What if we could pop an immortality pill that ‘cures’ the ageing
process?
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Ponce de Leon hunted for the Fountain of Youth. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest literary
works, was about the hero on the quest for immortality. In China, they ingested
jade, gold, cinnabar, mercury, sulfur and arsenic under the mistaken belief
that they would prolong their lives—and which ironically, ended quite a few
since many of the solutions were toxic.
The search for immortality has a long and checkered history,
but now, it may be a lot closer than it has been since the beginning of human
history—at least outside of religious beliefs.
Leading scientists are calling for ageing to be classified
as a ‘disease’ in the expectation that treatments to increase human lifespans
by hundreds of years will become reality in the near future.
“60 is the new 40” because of advances in modern medicine
and improved standards of living. In the UK there are 10,000 people over the
age of 100 and this number is expected to soar to over half a million by the
middle of this century.
Until the 1980s, it was assumed that the process of ageing
was very complicated but research has thrown that out the window when it was
discovered that a mutation in a single gene, rather than hundreds of genes,
could bring about an increased lifespan in animals.
Much of the story of the last 20 or so years has been trying
to ‘unlock’ the how these ‘mutants’ work and some of the approaches are
amenable to the development of drugs. So, the idea of an immortality pill isn’t
that far-fetched.
One of the greatest difficulties to ‘solving’ the ageing process
is the lack of investment in research. If ageing was classified as a disease,
it could encourage more investment in research for it.
Richard Faragher, professor of biological gerontology at the
University of Brighton and chairman of the British Society for Research on
Ageing, said "I think there is a longstanding idea that ageing is a
natural process and we shouldn't interfere in natural processes. It is a
mindset, but it is one that is enshrined in the law – normally what happens is
the law around medicine allows claims that this [drug] will be beneficial for
the treatment of specific diseases. To take a silly example, even if you had
genuine immortality tablets you couldn't legally sell them as such because
ageing does not exist as a clinical condition in law."
Dr Aubrey de Grey, co-founder of the California-based SENS
(Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which focuses on
research into regenerative medicine to treat the diseases and disabilities of
ageing, said, “There is no reason to suppose there would be any kind of limit
on how long people can live if we can develop regenerative medicine for age.
"It is likely to be a very sophisticated
multi-component treatment, involving many different stem cell therapies, gene
therapies to manipulate the DNA in the body, and also more traditional things
like vaccines. And there may very well be surgery involved, at least in the
early stage in the development of these therapies, to replace whole organs with
artificial ones that have been created in a laboratory using tissue engineering.
“…there is a 50/50 chance at least of developing all of this
within the next 20 or 25 years.”
Of course, the issue of ageing and immortality isn’t just a
scientific one; there are sociological and societal concerns, not to mention a Pandora’s
boxful of religious ones.
Humanity may have been searching for immortality since the
beginning of time, but should we have it? What are the implications if no one
dies due to age?
