The Invincible Man

So, due to the fact that I'm still rather resentful at everyone for their continued focus on politics and my own inability to participate completely in the 2008 political campaign process because of my age, I decided to rebel against the whole political atmosphere thing and throw you all for a loop. Science, and not of the global warming variety either.

I was reading this article recently in the Washington Post about a man named Aubrey De Grey, the so-called Invincible Man who proposes that some people living today in the spanking new (well, relatively so) year of 2008 will live for 1,000 years.

Now, I may be wrong on this but so far, I haven't heard of anyone living to 200, much less 1,000. There's a considerable difference between the two lifespans. If we, with all our technology today, cannot get someone to not kick the bucket once they reached the big 2-0-0, then how are we ever going to be able to have someone to survive to reach their 1,000 year old birthday (assuming the global warming won't kill us all first)? Technology takes a great deal of time to perfect and I'm predicting that this little bit of technological know-how won't be figured out as easily. Yes, there have been people who have lived past 100 but they are, at that point and let me state this carefully, so evidently old that they are usually unable to live as they had when they were younger. De Grey claims that these future 1,000 year olds will be young and muscular, as healthy as they were when they were 20.

The whole basis of De Grey's argument are "seven kinds of critical kinds of damage" including "intracellular aggregates such as lipofuscin" which are accumulated by the cells in our bodies but outside of our bodies, are quickly decomposed by micro-organisms (based on De Grey's observations that "lipofuscin is fluourescent and graveyards don't glow in the dark"). The trick to preventing this sounds deceptively simple, put the lipofuscin-digesting microorganisms in our bodies.

Still, there are other issues, some that any Biology student can point out in a flash (but perhaps De Grey has been able to address them because so far, no scientist had been able to prove that De Grey's arguments were impossible according to the judges which included renowned scientists such as J. Craig Venter). What of the flaws in DNA replication which also contribute to aging? As cells divide, they must replicate their DNAs and, to be short and sweet here, there is one end of DNA that cannot be replicated. So, as cells continue dividing, their DNA strands grow shorter and shorter, a problem that is only slightly mitigated by the existence of telomeres which are attached to the un-replicable end of the DNA strand. Still, it obviously cannot work forever.

There are also the issues that come with the potential of immortality, or at least the closest thing to immortality as we can get. If we somehow did manage to survive for 1,000 years, the population would continue to grow with a steady birth rate and a virtually non-existent death rate. The burden on the planet and its resources, I must imagine, would be almost beyond relief. What are the moral implications of this? How will society change in response to having the same citizens for 1,000 years?

As for me, I'll be content enough to kick the bucket at some respectable old age of 100. I doubt that this will come in time to work for me, at any rate.

If anyone has read De Grey's work, "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime" or has any input on this, please comment. I'll be interested to hear your opinions on this.