From: Dan S [dan@southeast.net]
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 1998 12:14 PM
To: isml
Subject: [isml] Elixir of Eternal Youth
Date: 24 Jan 98
>From The Electronic Telegraph,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=001036222020742&rtmo=koJoCCkp&atmo=kkkkkkku&pg=/et/98/1/24/esever24.html
-
Will death soon be optional?
Scientists in Texas last week announced that they had found the biological trigger that stops the ageing process. Are we really on the edge of discovering eternal life? Alasdair Palmer looks at the implications 'FOLLOW these instructions and you will stay young forever". From the moment people first became aware that they would grow old and die, that promise has been made by quacks, con-men and self-deluded fanatics. So far, it has been broken every time.
The record of "elixirs of eternal youth" is one of complete failure. All of the potions have proved to be bogus, even when not actually poisonous - as most of them have been. Twentieth century techniques for avoiding death are, for the most part, as lamentable as their ancient predecessors.
But that has not stopped people being taken in. Nearly 100 Americans have paid more than £30,000 to be frozen in liquid nitrogen in the hope that, one day, they can be defrosted, cured of whatever killed them, and brought back to life.
The desire for eternal youth - or even just 80 years of life with the body of a 20-year-old - seems to be as profound as it is pervasive. The idea that there might be a way to escape age, some magic fountain or fire of youth, has inspired authors from ancient Babylon to contemporary Hollywood. But even in fiction, there has normally been a catch: step too many times in the fire of youth - as Ursula Andress did in the film She - and you don't get burned, you just suddenly age horribly.
Eternal youth has been variously condemned by philosophers as ethically undesirable or just terminally boring. No one has been convinced, or even listened. From Ancient Rome to modern New York, those with money to spare seem to spend as much as possible on regimes to preserve youth. The effects are not all that the creams, treatments and surgical techniques claim. Just take one look at the face of Jocelyne Wildenstein, one of the many women who has spent thousands of dollars on trying to stay young.
But last week, the journal Science published an article that gave hope to those who pine for a panacea for age and death. A team of scientists working with Dr Woodring Wright in Texas announced that they had discovered what they described as "the fountain of youth" for human cells.
They had isolated the mechanism that causes cells to stop replacing themselves, and found a chemical to switch it off. The effect of that chemical is to keep cells regenerating themselves at the maximum rate. In short, it stops them growing old - because the principal cause of old age is a slowing of the rate at which cells replace themselves.
So far, the experiment works only on cells cultured in a plastic dish in the laboratory. But Miller Quarles, the man who financed it, cannot wait to try it on the cells that make up his body. He has no doubt whatever that it will work and that it will make him young again.
Mr Quarles is 83, a millionaire and an optimist. "There is no question
that we will soon be able to extend life indefinitely," he says. "I don't
see why I should have to die . . . I just don't accept death."
Mr Quarles set up the Geron Foundation to identify the chemical key
to youth and age. His men are making progress.
The idea that it might be possible to find a chemical that would stop people growing old is not quite as absurd as it sounds. We tend to think of the process of ageing as analogous to the way a washing machine or car gradually wears out.
But degeneration over time is not inevitable. The principle of "wear and tear" is not a fundamental law of the universe, and it is not what explains why people age. Wear and tear slowly destroys machines made out of materials - like rubber, metal and plastic - which cannot replace themselves when they are damaged. But unlike rubber tyres, cells can replace themselves.
Within hours of eating a meal, the food you have consumed has been converted
into new cells in your body. Cells constantly make copies of themselves
to replace worn or damaged predecessors. The body can replace worn and
torn cells with new ones which are just as good, indeed better,
than those they replace.
That is why the difference between the skin of a 60-year-old woman and a 16-year-old girl is not that more of the old woman's skin has been worn away - a young girl's skin probably gets a lot more wear and tear each day than an old woman's. What makes the old woman's skin look wrinkled is that it is less effective at replacing itself. What makes you decline with age - what makes skin sag, muscles shrink - is that your cells make less accurate, and less frequent, copies of themselves.
Why should that happen? Why do your cells lose the ability to copy themselves
accurately and frequently? As the biologist Prof George Williams has argued,
it would be a miracle if our physical and
intellectual performance did not eventually start to decline - but
surely it would be a lot less miraculous than the evident fact that, out
of a microscopic near-nothingness, we grow to a maximum of mental,
physical and reproductive capacity within 20 years.
To maintain that capacity once it is there ought to be less complicated than to produce it out of practically nothing in the first place. But maintaining peak performance is just what the body cannot do. As Prof Williams says, "youthful competence and vigour gradually yield to ever greater debilitation with an ever higher probability of death".
So why does that decline happen? Prof Williams's explanation starts
with a familiar fact. Almost every aspect of physical make-up is the result
of natural selection - the process by which, over time, organisms evolve.
Natural selection has produced your opposable thumb, your immune system,
and your brain with its hundred billion neurons. But that just serves to
refocus the puzzle of why we deteriorate with time. Solving the problem
of maintaining your cells, and therefore your body, at the
level of its highest performance, looks a much easier task for natural
selection to accomplish than turning out a hundred-billion neuron brain
from the fusion of a single sperm and egg.
There is one fundamental reason why no such evolution has taken place. In nature, the older the portion of any given population you look at, the smaller its size. This would be true even if individuals did not degenerate at all with age, for the simple reason that the longer an individual is alive, the more likely he or she is to be eaten or die by accident - by drowning, falling, or contracting a disease so virulent it kills anyone, no matter how fit.
Because, at any given moment, most individuals will be young, natural selection will always favour developments that improve the fitness and reproductive capacity of the young - the majority - even if those developments decrease the fitness of the minority who have been around a long time.
Prof Williams argues that this is why age and degeneration go together. Improvements to the bodies of old people cannot improve the reproductive success of a population as fast as improvements to the bodies of young people. Old bodies have been more or less insulated from evolutionary pressures as a result - which explains why 60-year-old bodies do not have the same degree of physical perfection as 20-year-old ones.
Our cells are programmed to reduce the efficiency with which they reproduce because it has never "paid" them to find a way to keep that efficiency at peak levels.
But if age is merely a matter of the effect of certain chemicals on our cells, might we not eliminate that effect by changing the chemicals? By modifying the copying mechanism, for instance, so that instead of declining - or folding up altogether - after a certain number of copies have been made, it goes on, as perfectly and as frequently as before?
That is the strategy that Miller Quarles and his researchers are following. It is not impossible that it will work. Investors seem to think so: the share price of Geron, Quarles's company, rose after the announcement in Science.
If a way to keep people from degenerating is found, there is no question that it will be enormously popular. It is not easy to imagine a society in which everyone who reaches the age of 20 can expect at least another 80 years of peak fitness before finally succumbing to accident, disease, or sheer boredom - but it would certainly be different from our own. Every woman, for example, could expect to be fertile not for 20 years, but for 80. No one would have to retire. There would be no "pension burden" or senile dementia.
But a "youth pill" is still deep in the realms of fantasy. The most likely outcome of the research Miller Quarles has funded is that it will fail to achieve anything significant at all in that direction. In which case, he will join the large group of people who have been deluded into thinking that they found the elixir of life. He will also end up in the same way everyone else does - dead.
dan@southeast.net
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