The cure

Science seeks to extend the healthy human lifespan

How long would you like to live? I’ll take 200 years—and I’ve got my reasons.

For me, aging is tightly linked to a nagging, sometimes anxious sense that I’ve been born too early to experience things I imagined as a child. It’s the kind of anxiety that former Tulsa writer, robotics engineer and TV star Daniel Wilson explored a few years back in his wonderful Where’s My Jetpack?

I’d love to take an orbital trip around the far side of the moon and personally survey some of the more interesting moons in our solar system. I’d also like to have a machine companion consistent with HAL 9000, the intelligent colossus that lives on the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Some other aspirations include directing complex film projects, composing music and conducting orchestras. These adventures either are not yet technically possible or will require decades of personal prep and development, so I need more time. Lots of it.

In last October’s aging-themed issue of The Atlantic, Greg Easterbrook surveyed the history of aging. Easterbrook reminded us that until very recently, the few humans who grew old were assumed to have won the favor of the gods. For centuries, people were fortunate to reach 40. But life expectancy at birth has risen about three months per year since 1840.

“When the 20th century began, life expectancy at birth in America was 47 years; now newborns are expected to live 79 years,” Easterbrook wrote. “If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of the century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years. By the end of the century, it will be 100 years.”

We’re not talking about just hanging on a few decades after 60 or 70. We’re talking about a more-or-less fully functional and healthy life at what is now considered the extreme edge of the human life span—about 120 years.

Experimental drugs have been shown to dramatically extend healthy lifespans in worms and other small mammals. Combined with advances in genetic engineering, neural cell regeneration, tissue reconstruction/artificial production and radical stem cell work, scientists are fundamentally changing our conception of aging and what’s needed to slow it down.

Another avenue (and something of a halfway house) is the significant progress in artificial organ development and what some call tissue engineering, including breakout artificial heart, kidney and lung projects. Such advances might have increasing significance for Oklahomans with the recently announced biomedical engineering program at the University of Oklahoma—a project highly relevant to aging research. 

In 2013, Google announced Calico, another customary billion-dollar-plus “moonshot” project in California that’s focused on aging and associated diseases.

Calico is exploring drug therapies that can slow down neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and ALS, which result from the aging and death of nerve cells. The company seeks to identify drugs that promote the growth and development of new nerve cells—a phenomenon observed to be absent from the adult brain. 

There’s also the well-capitalized Buck Institute for Research on Aging a northern California operation scoping out ways to make primitive organisms live longer and with much better health than they’d normally have. They’ve done so since 1999 with spectacular—if only partially public—results. According to several published accounts, Buck and the genetics, bio-gerontology and neuro systems labs at University of Michigan, University of Texas and University of California at San Francisco are also looking at ways to mitigate aging through a fusion of drug therapies, genetic engineering, nanotechnologies and radical organ regenerative processes.

Ethical and political issues abound—Who gets the magic elixirs, and on what terms? And of immediate concern—given poverty, climate change and our many other urgent challenges—how best can we apply our intellectual and physical assets to cure what ails us? 

For more science and tech commentary from Ray Pearcey, read his thoughts on science education in Oklahoma or Tulsa's potential role in the future of aviation.