The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (37 page)

Designer Baby Boomers

Sufficient information already exists today to slow down disease and aging processes to the point that baby boomers like myself can remain in good health until the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, which will itself be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution (see Resources and Contact Information,
p. 489
). In
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
, which I coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D., a leading longevity expert, we discuss these three bridges to radical life extension (today’s knowledge, biotechnology, and nanotechnology).
¹²
I wrote there: “Whereas some of my contemporaries may be satisfied to embrace aging gracefully as part of the cycle of life, that is not my view. It may be ‘natural,’ but I don’t see anything positive in losing my mental agility, sensory acuity, physical limberness, sexual desire, or any other human ability. I view disease and death at any age as a calamity, as problems to be overcome.”

Bridge one involves aggressively applying the knowledge we now possess to dramatically slow down aging and reverse the most important disease processes, such as heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and stroke. You can, in effect, reprogram your biochemistry, for we have the knowledge today, if aggressively applied, to overcome our genetic heritage in the vast majority of cases. “It’s mostly in your genes” is only true if you take the usual passive attitude toward health and aging.

My own story is instructive. More than twenty years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The conventional treatment made my condition worse, so I approached this health challenge from my perspective as an inventor. I immersed myself in the scientific literature and came up with a unique program that successfully reversed my diabetes. In 1993 I wrote a health book (
The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life
) about this experience, and I continue today to be free of any indication or complication of this disease.
¹³

In addition, when I was twenty-two, my father died of heart disease at the age of fifty-eight, and I have inherited his genes predisposing me to this illness. Twenty years ago, despite following the public guidelines of the American Heart Association, my cholesterol was in the high 200s (it should be well below 180), my HDL (high-density lipoprotein, the “good” cholesterol) below 30 (it should be above 50), and my homocysteine (a measure of the health of a biochemical process called methylation) was an unhealthy 11 (it should be below 7.5). By following a longevity program that Grossman and I developed, my current cholesterol level is 130, my HDL is 55, my homocysteine is 6.2, my C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels.
¹⁴

When I was forty, my biological age was around thirty-eight. Although I am now fifty-six, a comprehensive test of my biological aging (measuring various sensory sensitivities, lung capacity, reaction times, memory, and related tests) conducted at Grossman’s longevity clinic measured my biological age at forty.
¹⁵
Although there is not yet a consensus on how to measure biological age, my scores on these tests matched population norms for this age. So, according to this set of tests, I have not aged very much in the last sixteen years, which is confirmed by the many blood tests I take, as well as the way I feel.

These results are not accidental; I have been very aggressive about reprogramming my biochemistry. I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract). As a result, the metabolic reactions in my body are completely different than they would otherwise be.
¹⁶
Approaching this as an engineer, I measure dozens of levels of nutrients (such as vitamins, minerals, and fats), hormones, and metabolic by-products in my blood and other body samples (such as hair and saliva). Overall, my levels are where I want them to be, although I continually fine-tune my program based on the research that I conduct with Grossman.
¹⁷
Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative—and optimal (based on my current knowledge). Grossman and I have extensively
researched each of the several hundred therapies that I use for safety and efficacy. I stay away from ideas that are unproven or appear to be risky (the use of human-growth hormone, for example).

We consider the process of reversing and overcoming the dangerous progression of disease as a war. As in any war it is important to mobilize all the means of intelligence and weaponry that can be harnessed, throwing everything we have at the enemy. For this reason we advocate that key dangers—such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and aging—be attacked on multiple fronts. For example, our strategy for preventing heart disease is to adopt ten different heart-disease-prevention therapies that attack each of the known risk factors.

By adopting such multipronged strategies for each disease process and each aging process, even baby boomers like myself can remain in good health until the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution (which we call “bridge two”), which is already in its early stages and will reach its peak in the second decade of this century.

Biotechnology will provide the means to actually change your genes: not just designer babies will be feasible but designer baby boomers. We’ll also be able to rejuvenate all of your body’s tissues and organs by transforming your skin cells into youthful versions of every other cell type. Already, new drug development is precisely targeting key steps in the process of atherosclerosis (the cause of heart disease), cancerous tumor formation, and the metabolic processes underlying each major disease and aging process.

Can We Really Live Forever?
An energetic and insightful advocate of stopping the aging process by changing the information processes underlying biology is Aubrey de Grey, a scientist in the department of genetics at Cambridge University. De Grey uses the metaphor of maintaining a house. How long does a house last? The answer obviously depends on how well you take care of it. If you do nothing, the roof will spring a leak before long, water and the elements will invade, and eventually the house will disintegrate. But if you proactively take care of the structure, repair all damage, confront all dangers, and rebuild or renovate parts from time to time using new materials and technologies, the life of the house can essentially be extended without limit.

The same holds true for our bodies and brains. The only difference is that, while we fully understand the methods underlying the maintenance of a house, we do not yet fully understand all of the biological principles of life. But with our rapidly increasing comprehension of the biochemical processes and pathways of biology, we are quickly gaining that knowledge. We are beginning to
understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of related processes. Strategies are emerging for fully reversing each of these aging progressions, using different combinations of biotechnology techniques.

De Grey describes his goal as “engineered negligible senescence”—stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older.
¹⁸
As he explains, “All the core knowledge needed to develop
engineered negligible senescence
is already in our possession—it mainly just needs to be pieced together.”
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De Grey believes we’ll demonstrate “robustly rejuvenated” mice—mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it—within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later.

The diverse field of biotechnology is fueled by our accelerating progress in reverse engineering the information processes underlying biology and by a growing arsenal of tools that can modify these processes. For example, drug discovery was once a matter of finding substances that produced some beneficial result without excessive side effects. This process was similar to early humans’ tool discovery, which was limited to simply finding rocks and other natural implements that could be used for helpful purposes. Today we are learning the precise biochemical pathways that underlie both disease and aging processes and are able to design drugs to carry out precise missions at the molecular level. The scope and scale of these efforts are vast.

Another powerful approach is to start with biology’s information backbone: the genome. With recently developed gene technologies we’re on the verge of being able to control how genes express themselves. Gene expression is the process by which specific cellular components (specifically RNA and the ribosomes) produce proteins according to a specific genetic blueprint. While every human cell has the full complement of the body’s genes, a specific cell, such as a skin cell or a pancreatic islet cell, gets its characteristics from only the small fraction of genetic information relevant to that particular cell type.
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The therapeutic control of this process can take place outside the cell nucleus, so it is easier to implement than therapies that require access inside it.

Gene expression is controlled by peptides (molecules made up of sequences of up to one hundred amino acids) and short RNA strands. We are now beginning to learn how these processes work.
²¹
Many new therapies now in
development and testing are based on manipulating them either to turn off the expression of disease-causing genes or to turn on desirable genes that may otherwise not be expressed in a particular type of cell.

RNAi (RNA Interference)
. A powerful new tool called RNA interference (RNAi) is capable of turning off specific genes by blocking their mRNA, thus preventing them from creating proteins. Since viral diseases, cancer, and many other diseases use gene expression at some crucial point in their life cycle, this promises to be a breakthrough technology. Researchers construct short, double-stranded DNA segments that match and lock onto portions of the RNA that are transcribed from a targeted gene. With their ability to create proteins blocked, the gene is effectively silenced. In many genetic diseases only one copy of a given gene is defective. Since we get two copies of each gene, one from each parent, blocking the disease-causing gene leaves one healthy gene to make the necessary protein. If both genes are defective, RNAi could silence them both, but then a healthy gene would have to be inserted.
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Cell Therapies
. Another important line of attack is to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs and introduce them into our bodies without surgery. One major benefit of this “therapeutic cloning” technique is that we will be able to create these new tissues and organs from versions of our cells that have also been made younger via the emerging field of rejuvenation medicine. For example, we will be able to create new heart cells from skin cells and introduce them into the system through the bloodstream. Over time, existing heart cells will be replaced with these new cells, and the result will be a rejuvenated “young” heart manufactured using a person’s own DNA. I discuss this approach to regrowing our bodies below.

Gene Chips
. New therapies are only one way that the growing knowledge base of gene expression will dramatically impact our health. Since the 1990s microarrays, or chips no larger than a dime, have been used to study and compare expression patterns of thousands of genes at a time.
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The possible applications of the technology are so varied and the technological barriers have been reduced so greatly that huge databases are now devoted to the results from “doit-yourself gene watching.”
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Genetic profiling is now being used to:

• Revolutionize the processes of drug screening and discovery
  . Microarrays can “not only confirm the mechanism of action of a compound” but “discriminate
  between compounds acting at different steps in the same metabolic pathway.”
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• Improve cancer classifications
  . One study reported in
  Science
  demonstrated the feasibility of classifying some leukemias “solely on gene expression monitoring.” The authors also pointed to a case in which expression profiling resulted in the correction of a misdiagnosis.
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• Identify the genes, cells, and pathways involved in a process, such as aging or tumorigenesis
  . For example, by correlating the presence of acute myeloblastic leukemia and increased expression of certain genes involved with programmed cell death, a study helped identify new therapeutic targets.
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• Determine the effectiveness of an innovative therapy
  . One study recently reported in
  Bone
  looked at the effect of growth-hormone replacement on the expression of insulinlike growth factors (IGFs) and bone metabolism markers.
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• Test the toxicity of compounds in food additives, cosmetics, and industrial products quickly and without using animals
  . Such tests can show, for example, the degree to which each gene has been turned on or off by a tested substance.
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