In the past decade, the concept of not growing old has crept from the pages of fiction into the mission statements of some of the best research institutions in the world. The branding is different — they speak of “regenerative medicine” or “tissue engineering” or “biogerontology” rather than “the elixir of youth” — but the basic idea is the same: decrepitude is not inevitable; science will help us to stop the rot.
By the reckoning of some scientists, there is a real-life Dorian Gray among us. That person may not be a beautiful young man with a mysterious portrait in the attic: in Oscar Wilde’s dark tale, a new film of which comes out tomorrow, the portrait ages and withers in Dorian’s stead, allowing him to remain perpetually handsome despite a life of debauchery. Rather, it is someone who, through a mixture of good genes, healthy lifestyle and timely medical interventions, will give every illusion of staying young throughout an extraordinarily long life.
Dorian Gray achieved eternal youth; now science is moving towards the same goal. Will some people today live to 1,000?
While in the developed world every succeeding generation has enjoyed a longer life expectancy than the one before it — thanks primarily to modern sanitation, nutrition, disease control and a virtual end to infant mortality, which has stretched life expectancy from under 50 years to more than 75 in the past century — it is only this generation that has really dared to think of ageing as a “disease” that requires curing.
So, while the middle-aged of today can look forward to notching up about 80 or 90 years, some biologists have speculated that our children will routinely surpass the 120-year mark with their faculties intact. And although a double century still seems optimistic, some, such as Professor Steve Austad, of the University of Texas, think that the first person destined to reach 150 is already alive (in 2000 Austad made a $150 bet with Professor Jay Olshansky that by the year 2150 someone will have reached 150 years old in good mental shape; Professor Olshansky, at the University of Illinois, bet on 130). Austad’s optimism is based mostly on the incremental advances in life expectancy that accrue as society advances.
But the anti-ageing dream is further fuelled by the recent phenomenal advances in biology and biotechnology, which are giving us an insight into the processes that grind down our bodies and providing clues to how to combat them.
Ageing results from wear and tear on our cells; our bodies repair easily when young but their patching-up abilities become lacklustre or go awry as the years rack up. It is the relentless accumulation of cellular onslaughts that eventually overwhelms us, often in the form of age-related diseases such as cancers (which occur when faulty cells fail to self-destruct and gather to form tumours), arthritis and Alzheimer’s. Sometimes death just happens; it is the white flag of old age, the point of ultimate biological surrender.
There are armies of researchers studying how to repair the onslaughts and eradicate diseases of old age, buoyed by advances in genetics and stem-cell research. For example, reseachers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Maryland, reported in June that liver tumours in mice virtually vanished when treated with genetic snippets called microRNAs. “Since we were able to demonstrate such dramatic therapeutic benefit in this extremely aggressive model of human liver cancer, we are hopeful that similar strategies will be effective for patients with this disease,” said Dr Joshua Mendell, one of the astounded authors of the paper in the journal Cell.
Drug companies are on the case, because ageing afflicts everyone and makes every person in the developed world a potential customer. The current silver-haired generation is richer and vainer than any that has preceded it; the anti-ageing industry in the US alone is estimated to be worth $20 billion (£12 billion) and will grow by 9 per cent this year thanks to therapies to deal with menopause, hair loss, joint problems and ailing memories. Factor in the substantial number of billionaires who wake up one morning and decide that they don’t want to die (such as John Sperling, the $3 billion education-for-profit magnate who tried to buy the company that cloned Dolly the sheep) and you have a very competitive, fast-moving, well-funded research field with ready custom. Not all the research is being done in academic and company labs; numerous organisations, such as the Maximum Life Foundation (mission statement: where biotech, infotech and nanotech meet to reverse ageing by 2029), are marshalling biologists, futurists and doctors in their quest to extend lifespan radically.
Some researchers believe that if senescence (the ageing of an organism) can be reduced or even reversed, its end point — death — is no longer inevitable. The controversial British researcher Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why the human body cannot last for 1,000 years (barring accidents). He believes that such a modern-day Methuselah already walks among us. De Grey’s vision is close to that of “transhumanists”, people who believe in using science to transcend the limitations of being human, the most obvious limitation being death.
As de Grey puts it: “I claim that we are close to that point (someone living to 1,000) because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it is a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time — and each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.” His argument is that anti-ageing therapies will improve faster than we age, so that a young person today will be able to stave off ageing almost indefinitely.
Imagine an individual who makes full use of all therapies currently available to him or her, or being researched, whatever the cost. At Dorian’s birth, his genome is sequenced. This means that the whole book of his DNA, with its 23 chapters (each chapter representing a pair of chromosomes) laid out in separate paragraphs (genes), is written down. Reading a person’s genome is very crudely equivalent to mapping out the major plot twists of his medical future (the eminent biologist Lewis Wolpert recently declared his belief in the predictive power of the genome; others think that a mere listing of our genetic make-up is next to useless). And so Dorian’s doctors can “read” what lies in store for him in terms of his likelihood of suffering from certain diseases.
Imagine that his genome predicts a risk of heart disease; Dorian may choose to start taking a statin and lead a blameless lifestyle (a vigorous but not punishing exercise regimen, the occasional glass of claret). Unlike his literary namesake, he marries well (married men live longer than single men).
Dorian would not need to worry about any genetic diseases; gene therapy eliminated them at birth. To stretch the genome-as-book analogy, gene therapy can be thought of as a copy-editing process, correcting bad grammar and inserting punctuation marks and missing letters where needed. Scientists usually achieve this by sending a virus into the body. The virus, which contains the new genes to be inserted, invades each cell — every cell of your body contains a copy of your genome — and manipulates the genome from within.
At the same time as Dorian’s genome was fixed, it was upgraded: a suite of genes thought to code for longevity was inserted (the biggest predictor of how long you will live is how long your parents lived, suggesting that many old people use a genetic advantage to cheat death). Neither would he need to fret about physical degeneration of his vital organs: his umbilical cord blood was banked at birth, providing a ready source of stem cells that could be used to grow a new liver, kidneys or even a new heart (or scientists could clone a skin cell, as they did with Dolly, creating an embryonic Dorian whose stem cells could be harvested for similar purposes).
Now to Dorian’s diet, which would involve him consuming a third fewer calories than normal. There is much evidence to suggest that eating less (while not becoming malnourished) extends life; a 20-year study of rhesus monkeys at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Centre put one group of animals on a normal diet and a matched group of monkeys on a diet containing 30 per cent fewer calories. When the study ended this summer, 37 per cent of the monkeys on the normal diet had died from age-related diseases (such as diabetes, cancer and heart diseases) compared with only 13 per cent in the restricted-calorie group.
There is tentative evidence that what applies to worms, flies and monkeys may apply also to people. Some of the longest-lived people on the planet reside on the Japanese island of Okinawa, which has a history of low food supply because of crop failures. A 2007 study reported in the Annals of the New York Academy of Science suggested that Okinawans lived, on average, five years longer than Americans because they ate a tenth fewer calories.
A hard core of longevity enthusiasts have already bet on the low-calorie route to long life by joining the Calorie Restriction Society. This society, which offers advice on how to eat fewer calories while staying healthy (avoid second helpings; fill up on vegetables; skip the occasional meal; “pre-eat” before parties) sounds less daft than it did a decade ago and will even be taking part in a Harvard University conference on healthy ageing this month.
But the real goal for anti-ageing researchers — for our imaginary Dorian — would be to find the master mechanism in the body that controls ageing. Find the pendulum and stop it swinging or, at least, make it swing more slowly.
Some clues may come from the American teenager Brooke Greenberg, who is the nearest that science has to a real-life Dorian Gray. The 16-year-old is the size of an 11-month-old baby. She stopped growing in the conventional sense while still a baby, although some parts of her anatomy continued to mature. Brooke has baby teeth but the bones of a ten-year-old (in cellular age, not size). She cannot talk or swallow normal food; she is fed through a tube to her stomach. Her condition, named Syndrome X, is thought to be unique and possibly results from the absence of a master gene that regulates how the body grows, develops — and ages.
“Without being sensational, I’d say that this is an opportunity for us to answer the question (of) why we are mortal, or at least to test it,” says Professor Richard Walker, a specialist from the University of South Florida College of Medicine, who, along with geneticists and other developmental experts, is baffled by the cause of Greenberg’s condition. “If we are wrong, we can discard it. But if we are right, we have the golden ring.”
Brooke may be frozen in childhood but her inability to age normally has a price. She has suffered strokes, seizures and tumours, and has been close to death on several occasions. Her existence teaches us something that Wilde’s Dorian quickly discovered, and that scientists, transhumanists and ageing billionaires may yet encounter: be careful what you wish for.