People, in the poorest regions of Costa Rica, understand that a friendly relationship and seeing children at least once-a-week alter DNA and the length of telomeres. They live longest of all, despite higher rates of obesity and hypertension. Death and aging constitute a mystery. Some of us die more quickly. We often ask about it as children, deny it in youth, and reluctantly come to accept it as adults. Aging is universal across all species. In the bare-fact of our aging and dying, we resemble all other animals; in the details, however, we’ve improved considerably over the course of our history. At some point, our bodies decide to grow senescent and then to die. It’s intrinsic, initiated from within the organism. The repeated shuffling of sirtuins and other epigenetic factors away from genes to sites of broken DNA, then back again (while helpful in the short term) is ultimately what causes us to age. Over time the wrong genes come on at the wrong time and in the wrong place. When you disrupt the epigenome by dealing with DNA breaks, it results in an erosion of the epigenetic landscape of misguided and malfunctioning cells.
A malady that impacts less than half the population is a ‘disease’. Aging impacts everyone & therefore is an inevitable, irreversible decline in organ function that occurs over time even in the absence of injury, illness, environmental risks, or poor lifestyle choices. The multiple hallmarks of aging include; genome instability caused by DNA damage; attrition of telomeres; alterations to the epigenome; loss of healthy protein maintenance; mitochondrial-dysfunction, exhaustion of stem cells & accumulation of senescent cells. Aging limits the quality of life and has a specific pathology. It does all this and in doing so it fulfils every category of what we call a ‘disease’, except one; it impacts more than half of the population. It’s the mother of all diseases, the one we all suffer from. Aging, by all means, is a disease though not yet considered so by any country. Insurance companies don’t cover pharmaceuticals to treat cases that aren’t recognized by government regulators even if it benefits humanity and the nation’s bottom line. Without such a designation, unless you’re suffering from a specific disease, longevity drugs will have to be paid for out of pockets, for they’ll be elective luxuries.
As nobody has been working on any cure, because what’s wrong with oldies isn’t viewed as an illness. It’s thought to be an inevitable part of life. Cancer, heart diseases, Alzheimer’s, and other conditions we commonly associate with getting old aren’t necessarily diseases themselves but symptoms of something greater. Efforts to define aging as a ‘disease’ both in custom and on paper will change the course of the future. Besides public funding to augment the cure doctors will feel comfortable prescribing medicines, such as Metformin, to their patients before they become irreversibly frail. Jobs will be created and scientists and drug makers will flock, industries will flourish. When we’re young we don’t get treatments that could keep us healthy as we grow old. When we’re old, we don’t get the treatments that are routinely used on the young. With the availability of the most advanced techniques like bio-tracking, DNA-sequencing, epigenome-analyses, robotic-keyhole surgery, stem-cell treatment, senolytic drugs it may initially benefit uber-rich alone.
There’s a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both but simply keeping people alive is no virtue.
Additional years gained aren’t, something worth-living anyway. Since 1900, life expectancy increased on an average of 20 years. But then people keep dying slowly and painfully after having spent a decade or more suffering through illness after illness at the end of their lives. Older people cost the economy a lot and constitute just over 10 percent of the population but fill the hospital beds and consume a third of all the medicines. As life-spans, instead of health-spans, continue to increase worldwide this will soon become the fate of billions of additional people.
While working on controlled mutation (in 1986), Kenyon happened to increase the natural lifespan of the nematode-worm by a factor of six…it now lived for 120 days as against its natural lifespan of 20 days (at a vitality-level it ordinarily had at 5 days). Longevity-escape-velocity is the pace of technological advancement in the area of extension which eventually increases to the point that for every year that passes, average human life expectancy increases by more than a year at which point we put a comfortable distance between ourselves and our mortality. It’s all about restoring the molecular and cellular structure of the body to the state it’s earlier in adulthood. Treatment where we can treat the thirties forever. Peter Theil’s Alcor; Google’s Calico and a host of other organizations are in the fray to enable life-extension to the point of not-to-die-at-all. While all this’s going on questions arise about the work patterns, retirement arrangements, living/spending habits, health-care needs, savings, and investments of people who live quite healthily well into their 100s.
Life-extension means the recovery of the physical/intellectual capital that’s tied up in hospitals and clinics, treating sick oldies. Add to this the billions of additional women, if provided, much longer windows of opportunity for pregnancy and parenting & extended female fertility by up to a decade or so. Imagine the combined intellectual power of the men and women who’re currently sidelined due to age-discrimination, socially enforced ideas about the right time to retire, and diseases that rob them of the physical and intellectual capacity to engage, as they once did. People in their 70s- 80s reenter the workforce to do something they’ve always wanted to do, earning more than they ever did, or serving their communities as volunteers, and helping raise their grandkids. With the money saved, by preventing expensive medical care, and with active people over 70 still in the workforce, imagine the experiences that could be shared, the institutional knowledge that could be relied upon, and the wizened leadership that would emerge. Problems that seem insurmountable today will look very different when met by the tremendous economic and intellectual resources offered by human vitality. That could be especially true if we’re all engaging in our world with the best version of ourselves.