Becoming Methuselah- Longevity

next tech THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

becoming

methuselah Every year, we push death back a little bit farther. B Y C H I P W A L T E R

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he long habit of living,” British thinker Thomas Browne once wrote, “indisposeth us to dying.” How true. But indisposed or not, we are all genetically programmed to break this particular habit—destined from the day we are born to find our own, inevitable end. No pills or procedures conjured so far have contrived a way to deal death itself a deathblow. As a species, we have made some progress at outfoxing what nature throws at us. We fight the elements with clothing and shelter; we’ve invented agriculture and domesticated animals to better handle hunger; and we’ve devised parties, singles bars and Match.com to aid with the problem of mating. All, in their way, have loosened death’s grip. Sanitation and antibiotics have done wonders to elongate life, too. But still, the end refuses to be, once and for all, ended. For as long as we’ve been aware that death is inescapable, we’ve also devised philosophical and spiritual ways to address the issue. There’s heaven, which makes death easier to swallow by turning it into a short transit ride we can take to a new and improved version of the life we were experiencing before we died in the first place. Despite the many advantages heaven offers, it hasn’t seemed to signifiillustration by Tim Lee

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cantly diminish our collective dread of death—a fact that renders suspect the faith some profess. There’s also reincarnation, though personally I never saw the advantage of coming back for another round of life if it meant remaining clueless about the first go-around. Where’s the second chance in that? Hindus and Buddhists imagine nirvana, a state of complete bliss and enlightenment reached after suffering through enough reincarnations that you literally see the light. Nirvana doesn’t so much require a new life as a new you. There may be something in that. Even atheists and agnostics, who believe the end really is, or could be, the end, can gather up a few morsels of immortality by invoking the family they leave behind as living memorials. This, however, places you in the uncomfortable position of entrusting how you’ll be forever remembered to your offspring. Keep in mind these are the same people you spanked, disciplined and repeatedly embarrassed when they were teenagers. Finally, there is the work we leave behind, which can serve as a tribute. But few of us bequeath bodies of work that have the shattering effect of, say, Shakespeare or Einstein. Much as we would like to think otherwise, not many of us are likely to head chapters in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. With death so severely outflanking us like this, what are we to do? Personally, I’m prepared to hang on as long as my rattled brains and shriveled shanks let me. As a card-carrying baby boomer, I’m counting on medical breakthroughs that will amend the universal genetic contract that reads: “The deterioration of the 100 trillion or so cells that compose you is an irreversible and foregone conclusion. Please accept this and get on with what life you have remaining. Time is running out.” True, time is—but if you scan the technological horizon, my hopes for a contract amendment turn out to be not altogether delusional. In fact, you can make a reasonable argument that we may, at last, have death in our crosshairs, though we aren’t yet able to pull the trigger. Not only that, we may be living in just the right city for carrying off this neat little trick.

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ittsburgh, because it has one of the nation’s oldest populations, has become a kind of beta test for dealing with old age and death. Demographers usually see this as a bad thing, but with so much of the world growing collectively older—Europe and Asia as well as North America—and with more than 70 million baby boomers headed in lock-step for that great Rolling Stones concert in the sky, getting an early handle on the death problem could be a growth business. Maybe this is why so much work seems to be getting done in the region that focuses on keeping the Grim Reaper at arm’s length. Since death is, collectively, a little closer in these parts, we pay closer attention to it than do folks in other places. A joint project between Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, for example, is developing robots to help the elderly live longer on their own without needing to enter an assisted-living home. And according to Ken Gabriel, a founding co-director of a Pittsburgh-based nanotech initiative called the MEMS Industry Group, MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) technologies, which will operate inside the human body at the scale of clusters of cells, are under development. They will monitor key internal organs and obediently deliver reports on how they’re doing when an electronic wand is waved in their vicinity. Other MEMS devices promise to deliver drugs, hormones and biochemicals in just the right doses at just the right time, like artificial glands tailor-made for reducing pain or rectifying imbalances that often accompany the advance of age. Pittsburgh has also been a leader in transplant surgery for more than a decade, a breakthrough that has stopped death in its tracks thousands of times. Building on those successes, the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine is pioneering the design of bioartificial hearts, lungs and livers: high-tech bridges to more permanent solutions. UPMC is also developing ways to genetically manipulate transplant tissue to reduce the need for drugs that suppress the immune system. Where have these and other efforts got us over the past 50 years? Pretty far. Today we’re expected to live to 77. In 1950 it was APRIL 2004 PITTSBURGH 95

Since death is, collectively, a little bit closer around these parts, maybe we pay closer attention to it than do folks in other places. 68. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, deaths from heart disease have dropped 40 percent since 1970, and since 1990 cancer mortality rates have declined 20 percent. It seems we are not quite as mortal as we used to be. In Western Europe and Japan, people are doing even better. There’s a startling pattern emerging here—one that’s hard to reconcile with our deeply ingrained acceptance of death. In an upcoming book, A Short Guide to a Long Life, futurist Ray Kurzweil holds that current trends show that by 2015 we will be elongating our lives by more than a year every year. Do the math. This conceivably means that a significant number of us who are still alive today may survive our way into immortality, or at least into lives of long and biblical proportion. It’s not so much that we have eliminated death; we are just getting very good at buying time. New technologies, and the new medical breakthroughs that rush in with them, are advancing at an exponential rate. That means we can expect to make more progress in the next 50 years than we made in the last 700. (We were struggling to escape the Dark Ages 700 years ago.) Suppose in 20 years, when you hit today’s expected date with death (age 77), new medical procedures will have advanced as much as they have since 1950. Chances are that whatever is about to do you in, unless it is a speeding bus or an angry spouse, will now be fixable in 2024. And if you are repaired and gain another 10 years in the bargain, chances are that the newer breakthroughs made in the intervening decade will buy you still more time.

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hen I pass this scenario around among friends and family, the general reaction is, “I don’t want to live forever.” Some, just a spare few, say they are all for it, but most say, contrary to the advice of poet Dylan 96 PITTSBURGH APRIL 2004

Thomas, that they actually do plan to “go gentle into that good night.” (We’ll see.) The main argument for not living too long is the feeble factor. Who wants to reach old age and then spend the next 100 years in elderly care facilities drooling on him- or herself, dependent on Depends, trying to recall the next sentence he or she wants to say? I’m not a big fan of this variety of long life either. But let us suppose that the future version of old age is not the enfeebled, brittle variety we mostly see around us. Suppose that we could count on being vital, sharp, even strong in our dotage? Trends already indicate this is starting to happen. Statistics based on the federal government’s Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly show that the number of people over the age of 55 with chronic disabilities that require help walking or getting dressed has dropped 6 percent in the last 20 years. Add in drugs and procedures that reduce arthritic pain, enhance sexual performance, retract wrinkles and improve eyesight, and you begin to see that old age doesn’t have to be a decrepit march into weakness, isolation and bad daytime television. You can also argue that the current crop of medical miracles (often, admittedly, not quite as miraculous as advertised) is really just a warm-up for the truly powerful varieties on the horizon. The McGowan Center’s explorations today of bioartificial organs are crude precursors to the humanmade, molecularly assembled biomachines that will some day aid your heart or pump your testosterone just as effectively as the natural versions. Nanotechnologies 20 years down the road will very likely be capable of cleaning out the plaque in your arteries or hunting down and destroying cancer cells one molecule at a time. The titanium mechanical prostheses that currently (and painfully) replace joints will themselves be replaced by bioengineered polymers that are inject-

ed into a pained limb and then grow naturally to replace damaged tissue. Genetic therapies will eliminate or treat diseases like sickle-cell anemia, schizophrenia or cystic fibrosis that currently wipe out or debilitate millions. They may even make it possible to grow our own replacement organs so that we can have them on hand when the original gives out. The really big breakthrough, however, will come when scientists finally track down the nastiest disease of all: old age itself. There is no clear reason why cells begin to misfire with age to create lessthan-perfect replacements for themselves. They just do. It may be genetically programmed; it may be thanks to roaming bands of oxygen molecules called free radicals that tear apart the invisible chains of matter within us atom by atom. But as we drill down into these invisible worlds, we’re finding ways to increasingly rearrange things to our satisfaction. Soon enough, we may manage to refine the work to the point at which we can not only slow or halt the inevitable deterioration, but also molecularly reverse it so that no matter how many years you spend on earth, you can pass them feeling as you did at age 35. You will be handed, in other words, a new you. So maybe Hindus, Buddhists and reincarnationists can say they had it right all along—except that with this second chance, we’ll be aware that it IS a second chance. Or will we finally have created heaven on earth? That’s debatable. What, after all, will we do with all of us who refuse to die? Florida is only so big. Will our own longer lives allow us to save the 3 million children who die each year from starvation, or eliminate war, greed and poverty? In a strange way, maybe. I believe the accrued wisdom that piles up with our lengthened lives will help. So much of it currently goes out the door with death, locked in the person who accumulated it. How much better off would we be if Leonardo and Shakespeare, Einstein and Confucius had lived even another 50 years? I suspect that by combining our newfound banks of human wisdom with ever newer innovations, we’ll get better at solving the looming, ugly global problems that lie ahead. Call me an optimist, but I think history, so far, is with me on this. After all, we are all still here to hope, aren’t we? APRIL 2004 PITTSBURGH 97