Millennia-Extending Longevity, Science or Fiction? 

"I doubt there are many people in Ethiopia or Bangladesh who are clapping their hands at the idea that some rich guy in Silicon Valley is trying to live another hundred years if their kids are dying from malnutrition or some easily handled health problem."
Arthur Caplan, bioethicist, Langone Medical Centre, New York University

"If all of them [family generations] are still alive that's more than 200 people I have some relationship and responsibility to. What if they all have some sense of expectation of me?"
"Many [people] believe that it is precisely our knowledge of our imminent mortality that makes us most human."
"Look, I want to live to 150 too. I mean, don't misunderstand me. I want to see my great-grandchildren. I want to see the first people on Mars. I want to see all that Aubrey wants to see. I just don't pretend that it's not a narcissistic desire because I can't think of a single good that would give society."
Paul Root Wolpe, chief bioethicist, NASA

"Over the past two years we've had a slew of breakthrough publications in journals such as Science, Nature Communications and Nucleic Acids Research that reported key advances against the most intractable components of aging. It's no exaggeration to say that in at least a couple of cases we have broken through logjams that have stalled key areas for over 15 years."
"You may feel that eight years is a long time to be only making such preliminary, step-one breakthroughs, but you'd be wrong - step one is always the hardest, and that is why nearly all research, whether in academia or in industry, is immensely biased towards the low-hanging fruit and against the high-risk high-reward work that is so essential for long-term progress."
"We exist as an independent foundation for precisely that reason. But, saying that, I must also stress that we are already showing great success in taking enough steps so that our programs become investable. The atherosclerosis one was the first of, at this point, five start-ups that have emerged from our projects - covering conditions as diverse as macular degeneration, senescent cells, amyloid in the heart, and organ transplantation."
"Think back to the first time you got laid. Were you thinking 'omigod I totally have to get this person into bed right now because I only have another 60 years to live? I don't think so."
"Once we've got to the point where this [rejuvenation] therapy is sufficiently comprehensive, then of course one can do it as often as one likes."
"One can choose to be biologically 50, or biologically 20 depending on how frequently and how thoroughly one applies these therapies [of biological renewal]."
Aubrey de Grey, biomedical gerontologist, co-founder, chief science officer, SENS Research Foundation

SENS.org

Aubrey de Grey's aspiration is beyond ambitious in his determination to prolong the human life span up to, as he promises, one thousand years. He doesn't appear to be a fundamentalist Biblical scholar citing that organ of antiquity as one source of authority for a millenium-human, but he is convinced that biological science can and will in the very near future -- around five years, he has ventured -- begin to reverse the aging effects that send humans into the inevitable trajectory to death.

For at least 100,000 years human life has been defined by its time in history. No one could know when the inevitability of death, whatever its cause, would strike. And, according to medical surgeon Atul Gawande, "It didn't matter if you were five or 50. Every day was a roll of the dice". It still is, in the modern era. Sudden onset of a deadly disease, or the progress of a chronic, debilitating disease, or an accident, a ladder-fall, a vehicle collision, a fall while hiking in the mountains, a victim of a demented killer, a statistic of an earthquake, a firestorm, a tsunami, you name it, it happens. And then longevity potential becomes moot.

But life expectancy was been on a steady increase, particularly in the West, with the rest of the world catching up more or less as civilizational norms trickle down to less socially advanced countries. Of course we would also have to discount natural disasters and their impact on human life, and the human penchant of initiating conflicts and their impact on life. But at the present time fewer children throughout the world are dying before reaching age five. And death from malnutrition's effects has been diminished.

And, as Dr. Gawande stated in his book Being Mortal, modern medicine has most certainly done its part for the "bottom to drop out later and later". So we see longevity struggling in various parts of the world to reach past 60, past 80, past 100. For the first time in history in Canada, those in the over-65 demographic outnumber those under 15 years of age. As for centenarians, their numbers swelled by 41 percent from 2011 to 2016. Who would have imagined?

When we age, the process leading us to death is predictable as our body declines often taking our mind with it and everything fails catastrophically. Lungs begin to fail, reflexes are diminished, vision becomes compromised. Or, as Dr. Gawande puts it, from the perspective of a seasoned surgeon: "The aorta and other major vessels can feel crunchy under your fingers", inside the body of an aged human during surgery. And, rather unhelpfully, by age 85 three or more major chronic diseases will have afflicted half that age group.

What SENS-funded researchers are working toward is rejuvenation therapies enabling the repair or elimination of seven types of biological castoffs accumulating as humans age from cell loss to mutations in chromosomes, death-resistant cells and other types of barriers to continuing life. The goal is to allow people to continue to grow in years, but not toward imminently oncoming death. De Grey forecasts that the first edition of SENS has a 50-50 chance of becoming reality within five years.

Although there are some unknowns; whether with each reset button prolonging our lives as we grow hundreds and hundreds of years old, would our experiences and memories of the previous 100 years be lost to us? And should these wondrous biotechnologies favour positive results in some people and not others, would there be a remedy for two classifications of humans, the responsive and non-responsive to elongating lifespans? And costs relating to rejuvenating therapies, who picks it up; available then only to the wealthy?

De Grey envisions that at age 40 typically, the first rejuvenation therapy would apply and from that point forward a series of "rejuvenation" episodes would return us to the chosen biological fitness of whichever age group we might wish to stabilize at. Repeated decade after decade, the ancient search for the secret and frustratingly elusive fountain of youth would have been discovered, at long last. Reaching a point that de Grey names "longevity escape velocity"; renewal outpacing aging.

There is a vast number of experts in the field of human biology who remain skeptical. Particularly that human life whose span has remained fairly constant for so many tens of thousands of years can be shifted toward a new trajectory with biological intervention, to see people aging toward a thousand years of life. Our lifespans, according to Dr. Yves Joanette, scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Centre on Aging, remain fixed and what is normal in longevity cannot be overridden.

"We may push it forward a bit. But I don't think it's going to be doubled, or tripled, or made eternal", he stated. Even if diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and all cancers were finally eradicated life expectancy at birth in the United States, as example could rise to 90, according to a 2004 report by the Bush presidential council on the bioethics of "ageless bodies". As for de Grey himself, he states he has no fear of death, but nor does he court it. Wearing a seatbelt in a moving vehicle and avoiding danger is just common sense. "But that's not being scared. That's just being careful. I don't have time to be scared."

"We all believe in postponing deaths. We all want our own deaths postponed and we invest vast amounts as individuals and societies in methodologies for achieving that."
"To withdraw from that is to say that postponing death is not a good thing."
University of Manchester philosopher John Harris, director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation