-related conditions. What both groups have in common is a belief that the trajectory of a human life is not fixed. “The latest developments in the science of longevity is challenging the current narrative that many of us willingly accept in society — that when you’re born, you grow up, you might have some kids, and you’re just meant to grow old and pass away,” Transhumanism Australia co-founder Peter Xing told The Sunday Times. “With recent discoveries like senolytics ... and their applications extending beyond human trials, we’re starting to demystify the ageing process and find ways to treat it like other medical conditions.” Wade into the world of lifespan science and you cannot avoid hearing about senolytics: a class of drugs that target “senescent cells”, which are implicated in ageing because, as we age, they stop dividing. The theory goes if you can make a drug that destroys senescent cells, ageing can be slowed or halted. Trials with mice have destroyed the cells and increased median lifespans. But senescent cells are not solely responsible for us getting old. Writing for The Scientist, New York journalist Katarina Zimmer wrote: “Although it’s not in question that senescence is a driver of ageing, it’s certainly not the only one, or even a major one. “If it were, researchers would be able to make mice live much longer by eliminating senescent cells, but that isn’t the case. Experiments ... have increased rodents’ median lifespan — meaning that fewer of the animals are dying young — but eliminating senescent cells couldn’t extend the maximum lifespan of the animals.” Human trials have been somewhat encouraging. One 2019 study published in the journal Aging Cell claimed to have wiped 2.5 years, on average, off the biological age of its human subjects and boosted their immune systems via a cocktail of drugs that included a growth hormone and diabetes medication. But the study was small, involving just nine volunteers over one year, and lacked controls. If the idea of popping a pill to live longer sounds familiar, you have probably been to the movies. In the 1990s black comedy Death Becomes Her, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep take a miracle potion to prevent growing old. The 2002 film Tuck Everlasting had a love interest with access to a magic spring that made him immortal. Even Harry Potter had the philosopher’s stone, a take on an ancient myth about an “elixir of life”. Achieving immortality with a pill is still in the realm of fantasy. But it is not so far-fetched to imagine that a pill — or more likely pills, plural — could add a few extra years. That could extend someone’s life enough for them to be around to take advantage of future scientific breakthroughs. Over to Dr Rose again: “There’s not going to be one magic bullet where you take one pill or manipulate one gene and get to live to 500,” he told the New York Times. “But you could take a first step, and then another so that in 50 years time, people take 50 or 60 pills and they live to be 200.” UK longevity researcher and author of The Ageless Generation, Alex Zhavoronkov, has taken it a little further than that and takes 100 different drugs a day, a mix of over-the-counter supplements and vitamins and prescription drugs. He believes their “geroprotective” qualities could help him live well into his hundreds. Even Mr Xing, who otherwise advocates for good sleep, diet and exercise, takes a regular senolytic. Australian futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson said the developments in pharmaceuticals were happening in tandem with other steps forward that would all add up. “Many of these technologies are evolutionary and incremental improvements, but one per cent gains here and there in diet, exercise, mindfulness, biohacking, hygiene, breath-work, clean air, self-driving cars, IoT (internet of things) sensors, smart cities etc all stack up to help boost our longevity,” he said. “These technologies are accretive and will ensure that our lifespans will be extended. In fact, they are turning us into cyborgs — people whose mental and physical abilities are extended and augmented courtesy of technology.” The list of companies in the pharmacological anti-ageing space and the nature of their research could fill this newspaper. They include companies injecting patients with components found in young people’s blood and others working on mitochondrial biogenesis, which is essentially trying to slow the tendency of the mitochondria in cells to wear out. The related field of gene editing, which has boosted the lifespan of mice, is also full of encouraging claims about the potential to reprogram a person’s genes. Other scientists are exploring a more tangible way to extend life. Organ transplants and artificial enhancements, such as fake hips, have been around for years. But only recently has the prospect of 3-D printing human body parts been on the table. Swedish researchers, for example, have been working on growing lungs in the lab that could be transplanted into patients, given chronic lung disease is the third leading cause of death worldwide. So far all of these ideas, from pills to body parts grown in a lab, involve efforts to extend human life in a way that would not look radically different from life today. The prospect that our brains could be uploaded to exist separately from our bodies is very different. Again, this is a case of reality mirroring fiction, the idea of “mind uploading” being well-worn territory for science fiction. In Tron, Jeff Bridges plays a computer nerd who finds himself downloaded into a computer’s mainframe. Netflix series Black Mirror features a simulated reality in which people can choose to live on after their bodies die. The Ryan Reynolds film Self/less made it particularly creepy, imagining a world in which the terminally ill can have their mind transferred into a younger body. It might sound like the premise of another film — and a fairly grim one at that — but San Francisco start-up Nectome has a small waiting list of supporters apparently keen to have the company preserve their brains after death for a little over $10,000, in the hope they can be uploaded to achieve digital immortality. Given that Nectome reportedly planned to test the technology with terminally ill volunteers it is unsurprising it has attracted unwanted attention from ethicists and neuroscientists, with some of the latter sceptical such a breakthrough is achievable in the near term. In Japan, Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories makes robots that resemble real people and can imitate them. In the future, according to the lab’s titular founder, it could be possible to share memories with the robot, blurring the lines about where a person’s consciousness really exists: in their brain or the robot’s. Then there are those putting their faith in a nebulous future. Cryotherapy has long been used for pain and even as a beauty treatment. Cryonics is more extreme and involves preserving the body and brain after death. For a little under $40,000 you can have your body frozen in the hope future generations will have the capacity — and presumably the desire — to bring you back to life and cure what killed you. At least 150 people have been laid to chilly rest at Michigan’s Cryonics Institute, the website for which is full of reassurance for those staring down old age, illness or death. “If we can today restore life to people who have been ‘dead’ for several minutes, and even hours in some drowning cases, far more should be achievable in the future, especially if the patient has been cryopreserved,” it reads. “‘Absolute’ death may only be said to occur when the brain’s essential information is destroyed — and brain preservation is precisely what cryopreservation aims to achieve. “As for having a fatal disease — as science progresses, fatal diseases become formerly fatal diseases. Polio and bubonic plague were fatal diseases once; they — and hundreds of other diseases — are not fatal now. Many qualified people think that cures for currently fatal diseases — including old age — are only a matter of time.” What is rarely addressed by the scientists or tech bros attempting to prolong human life is whether humans are philosophically prepared for a significantly longer life. Mr Sorman-Nilsson thinks not. “I don’t believe we are culturally or mentally ready for eternal life,” he said. “‘Belief-based and emotional questions at the altar, like ‘until death do us apart’ will be even more loaded in an age of eternal life, and we’d need more investments into our mental health, our ability to handle monogamous, or polyamorous, relationships, emotional intelligence, as well as our cognitive functioning. “In an age where retirement starts at 65ish, what functions will the ‘forever young’ 141-year-olds be filling in society?”

Cheating death has been mythologised in culture but is science any closer to helping humans live forever?

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