Some experts think that government funding is not moving the game fast enough, which is where biotech companies like Altos steps in. The development of genome-editing tool Crispr by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna is an accelerant. The field is getting flashier - and faster. “If we did have an anti-ageing pill, as I think we are likely to have one in five years …”, he says, growing twinkly eyed. These things work on mice, dogs, even horses, says Miller. There’s also rapamycin, which seems to switch off the repair signal mistakenly sent by senescent cells. There’s metformin, a diabetes drug, which seems to retard ageing - but may also blunt the benefits of exercising in healthy adults. But some drugs look highly promising to Miller. Pharmaceutical giants, who make a fortune shifting drugs for heart diseases and cancers aren’t willing to back the kind of preventative care revolution that would make many medicines obsolete, says Miller.Īnd the brightest young scientific minds want to work in flashier, better paid fields - not, say, tinkering around with lab worms. And the least responsible said 600.” Serious science is slow work - one of the major obstacles to gerontology is that ageing studies, by their nature, are lengthy and expensive. And the less responsible said 200, 400 years. “And the more responsible of us said it depends. “15 years ago I was at a conference of 100 gerontologists and we were all asked how long humans could live for”, says Miller. He considers the likes of Aubrey de Grey, an early AI pioneer who claims humans will live more than a thousand years, a personal nemesis (De Grey was chief science officer of Silicon Valley’s sens Research Foundation, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He thinks about “90%” of research is poppycock, with only “10% of us doing hard science and making real progress”. “If you try and talk to most people about spending lots of money on the biology of ageing they say ‘oh my god, it’s a crackpot’”, says the University of Michigan biogerontologist Richard Miller, who’s well-funded lab pioneered much of the work on anti-ageing in mice. There “are many hurdles to overcome”, Yamanaka admitted in the MIT tech review.Īt which point, you might be tempted to call baloney. Frighteningly, many of the mice developed ugly embryonic tumors called teratomas. By 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish scientist also on board, had applied these factors to entire living mice in his lab, achieving signs of age reversal and leading him to term reprogramming a potential “elixir of life.” But some of the work backfired. Yamanaka’s breakthrough discovery was that with the addition of just four proteins, now known as Yamanaka factors, cells can be instructed to revert to a primitive state with the properties of embryonic stem cells. As Kingsley Amis once observed, “no pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.” Accidents and violence are the leading causes of death up to age forty-four, then cancer rises to the top, and then, at sixty-five, heart disease.īut back to Altos Labs, which has enlisted the weighty mind of Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, as an unpaid advisor. The holy grail, however, is ensuring that you’re as spritely on your 100th birthday as on your 60th: heading cancer, heart diseases and Alzheimer’s off at the pass. “Half of children born today will live to be centenarians,” says Verdin, a wonderfully telescopic way of thinking about this minute’s newborns. Verdin and the Buck Institute aren’t interested in indulging “immortalists”, but they do see the hundred year life as realistic, even the norm.

Since 1900, as public health improved, life expectancy has increased by 30 years. What about humans? “If you look at every discovery in biology it takes 15 to 20 years to mature to become something useful,” says Verdin. “We’ve identified the nobs and can tweak the rate of ageing,” says Verdin.īut I’m no mouse. Since then they’ve increased the lifespan of the laboratory worm C. Around that time, they discovered four cell mutations that, when present, tripled the creature’s longevity. Since 1999, scientists at the Buck have studied ways to make organisms live much longer. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

Ways to beat elixir of immortality