[ExI] David Ewing Duncan's new book, When I'm 164

[James Clement]

NOTE: the results of his survey to over 30,000 people, mostly at health
conferences like TEDMED were quite disappointing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/how-long-do-you-want-to-live.html


*How Long Do You Want to Live?*
By DAVID EWING DUNCAN Published: August 25, 2012 260
Comments<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/how-long-do-you-want-to-live.html#commentsContainer>

SINCE 1900, the life expectancy of Americans has jumped to just shy of 80
from 47 years. This surge comes mostly from improved hygiene and nutrition,
but also from new discoveries and interventions: everything from
antibiotics <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/antibiotics/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
andheart bypass surgery
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/surgery/heart-bypass-surgery/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
to cancer <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/cancer/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>drugs
that target and neutralize the impact of specific genetic mutations.
 David Sparshott
Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.


   - Read All Comments (260)
»<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/how-long-do-you-want-to-live.html#comments>

Now scientists studying the intricacies of DNA and other molecular
bio-dynamics may be poised to offer even more dramatic boosts to longevity.
This comes not from setting out explicitly to conquer aging, which remains
controversial in mainstream science, but from researchers developing new
drugs and therapies for such maladies of growing old as heart disease and
diabetes <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/diabetes/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
.

“Aging is the major risk factor for most diseases,” says Felipe Sierra,
director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on
Aging. “The National Institutes of Health fund research into understanding
the diseases of aging, not life extension, though this could be a side
effect.”

How many years might be added to a life? A few longevity enthusiasts
suggest a possible increase of decades. Most others believe in more modest
gains. And when will they come? Are we a decade away? Twenty years? Fifty
years?

Even without a new high-tech “fix” for aging, the United Nations estimates
that life expectancy over the next century will approach 100 years for
women in the developed world and over 90 years for women in the developing
world. (Men lag behind by three or four years.)

Whatever actually happens, this seems like a good time to ask a very basic
question: How long do you want to live?

Over the past three years I have posed this query
<http://www.davidewingduncan.com/whenim164/survey-results.html>to
nearly 30,000 people at the start of talks and lectures on future trends in
bioscience, taking an informal poll as a show of hands. To make it easier
to tabulate responses I provided four possible answers: 80 years, currently
the average life span in the West; 120 years, close to the maximum anyone
has lived; 150 years, which would require a biotech breakthrough; and
forever, which rejects the idea that life span has to have any limit at all.

I made it clear that participants should not assume that science will come
up with dramatic new anti-aging technologies, though people were free to
imagine that breakthroughs might occur — or not.

The results: some 60 percent opted for a life span of 80 years. Another 30
percent chose 120 years, and almost 10 percent chose 150 years. Less than 1
percent embraced the idea that people might avoid death altogether.

These percentages have held up as I’ve spoken to people from many walks of
life in libraries and bookstores; teenagers in high schools; physicians in
medical centers; and investors and entrepreneurs at business conferences.
I’ve popped the question at meetings of futurists and techno-optimists and
gotten perhaps a doubling of people who want to live to 150 — less than I
would have thought for these groups.

Rarely, however, does anyone want to live forever, although abolishing
disease and death from biological causes is a fervent hope for a small
scattering of would-be immortals.

In my talks, I go on to describe some highlights of cutting-edge biomedical
research that might influence human life span.

For instance, right now drug companies are running clinical trials on new
compounds that may have the “side effect” of extending life span. These
include a drug at Sirtris, part of GlaxoSmithKline, that is being developed
to treat inflammation and other diseases of aging. Called SRT-2104, this
compound works on an enzyme called SIRT1 that, when activated, seems to
slow aging in mice and other animals. It may do the same thing in humans,
though this remains to be proven.

“Many serious attempts are being made to come up with a pill for aging,”
said Dr. Sierra, though he suspects that there will not be a single
anti-aging pill, if these compounds end up working at all. “It will be a
combination of things.”

For over a decade, scientists also have experimented with using stem
cells <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/stemcells/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>—
master cells that can grow into different specialized cells — to replace
and repair tissue in the heart, liver and other organs in animals. Some
researchers have succeeded in also using them in people. The researchers
include the urologist Anthony Atala of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center,
who has grown human bladders and urethras from stem cells that have been
successfully transplanted into patients.

But another stem cell pioneer, James Thomson
<http://discovery.wisc.edu/home/morgridge/research/regenerative-biology/leadership/>of
the University of Wisconsin, believes that stem cell solutions will be a
long time coming for more complex organs. “We’re a long way from
transplanting cells into a human brain or nervous system,” he said.

ANOTHER intervention that might thwart the impact of aging is bionics: the
augmentation or replacement of biological functions with machines. For
years cardiac pacemakers have saved and extended the lives of millions of
people. More recent devices and machine-tooled solutions have restored
hearing to thousands who are deaf and replaced damaged knees and hips.
Physicians use brain implants to help control tremors brought on by Parkinson’s
disease <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/parkinsons-disease/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
Researchers also are working on a wide range of other machine fixes, from
exoskeletons that protect joints to experimental devices that tap into the
brain activity of paralyzed patients, allowing them to operate computers
using thought <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/ibrain-a-device-that-can-read-thoughts.html>
.

Curiously, after learning about these possibilities, few people wanted to
change their votes. Even if I asked them to imagine that a pill had been
invented to slow aging down by one-half, allowing a person who is, say, 60
years old to have the body of a 30-year-old, only about 10 percent of
audiences switched to favoring a life span of 150 years.

Overwhelmingly the reason given was that people didn’t want to be old and
infirm any longer than they had to be, even if a pill allowed them to delay
this inevitability.

Others were concerned about a range of issues both personal and societal
that might result from extending the life spans of millions of people in a
short time. These included everything from boredom and the cost of paying
for a longer life to the impact of so many extra people on planetary
resources and on the environment. Some worried that millions of healthy
centenarians still working and calling the shots in society would leave our
grandchildren and great-grandchildren without the jobs and opportunities
that have traditionally come about with the passing of generations.

Long-lifers countered that extending healthy lives would delay suffering,
possibly for a very long time. This would allow people to accomplish more
in life and to try new things. It would also mean that geniuses like Steve
Jobs or Albert Einstein might still be alive. Einstein, were he alive
today, would be 133 years old.

That’s assuming that he would want to live that long. As he lay dying
of anabdominal
aortic aneurysm
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/abdominal-aortic-aneurysm/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>in
1955, he refused surgery, saying: “It is tasteless to prolong life
artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it
elegantly.”

David Ewing Duncan is a contributor to Science Times. This essay is adapted
from his most recent e-book, “When I’m 164  <http://whenim164.com/>: The
New Science of Radical Life Extension and What Happens If It Succeeds.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20120922/b0509888/attachment.html>