2019.04.25; We Will Extend Our Lives but Not Attain Immortality, Says Anti-Aging Researcher

Published by DB, August 19th, 2017

We Will Extend Our Lives but Not Attain Immortality, Says Anti-Aging Researcher

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In Brief

Eric Verdin, a world-leading researcher on aging, recently shared what he has learned about the future of growing old. While Verdin views immortality as a fairy tale, he said that many promising methods for extending life are being studied.

The Future of Getting Old

The Population Reference Bureau has projected that the percentage of the population over the age of 65 will rise from the current 15 percent to a staggering 24 percent by 2060. This means that research into aging has never been more important.

Eric Verdin is at the forefront of this research and has become the President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. The institute is the world’s biggest independent research facility studying the causes of growing old — and how to combat them. Recently, he conducted an interview with Nautilus to discuss how aging is effecting our lives.

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Verdin believes that the explosion in age-related research is due to researchers’ discovery in the 1990s that aging is not necessarily an inevitability. Instead, it is caused by mutations — and scientists could make changes to the genome of other species that led to a lifetimes of up to twice as long. Verdin stated in the interview this resulted in a belief that "there might be pathways to regulate aging, and if there are pathways that means there are proteins, and that means you can eventually develop drugs."

Despite this, he says, "if you hear the word immortality, just run. There is no drug that can give you that." While Verdin believes we can increase the average human lifetime significantly, the fountain of youth is still just a fairy tale. "It’s just nonsense from my perspective, and I think we should really resist the I-word."

The best way to maximize your lifespan, he said in the interview, is to maintain your body well. Good nutrition and exercise are "incredible anti-aging medicine." His general advice is to treat the cause rather than the symptom with a combination of lifestyle and pharmaceutical treatments — to fight aging itself rather than dealing with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or macular degeneration when they occur.

The Youth of the Old

The human attraction to immortality has been present in our cultural landscape since the beginning of time — the human mind seems to be unable to resist its lures. There are countless myths and stories based on it: the fountain of youth, the Wandering Jew, the philosophers stone, and the Bible’s Enoch are a few examples.

Recently, this mystical desire has birthed a myriad of promising methods for reversing the aging process which are currently under investigation: from transfusing young people’s blood into older people to give them more osteopontin, to digging into the role telemores play on the aging process, to developing anti-aging, bacteria-based pills.

However, when our increasing life expectancy is combined with the decrease in fertility that many nations are facing, the results are an aging population. In an interview with CNN, Elon Musk pointed out why this is undesirable, saying it causes a "very high dependency ratio, where the number of people who are retired is very high relative to the number of people who are net producers" — an economically detrimental state of affairs.

Due to technological and therapeutic advancements, aging is looking less like an ugly inevitability of our condition and more like a new and exciting epoch in our lives. However, we must ensure that longer lives for people do not come at the expense of the environment, economy, or wellbeing of others.

References: Aging on Nautilus, Youtube , Milken Institute

Tom Ward July 17, 2017

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