Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, by Andrew Steele

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• Tags: Ageing, Human Longevity
• How I learned about it: Review in The Economist

My update on longevity research continues with Ageless, by Andrew Steele (See also The Price of Immortality, by Peter Ward).  Unlike Peter Ward’s book, which includes anecdotes about the weird side of the immortalist movement, Ageless is a serious and comprehensive look at the scientific research into the causes of ageing and its prevention.

Steele advocates for a new way of looking at ageing, moving from the treatment of individual age-related conditions like heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and dementia to treating ageing as a single condition.  He notes that currently, drugs are only approved if they treat a specific disease, and ageing isn’t on the list, so regulatory bodies like the US FDA wouldn’t approve a treatment for ageing if one was invented.  (This seems far-fetched to me, as a successful treatment for ageing would treat a wide range of specific diseases, and presumably the FDA would rush to approve such a beneficial treatment).

There are objections to a deliberate program to increase longevity, which could lead to overpopulation and environmental damage, or might benefit only the rich and powerful, and would allow tyrants to live longer, too.  Steele neatly overrides these objections with a conceptual reversal: if ageing didn’t already exist, you wouldn’t invent it as a solution to these problems, thus condemning billions to the suffering brought on by the conditions of old age.

There’s a familiar laundry-list of the categories into which the causes of age-related problems fall, including accumulated genetic and epigenetic damage, shortened telomeres, reduced autophagy and accumulation of senescent cells, malfunctioning mitochondria and chemical signaling, changes in the microbiome of the gut, and immune system decline.  Research shows there is potential for treating many of these conditions, using drugs, stem cell therapy, microbiome treatment, young blood to rejuvenate older bodies, or gene therapy.  Fasting shows promise, too – you might be able to “Live, Fast, Die Old.”  Yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice, rats, hamsters, dogs, and rhesus monkeys (although that’s ambiguous) live 50 to 85% longer with severe dietary restriction, although people who try it report irritability, that they feel the cold more, and have decreased libido.

For now, the best advice to improve your health and lifespan is pretty basic.  Don’t smoke, don’t’ get fat, and eat healthily – not too much, reduce meat, eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, reduce foods high in sugar and fat, don’t drink much alcohol.  Exercise, and get 7-8 hours sleep a night.  Get vaccinated, wash your hands, wear sunscreen, brush your teeth, and keep blood pressure low.  Be a woman.  Don’t take supplements (unless you have a specific vitamin deficiency) – that’s just a way to make expensive urine.  Unsurprisingly, Steele doesn’t suggest male castration as a way to extend lifespan – if done before puberty, it adds years to your life.

Trials are underway.  In the meantime, you can only eat right, keep fit, and wait.

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The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, by Peter Ward

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 2 out of 5
• Tags: Ageing, Immortality, Human Longevity
• How I learned about it: Library catalogue and Economist Review

The last book I read about extending human longevity came out in 2010 (see Long for This World, by Jonathon Weiner), so I thought it was time for an update.  “The Price of Immortality” is described as being in the spirit of Jon Ronson, which intrigued me since I’ve enjoyed some of Ronson’s work like The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats.

“The Price of Immortality” contains an odd mix: there are serious summaries of the latest scientific longevity research, alongside descriptions of fringe-element “immortalists” who have a nearly religious faith that immortality is within reach, meeting in church to hear overly-optimistic “sermons” from longevity experts and promoters; taking supplements instead of sacrament.

Immortalists pin their hopes on technologies like cryonics, which has had a history of being underfunded and unscientific.  Some hope to upload their consciousness into some form of digital storage, or that nanotech will enable cellular-level repair.

Cryonics is the “freeze and wait” approach, in which your dead body is preserved by freezing in the hope that future technologies can repair the damage and bring you back to life.  Scientists wanted to work in the lab and on animals instead of jumping straight to people.  Impatient immortalists wanted to get going right away, and some tried to set up services to meet the demand.  Lack of planning led to some wacky events, like frozen bodies being stored in places like a garage and an industrial park, or hauled around in a truck packed with dry ice.  Mortuaries had no means to prepare bodies for cryopreservation, so they were prepared illegally at the cryonics services office.  When money ran out to keep bodies frozen, they were left in the open to decompose.  Running short on containers to store frozen bodies, one guy squeezed several bodies into a one-person capsule, partially thawing the bodies so they could be squeezed in.

There are some equally wacky treatments offered for longevity – one speaker at a longevity conference recommended “rectally administered ozone therapy”.  “So just to recap: [he] told…attendees…to take a toxic gas and literally blow it up their own asses.”  It’s almost as if the speaker was trying to see how absurd he could be before the audience caught on and chucked him out.  There are lots of diets, supplements and fake stem cell therapies that don’t work, but which people are happy to sell you.

On the more serious side, we meet Aubrey de Grey and learn the concept of “escape velocity,” the point at which new technologies keep you alive long enough for the next new treatment to keep you going, and so on indefinitely.  We learn the nine hallmarks of aging, including epigenetic alteration, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and telomere shortening, all areas of promising research, but none of which has yet produced a viable treatment for humans.  There’s a telling quote from Dr. Judith Campisi, who was able to extend the health span (but not the life span) of mice in her research on cellular senescence.  While she agrees that research can find ways to treat the symptoms of aging, she says, “I can guarantee one thing: you will die one day.”

There are those who think they can live longer and those who want to live forever.  Impatient immortalists, frustrated by regulatory barriers, indulge in self-experimentation to speed progress, or ask that terminally ill patients be allowed to try experimental anti-aging treatments to accelerate advancement.

Jon Ronson is great at presenting absurd material in a dryly humorous way, and I was hoping for more of the same from Peter Ward.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed – there is plenty of absurdity in “The Price of Immortality”, but somehow it fails to capitalize on the humour value.

 

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