Slowing Down Aging With Science
Why are blueberries pomegranates and dark chocolate considered 'brain food'?
Quite a number of fruits and vegetables have been found to have very strong anti-oxidant properties. There are various standard experiments that you can do in the laboratory to measure, to quantify how strong an antioxidant a particular compound is, or a particular extract that may have many, many compounds in it. And, it's been found very conclusively that especially blueberries have a very, very high antioxidant capacity. And, this may be a good thing for extending one's life a little bit. But, unfortunately, it's one of these cases where most people have a pretty good antioxidant balance already, even if they're eating more of a variety of things, maybe not even blueberries at all. And, the addition of extra anti-oxidant capacity on top of that may do very little good. In fact, for some people, we think that it might even do a little bit of harm.
Is anti-aging medicine available right now?
There are no really effective anti-aging medicines or pharmaceuticals available right now. The only things that really exist are things that may be of some benefit to people who are unusually susceptible to particular aspects of aging. People who, for example might be coming down with Type-2 diabetes in their 30s, or who might get heart disease in their 30s. That's unusually young, and if you are genetically susceptible so that might happen to you, there are things you can do that might stave that off and bring you closer to having an average age of onset of those problems and therefore an average lifespan. But for people who have already, by default, got an average lifespan, they aren't going to die until the age of 80 or so, whatever happens unless they get hit by a truck, then there really is nothing that can appreciably extend their life.
What types of organizations support anti-aging studies?
At the moment, there are not nearly enough organizations out there supporting work to actually combat aging. The foundation that I run, the Methuselah Foundation, of which I am the chairman and the Chief Science Officer, is probably the main one that is really focusing on the development of future therapies that will really combat aging. There are, of course, plenty of studies going on around the world which are more indirectly focused on the eventual, hopeful development of anti-aging therapies. Essentially, all work with envirogerantology within the study of understanding aging is with an eventual hope that that understanding will lead us to be able to develop therapies. But that's a much more indirect approach than the approach that the Methuselah Foundation is taking. Then of course, there are people who sell existing products that really don't work very well at all yet and who are interested in improving the efficacy of those products by finding better ways to do things. So there are some companies, for example, trying to find analogs of Retheritrol that work much better than Retheritrol. And some people think that those things might be effective against human aging.
What role does government play in the study of aging?
The role of the government in working on combating aging has so far been very slight. And I think that's no surprise, because at the moment there is, of course, still a great deal of ambivalence in society as to whether defeating aging, or even combating aging, would be a good thing. People on the one hand know how horrible aging is, but on the other hand they have had to live with it for so many millennia, through the whole of civilization, that we've come to have a degree of irrationality about aging. And so it's not obvious that there are really any votes in combating aging at the moment and spending taxpayer money on it. And for that reason, it's pretty tricky to get government to put serious money into it.
Do large pharmaceutical companies support anti-aging studies?
The role of big pharmacies in combating aging is, in the process of undergoing quite a big change. Historically, the problem has been first of all that it wasn't clear what sort of approaches might actually be effective against aging. And secondly that even if some things were likely to be effective, it was going to be an awfully long time line. And of course, like any commercial entity, big pharmacies want to make profits in a reasonable time. So, this has scared people off a little bit, but the types of therapies that are likely to work against aging in the future are becoming clearer, not least of these my own work. And also, the pharmaceutical companies are beginning to experiment with the possibility of looking at longer time lines on the basis that, there is a lot of profit out there to be had in the end. So, I think that this may change. One thing that's often brought up with regard to the attitude of big pharmacies on anti-aging drugs is that actually big pharmacies don't want to do anything about aging because elderly, frail people are their main customers - the main reason for the profits that they make out of existing drugs. But, you shouldn't read too much into that, because the drugs and other therapies that will come along in the future that will really combat aging well; will not be one off things that suddenly make us non-aging such that we never have to take such drugs again. Rather, there will be things that we have to take periodically, just like repairing or maintaining a car for example, to repair and maintain the human body. And that will be a perfectly good source of profits for the same companies.
When will science be able to prove human aging can be repaired?
Science already knows that human aging can, in principle, be repaired just as it knows that aging of any other organism can, in principle, be repaired. What I mean by "in principle" is simply that aging is known now to be not programmed into the body. As one of my colleagues Lynn Hayflick put it some years ago, he said, that aging is a product of evolutionary neglect, rather than evolutionary intent. So, what that means is that we don't have genes that cause us to age, it's just that we don't have good enough genes to stop us aging. We have lots of genes that make us live as long as we do, and the process of combating aging is essentially a process of augmenting what we naturally have so that we're even better at not aging than we are already. So, that means that it's really just a technological advance. The human body is simply a machine that needs better maintenance. And better maintenance by definition is possible, and therefore, the combating of human aging is possible.
