Vegas Sculptor’s Blog

I once heard a comedian say that there comes a day when you should stop expecting people to make a big deal about your birthday. That day, according to the comedian, comes about the age of 16.

So it is without much fanfare that I celebrate another year today. I don’t expect much in the way of celebration, the folks at work are taking me to lunch, my wife will fix a special dinner, my daughters will have cards.

Much more significant to me is the realization that there are more birthdays behind me now than ahead of me. Even if I live to be 102 like my grandmother did, I’m more than half way now.

But what if I’m only just getting started? What if someday I look back and lament how young my grandmother was when she died?

If Dr.Aubrey de Grey is correct, that just might happen. According to theories de Grey has been working on, those of us living today could well live to be 200, 300, even 1000 years old.

Dr. de Grey, who earned his degree from Cambridge, is the author of several books. His first book dealing with aging, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, argued that damage to the mitochondria is a significant contributor to aging. He suggested that learning to repair this damage could increase lifespan.

With his latest book, Ending Aging, Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging In Our Lifetime, de Grey claims that aging is not a natural process that we have to accept as inevitable. He goes so far as to call aging a disease. A disease that can and should be treated and cured.

He suggests that there are seven types of cell damage that lead to the secondary effects we see as aging. By reversing the cell damage the body could revert back to a healthy, vigorous state that could only be described as youth. The seven types of cell damage are;

1) Changes to the nuclear DNA which result in cancer
2) Mitochondrial mutations which can affect the cells ability to function properly
3) Intracellular junk. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s disease) are associated with this problem.
4) Extracellular junk. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.
5) Cell Loss. Cells dying faster than they are replaced. Causes the heart to become weaker, Parkinson’s disease, etc.
6) Cell senescence: Cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. Type 2 diabetes is caused by this.
7) Extracellular crosslinks: Can cause tissue to lose its elasticity and cause problems including arterioscerosis and presbyopia

Now Dr. de Grey doesn’t try to suggest that all these problems can be solved in the next few years. He does, however, think that within the next decade progress will be made that will extend lifespan by 30 years. Within that 30 years, developments will extend our lives in such a way that lifespan extension will outpace our aging allowing us to live virtually forever.

To view a video of Dr. de Grey presenting this subject you can go here.

In the video Dr. de Grey addresses some of the problems associated with life extension such as overpopulation. But do you see other problems with this? If you have the chance to live 100, 200, or even 1000 more years wouldn’t you want to? If we have the ability to prevent the debilitating diseases that lead to poor health and eventually death, don’t we have a moral obligation to try to do so?

By the way, before you dismiss Dr. de Grey as some sort of crackpot, consider this, in July 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove de Grey’s claims, offering a $20,000 prize (half the prize money was put up by de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation) to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that “SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.” So far the prize has gone unclaimed.

Now, I wonder how I’ll put 900 more candles on my cake!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under news/rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.