The Quest for Immortality: Would You Want to Live Forever?

The Quest for Immortality:

Would You Want to Live Forever?

by  Martin J. Clemens

A big part of our culture, the global culture that is, lies in the process of aging, of growing old.  It’s difficult to edify, just how much of our lives are dedicated to understanding, worrying about, coping with and trying to defeat the aging process.  The sands of time, as they say, never stop flowing.  And far be it for me to start a discussion on the direction and essence of time.  No, I’ve something much more complicated to talk about today.

Senescence.

No, that’s not some new anti-ageing cream.  That’s the very contrived and scientific word for growing old.  More specifically it describes the gradual biological deterioration of cellular function, which in most living things means that after maturation, the entity in question experiences increased mortality in step with the passage of time.

It is senescence that causes your wrinkles and grey hairs and your stubborn spare tire, indirectly that is.  It is the unavoidable process that allows the direct causes of those maladies to come about.  And it is that unavoidable process that some people wish to…avoid.

Since the beginning of time, it seems, mankind has sought the key to immortality.  Whether that be through the fountain of youth – one of Sir Isaac Newton’s favourite musings – or, more recently, through the efforts of the transhumanist society, who see things in a slight bit more realistic terms, but we’ll get to that.

Senescence doesn’t apply to all living creatures though, amazingly enough.  There are certain taxa, mostly plants, but some animals as well, who do not suffer from an increased mortality as they age.  In fact there are some forms of life that undergo a defined decrease in mortality the older they get.  These rare creatures, as they mature from whatever prepubescent or larval form they initially hold, retain the ability to revert back into a pre-mature state of being, which by-passes the process of senescence altogether.

Some species of crab and lobster have this ability, as do a few others in the genus arthropoda, and there are several species of tree, fungus and shrubbery that exhibit an impressive resistance to time’s assault.

The reason for this highly coveted ability isn’t well understood.  In fact, the reason for the reason for this ability is something of a mystery too.  How it works, senescence that is – or biogerontology, if you prefer – is somewhat understood, in that there are many highly complex and hotly debated theories of senescence on the books at the moment, from Gene Regulation Theory to Chemical and/or DNA Damage theories.  It’s generally accepted that there is something inherent to biology that affects the efficiency of cellular replication throughout the lifecycle of any creature, it’s just, what that something is, isn’t readily agreed upon.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

Medical science has studied this process and its attendant features for decades, in pursuit of both cosmetic cure-alls and more humane means of improving the length and quality of life.  Human life that is.  Some have taken that effort up as a sort of mantra, and have labelled their cause transhumanism.  That is, whatever your preconceived understanding of the term may be, a concerted effort to defeat the sands of time and the effect they have on the human body.  In short, they – transhumanists that is – wish to find a way to achieve immortality.

That’s a loaded word though, among a loaded sentence for that matter.  We aren’t talking about the science fiction, romanticised notion of immortality.  We aren’t talking about the Q from Star Trek, much as they might appreciate the sentiment.  We’re talking about extending the lifespan of humans to an indefinite degree, through various technological and scientific means.

Quite often the goals of transhumanism are thought of in terms of cybernetics, a merging of technology and biology in an effort to find some permanence of life, though there are other means on the table.  A new documentary film making rounds through the film festival circuit, The Immortalists, chronicles the quest of two transhumanist advocates and scientists as they seek out answers to the problem of senescence and ways to achieve immortality.

These men, William H. Andrews and Aubrey de Grey, whom are showcased in the film, approach the problem from drastically different positions.  Andrews has studied biological methods of achieving a similar reversing of increased mortality, in much the same way as the species mentioned above.  He believes that an artificial extension of telomeres in our DNA are the answer.

In the simplest terms, telomeres, which are the caps on the ends of DNA strands, appear to shorten as we age.  Some researchers believe there is a direct correlation between this telomere shortening and senescence, and it follows, at least according to Andrews, that halting and/or reversing this shortening process will inherently alter or stop the aging process.  He is currently seeking means to develop chemical medications that will reinforce telomeres, in effect making the patient immortal, of a fashion.

De Grey however, is taking a more space-age approach to the issue.  He is calling for funding to further his research into medical nanotechnology.  More specifically, he believes the answer is to develop and deploy microrobots that will work in the patient’s blood stream to repair and even replace damaged or aged cells, effectively, though artificially, sidestepping the aging process.

This research is already being done, but not for the purpose of achieving immortality.  Several scientists at various universities and even pharmaceutical companies are attempting to use nanotechnology to combat cancer and even AIDS/HIV.  It seems a natural extension of the research, and de Grey is appealing to the interests of Silicon Valley elites in an attempt to fund his research with specific transhumanist goals in mind.

In keeping with the title of this post, however…would you want to live forever?

Notwithstanding the fear we all have regarding death, are there valid reasons to want to extend the human lifespan to such artificially great heights?

There are certainly lots of reasons why we shouldn’t do this.  Overpopulation is already an incredibly huge problem, do we really want to exacerbate that by eliminating the one part of life that mitigates our impact on this planet?  (Death, I mean.)  There’s also the issue of quality of life.  Whether poverty, war, strife, or mental illness are symptoms of the overpopulation issue or not, they will certainly not be solved by prolonging the suffering of people over centuries, or even millennia.  An eternity in squalor isn’t exactly an attractive idea, but this gives way to another issue, one you may not have considered yourself.

Who would be given the privilege of eternal life?  Would this be a luxury afforded only to the elites of our society?  If history is any indication, the answer to that question is a resounding yes, but what effect would that have on the already egregious divide between the so-called social classes?  Would we end up with a ruling class of immortals, lording over a lower class of slaves?  This line of reasoning becomes frightening fairly quickly, and though I’m not given to fear mongering, I can’t help but see this as a likely outcome.

Transhumanism is, or is supposed to be, a movement of equality.  It’s supposed to be the pursuit of immortality for the benefit of all mankind, but, and even now, the movement is slowly becoming something of a shadow of the earlier notion of eugenics.  Some have said that eugenics was a pragmatic effort to shore up the genetic potential of humanity in the face of what, at the time, was perceived as genetic flaws in our population.  The real flaw, however, was always in thinking that those who are different are somehow less worthy of survival.  This same flaw seems to be present in certain aspects of transhumanism.

It is said that this is an exciting time to be alive, and I couldn’t agree more.  I’m not sure, though, that we’ve overcome the baser inequalities that are inherent to our species, and until we do, efforts such as the quest for immortality will always be marred by the pursuit of power and money and flawed ideology.  We seem to be headed in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.


From Mysterious Universe @ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/03/the-quest-for-immortality-would-you-want-to-live-forever/


For more information about transhumanism see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/transhumanism
For more information about longevity see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/longevity

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Brooke the Immortal

Brooke the Immortal

An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging

By Philip Bethge

 

Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler. An American physician is trying to uncover the child's secret, because he wants to give mankind the gift of eternal life.
It is possible that the key to immortality is hidden in this delicate girl, who is only about 76 centimeters (2 feet, 6 inches) tall and weighs seven kilograms (15.4 pounds). Her arms and legs are as fragile as the branches of a young tree. Her laugh sounds like the whimper of a puppy; she has hazel eyes. And when Brooke Greenberg wants her mother she stretches out her tiny arms, shakes her head slowly, and twists her face into a lopsided moue.

"Come here, Brooke, yes, you are a pretty girl." Melanie Greenberg, 49, picks up the fragile looking child and gently strokes her back. "She loves being held," says Greenberg, a mother of four. Brooke's sisters are named Emily, Caitlin and Carly. Brooke is the second youngest. She will be 18 in January.

Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends. But for Brooke it's as if time had stood still. Mentally and physically, the girl remains at the level of an 11-month-old baby.
"Brooke is a miracle," says her father, Howard Greenberg. "Brooke is a mystery," says Lawrence Pakula, her pediatrician. "Brooke is an opportunity," says Richard Walker, a geneticist with the University of South Florida College of Medicine. They all mean the girl from Reisterstown, a small town in the US state of Maryland, who may hold the answer to a human mystery. At issue is nothing less than immortality: Brooke Greenberg apparently isn't aging.
She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding "extremely slowly," says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. "Then we've got the golden ring," says Walker.
He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. "Biological immortality is possible," says Walker. "If you don't get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years."

An Unprecedented Case

Brooke Greenberg was born prematurely on Jan. 8, 1993 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She weighed only 1,800 grams (about four pounds) at birth. It soon became clear that she wasn't normal. Almost all of her organ systems were altered. Her hips were dislocated, so that her legs pointed awkwardly toward her shoulders. She'd hardly been born before she was placed in a cast.
The first six years were torture for Brooke and her parents. On one occasion, seven holes in the child's abdominal wall had to be repaired. Because food kept entering her windpipe instead of her stomach, a gastric feeding tube had to be inserted. She fell into a 14-day coma when she was four. Then doctors diagnosed a brain tumor (the diagnosis later proved to be incorrect). "The Greenbergs had gone out already and made the preparations, buying a coffin and talking to the rabbi," pediatrician Pakula recalls.
Pakula practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents.
The most surprising thing about Brooke is that she hardly ages at all. Her body stopped growing when she was two years old. She hasn't grown a centimeter or gained a pound. Pakula injected the girl with growth hormones, but nothing happened. He studied the medical literature and consulted specialists worldwide. "She was presented to everybody who was anybody in the medical world at the time," says the 77-year-old pediatrician, "but she didn't match anything any physician had seen before."
The Greenbergs waited and hoped -- one year, two years, 10 years -- but nothing happened. Their daughter's facial features have remained unchanged. There are no signs of puberty. "Brooke's nurses, her teachers, even her father can't consistently sort photos of her chronologically," says Pakula. Only the girl's hair and fingernails are growing normally.

'She's a Miracle'

At the family's house in Reisterstown, Howard Greenberg points to photos on the walls: Brooke at three, next to her one-year-old sister Carly, who was already bigger than she was at the time; Brooke in a playsuit on her 12th birthday; Brooke at 14, at her Bat Mitzvah, the Jewish rite of initiation.
Greenberg hurries from picture to picture. Brooke looks the same in all the photos. Her mouth is always slightly lopsided and her eyes just a tough too far apart. "She's a miracle." It's something that has to be said, again and again. "What's she missing in life? Nothing. She hasn't got a worry in the world. She isn't broken. We're the ones who are broken." This is the father's way of explaining away his daughter's condition. "If you look at it that way, it makes it much more bearable," he says later on.
At first Melanie Greenberg took care of Brooke on her own, but now she has help. Feeding Brooke through the tube takes 10 hours a day. She goes to a school for disabled children from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Much of the rest of the time she spends in her room, sitting in her bed and watching television, or bobbing back and forth in her light-blue baby swing.
"She can do this all day," says Melanie Greenberg, lifting her daughter into the air and carefully placing her on her thin little legs, with her feet twisted inward. "It was not easy, it was very hard," she says, "but I'm sure there is a reason for Brooke to be here. Something is in her, something that could help millions of people."

Part 2: The Disassociated Body

Richard Walker, a retired professor of medicine and specialist in the biology of aging, lives in a house on a lagoon in the coastal town of Indian Rocks, Florida. He became aware of Brooke Greenberg in 2005. "I thought right away that she had a unique mutation in key genes that control development and aging," he says. Walker contacted the Greenbergs and convinced the father to let him take a sample of Brooke's blood so that he could study her genetic makeup. He examined the number and condition of the chromosomes. He analyzed the so-called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, the length of which provides information about the age of cells. He filled tiny reagent reservoirs made of biochips with pieces of genetic material, and tested the activity of a wide range of genes.
The results are as sobering as they are fascinating. "We haven't found anything unusual so far," says Walker, "but that wasn't a disappointment; it was actually an incentive to keep on searching."
The girl's uniqueness lies precisely in the fact that her genetic material seems normal, whereas she is obviously not normal, says the professor. Despite the surprisingly unremarkable genetic analysis, complete chaos prevails inside the girl's body.
Her brain is hardly more developed than an infant's, but her bones have a biological age of about 10 years. Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. In addition, the development of various organ systems, like the digestive tract, is what the professor calls "disassociated."
"Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms," Walker explains. He believes that there is only one explanation -- a failure of central control genes.
Normally, a carefully orchestrated genetic program allows a tiny egg cell to grow into an adult body. But if this master plan is impaired, the marvel of growth goes awry. Walker believes that this is precisely what has happened with Brooke. Genes that play an important role in physical development are either inactive or defective. "If we identify those genes, we might be able to understand the development and subsequently the aging of the body," says the scientist.

An Eccentric Theory

Walker believes that aging is merely the continuation of the body's development. He uses the image of a house to illustrate his point. First the house is built. When it's finished -- or, in the case of the body, when sexual maturity is reached -- the construction crew would normally leave the site. But in normal people the construction workers stay and keep building, according to a plan that's been fulfilled and a construction supervisor who says nothing but nonsense. Soon the crew builds things like contorted bay windows and shaky dormers. Supporting beams are suddenly sawed off, and then walls start falling. Finally the building collapses completely -- and death catches up with the body.
"Aging happens when developmental genes merely run out of meaningful information and subsequently cause chaos," Walker says. His idea is to simply shut off the master genes of development. This, he hopes, will put a stop to the aging process. If Walker is right, the consequences will be dramatic. A body manipulated in this fashion would no longer change, but would only perform repair work. Eternal life would be within reach.
All this talk has exhausted the professor. He sits in his heavy armchair and gazes out at the glittering water. A dinghy and a motorboat are tied to his private jetty directly in front of the deck, and a surfboard is lying nearby. The doctor sails, surfs and skis. He is 71. He loves his life.
Does he want to be immortal?
"Of course I want to live forever," he says. "I could study mathematics; I could learn so many more things. It would be the greatest gift in the world." Many people, says Walker, imagine that eternal life would be nothing but hardship and senescence. "But that's not how it would be," says Walker. Ideally development would be arrested just after a person reaches sexual maturity.
And the social consequences? Who would be allowed to live forever, and who wouldn't? Who would be allowed to have children?
Walker hesitates. "These are ethical questions, not scientific questions," he says. "These would be arguments made by philosophers and priests."

'Highly Unlikely'

Walker's theories are controversial. The British biologist Aubrey de Grey, for example, holds his American colleague in high esteem, but believes that aging and development are not related. The Brooke Greenberg case, says de Grey, has "absolutely nothing to do with aging." He points to the phase of life between the ages of 20 and 40, in which the body hardly changes at all. "Is it likely that the developmental gene expression suddenly stops during this time and then starts up again? No, this is highly unlikely," he says.
De Grey favors the standard theory that the body's cells simply wear out over the years, and that they accumulate toxins and lose their ability to regenerate. He has identified seven causes of death, like cell loss or changes in genetic material, which he hopes to combat with stem-cell therapy or special injections.
But Walker doesn't challenge the criticism. "The deterioration of the body's cells is precisely a consequence of the unregulated activity of development genes," he argues. His theory is seductive in a sense. While biologists like de Grey tamper with the countless symptoms of growing old, Walker simply wants to do away with aging altogether.
"Imagine we could stop the degenerative changes of the body," he says enthusiastically. "The onset of age-related diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia and many forms of cancer could be prevented."
To prove his theory, Walker needs people like Brooke Greenberg, in whom the developmental master genes fail. He's already discovered two similar cases. Six-year-old Gabrielle K., from Billings, Montana, born Oct. 15, 2004, also doesn't seem to be aging much at all. At the same time her chromosomes, just like Brooke Greenberg's, seem completely normal.
Nicky Freeman, a 40-year-man who seems to be trapped in a boy's body, lives in Esperance in Western Australia. His biological age is estimated at 10 years.

All in the Genes

Can Gabrielle or Nicky point the way to the fountain of youth? Walker doesn't know yet. He is focusing his attention on Brooke at the moment. He wants to sequence the girl's entire DNA, together with experts from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. If they find mutations in Brooke's genetic makeup, Walker plans to identify the corresponding genes in laboratory rats and then block them. He reasons that if the genetically manipulated remain young, researchers will in fact have put a stop to their development.
"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome. The father knows time is on his side. Doctors tell him that with good medical care his daughter can live a long time.

In the Greenberg home, Melanie has now attached a bag containing a complete nutritional formula to her daughter's feeding tube. The brownish flood runs through a tube into Brooke's small body.

Howard Greenberg looks down at his daughter. Wearing a red-and-white striped T-shirt and white pants, the girl rocks back and forth in his baby swing, as monotonously as a pendulum.
"I always thought she would die way before me, but I don't think that anymore," says the 53-year-old after a pause. "Brooke can live forever. She'll always be here."
by Martin H. Simon  from  DER SPIEGEL
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

From http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,725798,00.html
 

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Immortality Techniques

Immortality Techniques

Raymond Kurzweil is one of the most prolific inventors and futurists; he’s the one who developed text to speech synthesis and a synthesizer that develops and even creates poetry, among others. He has also predicted new technologies that would appear and some directions that our society would take, and he got it right.
Now, the 61 year old claims that considering the rate at which our understanding of our genes and nanotechnology is increasing, scientists should be able to replace many (if not all) of our vital organs in approximately 20 years from now. When confronted and asked if that’s not a bit of wishful thinking, he replied that neural implants and artificial pancreases already exist, and the distance is not as big as it seems.
Here’s what he said:
“I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever. Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.
Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen. Heart-attack victims – who haven’t taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts – will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive.
Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes. If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening. So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs.”
@ http://www.zmescience.com/other/immortality-just-20-years-away/

 

Chasing Immortality

The Technology of Eternal Life

An interview with Ray Kurzweil

by Craig Hamilton

The allure of eternal life has been tugging at the human imagination since we first began to contemplate our finitude. From the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known literary work on earth to the Taoist cult of immortality to Ponce de Leon's quest for the elixir of unending youth, the desire to free ourselves from the Grim Reaper's grasp has proven as persistent as the force it aspires to counter.
But although we may have been inspired to hear of Himalayan yogis who have been alive for centuries and although our collective obsession with health, fitness, and increased longevity seems to be at an all-time high, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, even the most optimistic among us have probably never seriously considered the possibility that death could become optional. Indeed, in an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world, it sometimes seems like our mortality is one of the few things that we can still be sure of.
Ray Kurzweil is determined to change all that. In the book he recently coauthored with Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, the award-winning inventor and futurist lays out a vision of “the science behind radical life extension” that makes most science fiction writers seem short on imagination. And he's not alone. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research into the aging process has been accumulating in laboratories around the world. And among the more ambitious of the scientists involved, there is, believe it or not, an increasing optimism about the potential of actually bringing the seemingly irreversible mechanisms of degeneration and decay that have haunted humanity for millennia to a screeching halt. Soon.
How soon? According to Kurzweil, two or three decades looks like the magic number. And for him, and other aging boomers, the million-dollar question is: Will he be around and in good health when the fountain of youth finally starts flowing? This is where the subtitle of his book comes in. Living “long enough to live forever,” it turns out, may require a bit more than simply eating your vegetables and not smoking (although that's definitely a start). For Kurzweil, building the “first bridge” to radical life extension means a radical shift in diet, a heavy supplementation regimen (he takes 250 supplements a day), and regular checkups and rejuvenation treatments to slow the aging process as much as possible using today's technology (and, of course, regular exercise and low-stress living). But even Kurzweil's “longevity program” is, he admits, only a modest stay against the inevitable. With a little luck, though, it will be enough to keep him kicking until the “second and third bridges”—biotechnology and nanotechnology, respectively—emerge to secure him his place in eternity.
Are human beings really ready to live forever? Do we have the psychological and spiritual resources to deal with such a profound shift in the very fundaments of our existence? What would a person be without the confrontation with mortality that has defined life and culture as we know it? And as much as we all run from death, are we sure that doing away with it would be a good thing? What would become of the first species to break the death barrier? When confronted with a prospect as radical as immortality, questions like these start to beg for answers. And given the possibility that we might actually be the first generation in history with the luxury of having to ask them, there are many who feel that we might do well to give them some thought before we proceed much further down the road to Shangri-la.
But that isn't stopping Kurzweil. Nor does it appear to be slowing him down. Widely regarded as one of today's leading futurists and innovators (winner of the prestigious National Medal of Technology, his inventions include the first reading machine for the blind and the first synthesizer to duplicate the sound of a grand piano), his unbridled enthusiasm for the omnipotence of technology to surmount any obstacle it confronts has him ready to embrace whatever the future may bring. If even one-tenth of what he predicts comes true, it will be the end of life—and death—as we've known it.
What is Enlightenment: In your new book, you assert that in the not-too-distant future, we'll have the capacity to extend the human life span indefinitely. How long do you think we can expect to live?
Ray Kurzweil: One analogy that life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey uses is, “How long does a house last? If you take care of the house diligently, and quickly address any problem that comes up, the house can last indefinitely. If you don't take care of it, it won't last very long.” The reason that analogy fails in regard to our own bodies is that we don't yet understand all the methods and we don't have all the maintenance tools for our bodies like we do for houses. We fully understand how a house works, because we engineered the concept of a house. We don't yet have all that information about our bodies and brains, and we don't have all the tools. But we will have them within twenty to twenty-five years, so we will be able to indefinitely maintain our bodies—and even anticipate, before they occur, the kinds of issues that now cause us to age and die. We're talking about putting your life into your own hands rather than leaving it in the metaphorical hands of fate.
WIE: How is science going to bring this about?
RK: Terry Grossman and I have described what we call the “three bridges” to radical life extension. Bridge one has to do with taking full advantage of today's knowledge of biology in order to dramatically slow down aging and disease processes. This will enable us to stay in as good a shape as possible for when bridge-two technologies become available. Bridge two is the biotechnology revolution, which will give us the tools to reprogram our biology and the biochemical information processes underlying our biology. We're in the early stages of that revolution already, but in fifteen years we will have, to a large extent, mastery over our biology. That will take us to the third bridge, the nanotechnology revolution, where we can rebuild our bodies and brains at the molecular level. This will enable us to fix the remaining problems that are difficult to address within the confines of biology and ultimately allow us to go beyond the limitations of biology altogether. So the idea is to get on bridge one now, so we can be alive and healthy when the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions come to fruition. Our aim is to live long enough to live forever.
WIE: You've been following your own “bridge-one longevity program” for several years now. Do you have any indications that it's working?
RK: When I was forty, I took these biological aging tests that measure forty or fifty different biochemical indicators, and I came out with a biological age of about thirty-eight. I'm now fifty-seven, and last year I came out at forty, so I've only aged a couple of years in the last sixteen years. That does reflect how I feel and look. I've overcome a major predisposition to diabetes—I was actually diagnosed with it twenty-two years ago, but as a result of using basically natural methods to reprogram my biochemistry, I now have no indication of it. I also had a predisposition to heart disease. My father died at fifty-eight of that disease, but I've never had it. So I have a completely different biochemistry than I would otherwise have.
WIE: Can you give an example of what you mean by bridge one, of how we can extend the life span using our current medical knowledge?
RK: One aging process that we can control right now has to do with the loss of phosphatidylcholine in our cell membranes. The cell membrane is typically sixty percent or more phosphatidylcholine in a young person, but it can be down to ten percent in the elderly, in whom it gets replaced by useless substances like hard fats and cholesterol. It's one of the reasons that the skin of an elderly person is not supple and their organs don't work as efficiently. The body makes phosphatidylcholine, but it does so very inefficiently, so gradually over the decades, our cell membranes are depleted of that vital substance. You can reverse that by supplementing with phosphatidylcholine; that's one of the 250 supplements I take. The objective is to use these bridge-one methods, which is applying today's knowledge aggressively so that we can be in biotechnology revolution, become available in another fifteen years.
WIE: How is biotechnology going to aid in life extension?
RK: Through biotech, we're developing the tools to reprogram our biology at the most fundamental level—the level of biochemical information processing. We're not far from being able to overcome diseases like heart disease and cancer, type 2 diabetes, stroke—the major diseases that kill ninety-five percent of us. And beyond simply curing disease, we're also working to reverse aging, which means addressing at least a dozen different processes that contribute to aging.
One of the key ideas in the biotechnology revolution is called rational drug design. We can design drugs to take on very carefully targeted missions to accomplish precise tasks. Drug development used to be called drug discovery, and it literally was that. If you had a mission like lowering hypertension, you would try fifty thousand substances and find one that seemed to lower blood pressure. But we didn't know how it worked or why it worked, and invariably, because it was really a very crude application, it would have all kinds of side effects. Whereas now, we can actually understand these processes very precisely in biochemical terms—for instance, the whole sequence of information processes that occur in the development of something like atherosclerosis, the source of heart disease—and we can attack them at specific vulnerable points. For example, there's one enzyme in the body that destroys HDL, the good cholesterol. If you inhibit that enzyme, people's HDL levels soar and it stops atherosclerosis. There's a drug now in phase-three FDA trials, torsotropie, that does exactly that, and it looks very promising. I wouldn't hang my hat on any one specific development, but there are thousands of these.
We also have the means now to inhibit gene expression. That's very important because every major disease—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and, of course, viral diseases—uses gene expression, and if we can inhibit certain carefully selected genes, we can stop disease. There's a new methodology, RNA interference, where we put small RNA fragments into a medication that goes into the cell and blocks the messenger RNA expressing a gene and then blocks the expression of that gene. It works very well.
There are lots of genes we'd like to inhibit. One exciting example is the fat insulin receptor gene, which basically says “hold on to every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.” You have to remember that our genes evolved tens of thousands of years ago, when conditions were very different than they are today. There wasn't any evolutionary reason for people to live very long, because once you were done with child rearing, which was generally maybe age thirty, you were using up the limited resources of the clan. And so longevity was not selected for. But there were genes that were appropriate for the time, like holding on to every calorie, because calories were few and far between—unlike today, with our super-sized meals. Now when scientists inhibited that gene in mice, those mice ate ravenously and remained slim—and they got the health benefits of being slim. They didn't get diabetes; they didn't get heart disease; they lived twenty percent longer. A number of pharmaceutical companies took notice and are now pursuing inhibiting the fat insulin receptor gene in fat cells, which would be quite a blockbuster concept. And that's just one of our twenty-three thousand genes.
So bridge two is already under construction, but in ten or fifteen years, we'll have the full fruition of that revolution, where we can really reprogram these information processes underlying our biology. And then twenty-five years from now, bridge three, the nanotechnology revolution, will enable us to go far beyond the limitations of our biology.
WIE: So even with all of the biotechnological innovation you're predicting, are there some limitations inherent in our biology that we won't be able to overcome without going beyond it?
RK: Biology, while remarkably intricate, clever, and complex, is far from optimal, because biological evolution made various early design decisions that everything else has to be based on. For example, everything is built out of proteins, and although proteins are three-dimensional molecules, they're a very limited class of materials with very limited properties. And we find time and again, as we actually reverse-engineer the methods of biology, that we can reengineer biological processes to be far more capable. For instance, our thinking takes place in the interneuronal connections in our brains. We have a hundred trillion of them, and they process information at chemical switching speeds of a few hundred feet per second, which is a million times slower than contemporary electronics. And that's based on the current speeds of today, when chips are still flat. Once electronics goes into the third dimension, they will be far more powerful. For instance, a one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain.
Or take our red blood cells, which are actually very simple devices—they just store and release oxygen in a certain fashion. There are already nanorobotic designs for robotic red blood cells that would do that hundreds of times more efficiently. If you replaced ten percent of your red blood cells with these respirocites, as they're called, you could do an Olympic sprint for fifteen minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours. Our biological systems are very sluggish. Take our white blood cells. I actually watched my own white blood cell in a microscope attack and destroy a bacterium, and it showed a measure of intelligence. It was very clever, but very slow; it was a boring thing to watch. It took about an hour and a half to complete that mission. Robert Frietas has nano-engineered designs that are fifteen to twenty years in the future, but once perfected, these designs would be hundreds of times more capable, would be able to download software from the internet that destroys specific pathogens including cancer cells, and would perform their mission in seconds rather than hours.
Now even though nanotechnology is largely in the future, there are already early adopter applications. For example, there's a blood-cell-sized capsule that's nano-engineered with seven animated pores that can successfully cure type 1 diabetes in rats; there are already sensors using nanotechnology that will be used in artificial pancreases to detect glucose levels with tiny computers embedded in the skin and to control the feedback loop. But the golden era of nanotechnology and the ubiquitous use of nanobots to augment the immune system and things like that will be more like twenty to twenty-five years away. Once we have the full fruition of biotech and nanotech, we really will have the means to indefinitely forestall disease, aging, and death.

WIE: Leonard Hayflick, one of today's leading authorities on aging, has said that he thinks that people who believe we can engineer our own immortality don't understand what aging really is, that deterioration and decay are universal processes that apply to everything, biological or otherwise.
RK: What am I? What is a person? I'm a pattern of matter and energy. I'm not this stuff that I'm looking at, because these particular particles were all different six months ago. We know that our cells turn over pretty quickly, and although our neurons persist longer, their constituent parts, the tubules and filaments, actually get turned over in days or weeks. Within a matter of months, all of the cells, or at least all of the systems within the cells, are changed. What persists is a pattern. I'd like to compare it to the pattern that water makes in a stream. When it's cascading around a rock, you can see a certain pattern, and that pattern can stay the same for hours or even months or years. But the water molecules that make up the pattern are changing within milliseconds. The pattern itself gradually changes as well—both the pattern of water in a stream and the pattern in our own bodies and brains—but there's a continuity even in this gradual change.
Now, Hayflick is correct that, left to their own devices, complex systems will eventually decay. On the other hand, you can intervene and modify those processes to maintain them. And it's not just a matter of fixing discrete problems, like saying, “Okay, there's a hole here. We'll plug the hole. There's a wound here, we'll plug the wound. There's a disease, we'll fix the disease.” We do have to have more pervasive systemic interventions that maintain the integrity of this complex system. But that is something that can be done. We can do it with complex information systems, and we can do it with our bodies and brains.
One example will be DNA errors. If you examine the cells of an elderly person, you'll see there's a very high rate of DNA errors that have occurred. And that is the type of process that Hayflick is referring to, because over time, those DNA errors cause a lack of integrity in this complex system. However, there are things you can do now to slow down DNA errors, and there will be biotech-based therapies to correct them. For example, I could take my skin cells and convert them into heart cells by manipulating the proteins in the cell body. I would discard those that had DNA errors or correct the DNA errors, extend the telomeres, multiply them in vitro and reinject them, and a good portion would ultimately work their way into my heart. If I did this therapy repeatedly, every day and every week, then after a year, my heart would be ninety-nine percent rejuvenated cells. Even if I was seventy, I'd have the heart of a twenty- or twenty-five-year-old, and I would have corrected the DNA errors.
So there are many ways to restore the integrity of a complex system. And yes, we do notice the sort of gradual blurring of the integrity of the information in a complex system if it's left to its own chaotic devices. But that's precisely what we're going to address.
WIE: Our current life expectancy is less than one hundred years. And our current life extension technology is nowhere near being able to do what you're speaking about. In light of this fact, what you're predicting sounds like an enormous leap in an extremely short time. What gives you the confidence that things will unfold in the way you predict?
RK: We don't have all the tools we need to extend longevity indefinitely at this moment, and if all science and technology were to stop, we wouldn't be able to do it. But science and technology are not stopping, they're accelerating. The future is always much more different than people anticipate because it grows not linearly but exponentially.
About thirty years ago, I became an ardent student of technology trends, and I began to gather data in many different fields and build mathematical models to predict future trends. And it turns out that certain things are hard to predict. If you asked me, “Will Google stock be higher or lower than it is today three years from now?” I could give you a guess, but that's all it would be. If you asked me, “What will the next wireless standard be?” that's also hard to predict. But if you asked, “What would one MIPS [million instructions per second] of computing cost in 2010?” or “How much will it cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2012?” or “What's the spatial and temporal resolution of noninvasive brain scanning in 2014?” I could give you a figure that will be remarkably accurate. I have a track record of predictions based on these models, because these types of measures of information technology track in very smooth exponential progressions. We're doubling the price/performance of information technologies each year—a factor of a thousand in ten years or a million in twenty years, which is really quite daunting. For example, whereas it took us fifteen years to sequence HIV, we sequenced SARS in thirty-one days. It cost twelve dollars to sequence one base pair of DNA in 1990, a penny in 2000, and it's under a tenth of a cent now.
Another important observation is that we're now at a point where we have the intersection of information technology and biology. We're understanding life and death, disease and aging as information processes, and we're also gaining the tools to change those processes—to reprogram the little software programs called genes that affect our lives.

 

WIE: Though we may fear death, and wish we could avoid it, most people have never taken the idea of immortality seriously. It seems that if such a thing were to become possible, it would be a change far beyond any change that has ever occurred in human history, with almost unimaginable psychological, social, cultural, economic, and spiritual implications. Is humanity ready for this kind of change?
RK: Psychologically, we're not equipped to live five hundred years. So if we were talking only about conquering disease and aging, and then just living on as human beings in our current form for hundreds or thousands of years, that would lead to a serious problem. I think we would develop a deep ennui, a sort of profound despair. We would get bored with the level of intelligence we have and the level of experience we have available to us. I think in order to make this viable, we need not only radical life extension but radical life expansion. We need to expand our intelligence and our capacity for experience as well, which is exactly what these new technologies will enable us to do. Then an extended life span would become not only tolerable but a remarkable frontier where we could pursue the real purpose of life, which is the creation and the appreciation of knowledge. And I mean knowledge in the broader sense, including music and art and literature and science and technology and relationships. We're going to profoundly expand our ability to do that.
My next book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, addresses the far-reaching implications for human life of these overlapping revolutions of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. For example, there are already feasibility designs showing that we could develop solar panels and nano-engineered fuel cells that could convert sunlight efficiently enough to meet all of our energy needs. Nanotechnology will also enable us to create any physical product at virtually no cost from very inexpensive raw materials and information. And nanobots are going to be permeating our bodies, brains, and environment—doing our work for us, transforming our environment, cleaning up pollution from earlier eras, and vastly expanding our intelligence. As we merge with our technology, we will have billions or trillions of nanobots in our bloodstreams keeping us healthy, interacting with our biological neurons, and providing, for example, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. If you want to be in real reality, the nanobots will just sit there and do nothing. If you want to be in virtual reality, they'll shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that you would be experiencing if you were in the virtual environment, and your brain will feel like it's in that virtual environment. You can move your virtual body there and have any kind of encounter you want, incorporating all of the senses.
But most importantly, this intimate merger of our biological intelligence with nonbiological intelligence will vastly expand human intelligence as a whole. I mean, once it gets a foothold in our brains, our thinking will really be a hybrid of the two, and ultimately, the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful, and may give us access to new forms of intelligence that are very different than anything we've experienced.
This also relates to longevity, because the reality of longevity for nonbiological systems is different than for biological systems. Right now, the software of our lives is the information in our brains. I estimate it to be thousands of trillions of bytes, which represents all of our memories and experiences and skills and just the whole state of our brain. So that's software, and it's inextricably tied up with our hardware. When the hardware of our brain crashes, the software dies with it. Our whole concept of life and death has those intertwined; they're not separable.
But we have already experienced a different type of reality where they are separable, and that's our software files. If you buy a new computer, you don't throw all your files away—your files have a longevity that's independent of the hardware. Our lives are also information files, which I call our mind file. So eventually, the information in our brains will be independent of the hardware substrate that it's running on, just like software is today. That's the nature of immortality some decades from now, as our lives increasingly become dominated by the software of our mind file.
In envisioning the future, people frequently will take one change and consider how it would impact today's world as if nothing else is going to change. Most futurist movies are like that. In Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, for example, you have human-level cyborgs, but everything else is the same—the coffee makers, the cars, no virtual reality. But you really have to look at all the different changes. If a very prescient futurist in 1900 had said, “We have a third of the population today working on farms, but I can see that will be less than two percent in a century from now,” people would have said, “Oh my god, everybody's going to starve.” But not only are we not starving, America's a major food exporter. How did that happen? Because new technologies, largely information-based, have improved productivity not only of food but of everything else.
WIE: Given our current struggles with overpopulation, many have pointed out that if such technologies were to become widely available, we would pretty quickly be faced with a choice between having more children and securing our own immortality. Do you agree?
RK: I don't think it's going to be a problem. Yes, radical life extension will enlarge the population. But soon, all of our products and foods will be manufactured by nanotechnology replicators that can make essentially any physical product at almost no cost. So this will lead to a radical increase in prosperity around the world. And we've seen that as nations become more prosperous, they lower their population growth. The most advanced countries have negative population growth. Now that will reverse again when we dramatically reduce the death rate. The birth rate will then exceed the death rate once again, and population will grow. But how quickly is it going to grow? It's not going to double every year, it's going to add a few percent every year. So compared to this very slow expansion of the biological population, the wealth creation from nanotechnology is going to expand at explosive rates. We're going to be able to keep up very easily.
WIE: One criticism of the life extension movement has been that these technologies are only going to be available to the rich, and therefore, their pursuit will intensify the class gap between the haves and have-nots—those who can afford to live forever and those who can't. Will we end up with a divided world of immortals and mortals?
RK: That's a misconception also. The law of accelerating returns says that there's fifty percent deflation annually in information technology so that you can buy the same digital camera today for half what it cost to buy it a year ago. The typical cycle is that a product starts out unaffordable and actually not working very well—remember when mobile phones barely worked and only the elite could afford them? Then it becomes merely expensive and works better, and then it becomes inexpensive and works very well, and eventually it's almost free and it's really perfected. So it's only at the point where technology doesn't work very well that only the rich can afford it.
Look at the AIDS drugs. They started out costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient and actually didn't work very well. Now, at least in the poorer countries, say, in Africa, it's about a hundred dollars a patient. It's still too much, and yes, we need to do a lot more. But actually, we have the opportunity to save millions of people, because the drugs are only a hundred dollars a person, and they actually work pretty well now. We're not where we need to be, but the technology has moved in the right direction. And that progression is going to accelerate. Ultimately, we'll be able to meet the material needs of the entire population at almost no cost.
WIE: Biotechnology and nanotechnology have both borne the brunt of fierce criticism in recent years. Many feel that the potential perils of these new technologies outweigh any potential benefits, no matter how remarkable they might be. Yet you seem to be advocating a no-holds-barred relationship to these developing technologies. Do you feel the risks have been overblown?
RK: Technology is a double-edged sword. It empowers both our creative and destructive sides. I had this conversation with Bill Joy in September 1998 and gave him a copy of my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which led him to write the Wired cover story “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us” and articulate the downsides of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. What was controversial about his article was his call for relinquishment: “Let's keep the good technologies, but there are dangerous ones like nanotechnology and biotechnology—let's just not do those.” I pointed out that all technologies are leading, in the end, to those dangerous technologies; that technology is inherently dangerous. And in fact, banning a technology at a broad scale just drives it underground, where it's actually more dangerous, because then the responsible practitioners we're counting on to protect us don't have easy access to the tools. So I think the most dangerous route would be to attempt to relinquish these technologies. If one seriously tried to do that, it would require a totalitarian system. And Bill Joy himself has evolved his position. He's now working as a venture capitalist actually investing in nanotechnology to accelerate renewable energy and other environmentally friendly technologies.
However, there are downsides. We talked about some of the tremendous benefits of genetics and the whole biotechnology revolution in terms of overcoming disease and extending longevity, but it also could empower a bioterrorist with tools found in a routine college biotechnology laboratory to create a biological pathogen that could be quite dangerous. It could be spread easily and be stealthy and deadly.
The answer, though, is not to relinquish these tools. In broad strokes, it is to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale. We're close, for example, to broad tools that could combat biological viruses in general. Now if we can get those quickly enough, we don't have to attack each new virus as it comes along. So what we need to do is identify these risks. We need ethical standards, which have worked very well in the genetic community—at least to prevent inadvertent problems, to prevent intentional abuse or misuse by terrorists, for example. But the fact that there will be risks is just inherent. I mean, technology is power, and it does empower all of our dispositions, creative and destructive.

WIE: What would you say to the idea that it's unnatural to want immortality? That this quest for life extension goes against the natural cycles of birth and death, and that if we attained immortality, we would have stepped so far outside the natural order that in some sense, we would no longer be human?
RK: In my view, we are the species that seeks to go beyond our own boundaries. Fundamentalism is the idea of putting artificial constraints on what humans can be—defining humans in terms of our limitations rather than by our ability to supersede our limitations. We didn't stay on the ground, we didn't stay on the planet, we're not staying within the limitations of our biology, and we're not staying within the limitations of our intelligence. The noblest purpose of human life is the creation, communication, understanding, and appreciation of knowledge in all its forms: from different art forms to different levels of expression in science and technology.
WIE: Some people would say that the meaning of life is, in a sense, defined by our mortality. That our limited life spans push us to spend the time we have wisely, creating a sense of urgency that tends to bring out our best qualities. That such things as courage and heroism, and even creativity, arise from the recognition that “I only have so much time here, and so does everybody else.” What would you say to the idea that if we were faced with the opportunity to live forever, we would quickly lose our edge, become lazy, start to take life for granted, and ultimately become more apathetic, self-centered, and indulgent?
RK: I think defining meaning in terms of death—saying that death gives life meaning—is to define us in terms of our limitations. In my mind, what's noble is the pursuit of knowledge, and that's going to expand through this exponential process along the law of accelerating returns. That's really the future of human life.
If you see human beings as no different than peaches on a tree that grow old and fall and die, then that view has merit. But there is something unique, after all, about humans. I mean, it's been said many times that science has thrown humanity off our pedestal of uniqueness and centrality. We discovered that the universe didn't revolve around the earth, that human beings were not anointed directly by God, and that we evolved from worms. And so we've continually had our egocentric view of the importance of humans shattered by these scientific insights. But there actually is one really important way in which humans are unique: We are the only the species that passes knowledge down from generation to generation, where that knowledge base is growing exponentially, and where we go beyond our limitations. Whereas other animals can be seen statically using tools, they don't create technology that evolves. You know, the combination of our cognitive capability and our opposable appendage, the thumb, enabled us to change our world. And that's what's ennobling, and gives life meaning.
Up until now, we've had no opportunity to circumvent our mortality. So we had no alternative but to rationalize this tragedy—which is what death is—saying, “Oh, it's really a good thing. And it's ennobling; it gives life meaning.” A large part of religion is to rationalize this tragic loss of knowledge and skill and personality as something positive. But really, what's positive about human beings is our pursuit of new frontiers.
WIE: It is well known among evolutionary theorists that the chief catalysts for change are stress and challenge. Whether we look at technological innovation, personal transformation, or collective evolution, positive change in any form tends to be driven by external pressures, by challenges that push us to reach further, dig deeper, create, and innovate. Even this rush for life extension is being driven by the stress of imminent death. In the utopian immortal future you envision, what do you see as the catalyst for continuing evolution, development, and change? In securing for ourselves a trouble-free future in eternity, will we inadvertently be ensuring our own stasis and depriving ourselves of the conditions needed for our own continued development?
RK: Well, already we can see that that's not the case. We are now pushing evolution forward. Biological evolution is not the cutting edge—it's really our technological evolution. We've taken over the driving force of the evolution of complexity from this evolutionary process that created it. And I think that the evolutionary process has its own urgency because there are still competitive pressures, and time becomes increasingly valuable when things are moving more and more quickly. We're not motivated only by the realization that we're running out of time because we're going to die in a few years.
You see lots of people competing to create new businesses and new knowledge, competing in the academic and artistic arenas. And by and large, they're not propelled by the need to put the next meal on the table. We don't need death to propel that forward. We have a hierarchy of needs: air is pretty much a need, but if you have air, then you worry about food, and if you have that, you worry about shelter. But most of us have already moved on to worrying about ego needs, and beyond that, there are desires to create meaningful knowledge and so on.
WIE: What is your response to the observation that death is part of a process of regeneration, and that it's through the cycle of death and rebirth that the very process you're speaking about happens? That in some sense, evolutionary progression wouldn't really be possible once the regenerative dimension were taken out of it?
RK: Religion talks about transcending death, but it has a mystical answer to how that happens. In fact, we find this transcendence in the real physical world. We find it in technology. If you put materials and energy in the right configurations, magical things happen. You get powers that go beyond the original materials. That's what excites me about being an inventor.
And we will transcend death and that natural cycle. We're not just grapes on the vine—we are overcoming that natural process that we emerged from. Yes, we came from nature, but we are going to surpass it through the power of our technology, which comes from our mind made manifest in the real world.
From http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j30/kurzweil.asp

Can a Pill Keep Your DNA Young?

The first drug targeting telomeres, now sold as a nutritional supplement, will soon face the harsh light of peer review.

by Susan Karlin

Telomeres—repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that become shorter with each cell division—have long tantalized biologists seeking to understand and control the aging process. When its telomeres become too short, a cell stops dividing and eventually dies. Stop that process and (just maybe) immortality beckons; hence the frenzy a decade ago when a group of researchers claimed they had figured out how to slow that winding-down. Now a second round of frenzy is under way. After years of research, the first telomere-targeting pills have hit the market, while other treatments are entering clinical trials.
An enzyme called telomerase maintains telomeres in our reproductive and stem cells but not in the rest of the body. In 2001 researchers at the biotech giant Geron Corporation isolated a molecule called TA-65 from the herb astragalus, which they said boosted telomerase activity (its effect has not yet been evaluated in published, peer-reviewed studies). Geron licensed the product to T.A. Sciences in New York City for development as a nutritional supplement; unlike medications, supplements require no FDA approval. A handful of physicians began selling TA-65 pills in 2007, and the company says that clients taking it have reported enhanced athletic, visual, and cognitive performance. To back up those claims, T.A. Sciences plans to submit research demonstrating TA-65’s effects on bone density, immune function, and age-related biomarkers for peer-reviewed publication this year.
The results should help early adopters decide whether the supplement is worth its $8,000-per-year price tag. Sierra Sciences of Reno, Nevada, is also developing possible pharmaceuticals to maintain telomeres. “We now have 35 chemicals sitting in our lab that turn on the telomerase gene,” says CEO Bill Andrews. The company hopes to have an approved drug within 15 years.
Geron, meanwhile, is pursuing a separate telomere therapy aimed at fighting cancer. Although telomerase is not present in most cells, it gets reactivated in cancer cells, allowing them to continue dividing. Blocking the enzyme causes the cancerous cells to die, so the company is working with a telomerase inhibitor, imetelstat, that it hopes will kill tumor cells while leaving healthy ones unharmed. The compound is currently in Phase I clinical trials, with Phase II testing slated to begin this year. The unsettling flip side is that telomerase-boosting treatments aimed at slowing aging might also increase the risk of cancer. Some studies in mice have shown that elevated telomerase activity leaves the animals more susceptible to skin tumors and breast cancer, so maybe there is no free lunch.
From http://discovermagazine.com/2010/may/20-can-a-pill-keep-your-dna-young

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