Top Quotes: “100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith” — Sonia Arrison
Introduction
“In 2011 fewer than 1 in 10,000 people lived to see their hundredth birthday.”
“ Perhaps most famous of the fountain-chasers was Juan Ponce de Len, a Spanish explorer who accidentally discovered Florida on his quest to find the springs of Bimini, which were rumored to have youth-extending properties.”
“Most adults over age fifty feel at least ten years younger than their actual age, one-third of those between sixty-five and seventy four feel ten to nineteen years younger, and one-sixth of people seventy-five and older said they felt twenty years younger. Even among those seventy-five and older, just a little more than one-third said they felt old. It seems then, for many people, that “old” won’t describe them until they get much older. As we shall see, this attitude is set to expand.”
Medical Advancements
“Regenerative medicine may one day be a solution to the shortage of donor organs in this country for those needing transplants.” He grew the bladders using a method similar to how Claudia’s windpipe was built, but he didn’t rely on a donor organ. Instead, he built a scaffold out of biodegradable materials in the shape of a bladder. He then took muscle and bladder stem cells from the patients and grew them in the lab until there were enough to place on the scaffold. He let the cells grow until the organs were ready for transplantation. Over time the scaffold degraded as the bladder tissue integrated with the body and all that was left was the new organ.”
“This is the beginning of a revolution in which we will eventually be able to replace much of our body’s “hardware,” including our hearts, which is encouraging because heart disease is the number one killer in the United States. No human hearts have been built yet because they are more complicated than bladders or windpipes, but that hasn’t stopped innovative researchers from making great progress so far.
Dr. Doris Taylor’s cardiovascular lab at the University of Minnesota has been working on the problem and announced in 2008 that her team had managed to grow a rat heart in the lab. “When we saw the first heartbeats, we were speechless,” said a member of her team. As in the procedures already discussed, Taylor’s lab stripped a rat heart of its cells so that all that was left was the scaffold, or the structure of the original organ. Researchers then repopulated the scaffold with cells from newborn rat hearts and coaxed the organ to beat on its own. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict where this research will go next. Dr. Taylor is currently repeating the experiment on pigs, not only because their hearts are closer in size to human hearts, but also because pig hearts are already used for replacement parts for some human heart patients.”
“Called “organ printing,” this method is exactly what it sounds like, but instead of ink, cells are put into a printer. Likewise, instead of printing on paper, the cells are printed on a biodegradable material that operates like a scaffold. The printer then prints “pages” on top of each other in order to make a three-dimensional shape. In December 2010, a company called Organovo announced that it had successfully printed human blood vessels with its proprietary 3D printer, the NovoGen MMX Bioprinter. “These vessels are the world’s first arteries made solely from cells of an individual person,” said Keith Murphy.”
“Blood can stay fresh for only a limited period of time and getting fresh supplies on remote battlefields is difficult. With a $1.95 million grant from DARPA, a company called Arteriocyte created a process whereby it could generate significant amounts of blood using hematopoietic stem cells, which are derived from umbilical cord-blood units. Arteriocyte has already applied for approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Although the military is a significant driver of progress in rebuilding humans, important work is also being funded through more traditional means, and one of the big breakthroughs has come from academics at a Canadian university.”
“On November 7, 2010, a team at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, published work in the journal Nature outlining how they had turned human skin cells into blood cells in the lab.”
“The technique could extend well beyond blood. It may be possible to make many types of cells out of a skin cell. “We’ll now go on to work on developing other types of human cell types from skin, as we already have encouraging evidence,” said Dr. Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute. Being able to quickly create a specific type of cell for a patient would boost the efforts of regenerative medicine and move humanity closer to the day when replacing almost any body part when necessary will be possible.”
“At the Centeno-Schultz Clinic in Broomfield, Colorado, doctors are using stem cell therapy to treat knee and hip pain as well as for other types of joint repair. The therapy involves taking bone marrow stem cells from the patient’s hip with a needle, as well as some blood. The samples are then sent to the lab for processing and then are reinjected into the area in need of repair using imaging guidance. Doctors at the clinic have published studies showing that the therapy works in terms of both boosting cartilage and reducing pain.”
“There is only one case of someone ever being cured of HIV (Timothy Brown has been HIV free since 2008), which was the result of a bone marrow treatment from a person resistant to AIDS owing to a natural mutation in the CCR5 gene (the percentage of people with this resistance is very small).”
“Gene therapy has been shown to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice, speed muscle healing, and achieve other results. But perhaps the most interesting animal studies involve those that extend healthy life span. Dr. Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco, has become well known for her discovery that partially disabling a single gene, called daf-2, doubled the life of tiny worms called Caenorhabditis elegans. Her lab later noted that altering the daf-16 gene and other cells added to the impact, allowing the worms to survive in a healthy state six times longer than their normal life span. In human terms, they would be the equivalent of healthy, active five-hundred-year-olds. 64
Experiments in animal models are not always applicable to humans, but humans do have the same sort of pathways that Dr. Kenyon manipulated, so similar genetic techniques may one day allow us to live longer in a healthier state as well. As Dr. Kenyon explained, “Our discoveries have led to the realization that the aging process, like everything else in biology, is under exquisite regula-tion, in this case, by a complex, multifaceted hormonal and transcriptional system that affects aging in many species, including mammals.»65 This regulation can clearly be altered, making aging, once thought to be a pro cess set in stone, malleable. Indeed, Dr. Kenyon acknowledged this fact, noting, “People have always thought that, like a car, our body parts eventually wear out. But we found that over time, when one gene was manipulated, the worm actually remained youthful- in all ways- so that age-related diseases were also postponed.”
This reality has been confirmed by the work of many other researchers. For instance, Dr. Robert J. Shmookler Reis’s laboratory at the University of Arkansas managed to genetically alter worms to live ten times longer than normal. Likewise, Dr. Maria Blasco of Spain’s National Cancer Research Center found an altogether different way to extend the lives of mice by 45 percent. Dr. Blasco’s team turned up the gene that affects production of an enzyme called telomerase, which helps to keep the ends of chromosomes from shortening, thereby allowing cells to keep replicating. But because cells that keep replicating often cause cancer, her team also engineered the mice to be cancer resistant by adding the genes p53, p16, and p19ARF. The result, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, was radically extended healthy life spans for some lucky mice. If humans were to increase their life expectancy by 45 percent, they could live to around 116 years old.”
“Aside from gene therapy, other ideas for increasing healthy life span include various pharmaceuticals or compounds. Perhaps the one that has made the biggest splash from a public awareness point of view is resveratrol, a type of polyphenol found in the skins of red grapes and red wine. In 2006 Harvard professor David Sinclair’s lab discovered that at high doses resveratrol protected mice from the ill health effects of a high-fat diet, such as diabetes and heart disease. This work was encouraging because scientists already knew that resveratrol could extend the life spans of yeast, flies, worms, and fish. It appeared that the same effects were likely for larger animals. Science writer David Stipp recounts how he was surprised at how effective the compound seemed to be. “After watching elderly mice on resveratrol perform like rodent Olympians in an endurance test, I came away convinced that the long, weird quest to extend life span . .. was finally getting somewhere.”
Resveratrol affects a set of enzymes called sirtuins, which are known to be involved in the proven life-span-extension method called caloric restriction (CR). CR is exactly what it sounds like: eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal but without malnutrition. It is well documented that CR causes an extension in both health and life span in rodents, delaying the onset of age-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. The evidence shows that even in monkeys CR is powerful. In 2009 results from a twenty-year-long study on caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys demonstrated the health effects. The monkeys on the low-calorie diet not only were in better health and suffered fewer deaths than the control group but also looked a lot better. The passage of time was tougher on the regular monkeys than on the calorie-restricted ones.
Of course, few people are willing to restrict their calories by 30 percent, so there was much excitement when news reports suggested that Dr. Sinclair had found a compound that could mimic the effects of CR. Dr. Sinclair’s company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, was sold to GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for $720 million, and clinical trials began on “small molecule drugs” that, like resveratrol, affect sirtuins. As of this writing, phase 1 trials for one of Sirtris’s drugs showed that it was safe, but there is no word yet on how well it might work in humans. Additional studies done by the National Institute on Aging indicate that resveratrol alone did not extend life in healthy mice, although it did protect the obese ones, so for now resveratrol itself does not seem to be the panacea everyone had hoped.”
“One last compound that we will consider in this chapter is TA-65, a telomerase activator discovered by Geron and licensed to a company called T.A. Sciences. Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes contain our genetic information. Every time a healthy cell divides, the telomeres get a little shorter. Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her co-discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres, says that we can think of telomeres “like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying. Telomerase is an enzyme that restores the length of the telomeres as they wear down. TA-65 is thought to stimulate more of this enzyme, with the hope that if telomeres stay longer, the aging process won’t move ahead quite so fast. So far there is no solid proof that this idea is correct, but there are a number of people who have been willing to pay the $1,200 to $4,000 price for a six-month supply of the supplement, and T.A. Sciences published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Rejuvenation Research showing that TA-65 did activate the enzyme telomerase in one hundred volunteer subjects over one year (although there was no control group). Whether this supplement will actually help those who take it live longer and healthier lives is still up for vigorous debate. Some scientists even warn that taking the compound could lead to serious problems over the long run because stimulating telomerase in mice has been shown to raise the risk of cancer. To counter these types of worries, the company notes, “TA-65 has been in use since 2005 with not one reported adverse event. “ Given that T.A. Sciences has a fairly large group of volunteers taking this product, it will be interesting to see if that claim holds up over the long run.”
“According to Dr. Perls’s research, even though lifestyle and habits are important for health, it is clear that “exceptional longevity runs very strongly in families.”Dr. Nir Barzilai agrees. The “super agers,” as he calls them, appear to have a heritable genetic makeup that allows them to better avoid cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure. The key, of course, is to find out exactly what parts of their genetic code keep them so healthy. Once more genomes are sequenced and our understanding advances, it may be possible to design genetic therapies to fight aging. And if the human source code can be altered, then so can the code of any living organism.”
“An example of one of his engineering suggestions is to insert enzymes into the body’s lysosomes (little cellular recycling centers) in order to make them better at eliminating the “junk” that builds up in cells over time. This would help fight aging because when too much junk builds up, the cells die.”
“This book assumes that human life expectancy will one day reach 150 years and that health span will extend along with it.”
“Tractors have come a long way since manufacturer John Deere started out in 1837 forging his first steel plow. If Deere were alive today, he would certainly be surprised to see tractors help drive themselves. Indeed, farming is not an occupation that springs to mind when one thinks about GPS. Yet in 1993 Michael O’Connor, then a PhD student at Stanford, realized that the GPS he was working with could be used to save farmers money by reducing waste.”
“When farmers work their fields, they go back and forth over many hectares for hours at a time. If they don’t drive in perfectly parallel lines, or if they drive over the same area twice, these deviations can cost thousands of dollars in wasted fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides. O’Connor led a team that invented a system called AutoFarm, sold by Novariant, that prevents these problems. With GPS precisely guiding a tractor, combine, or harvester to within three centimeters of a specified path, there is less waste and fewer pollutants from the burning of fossil fuel, overuse of fertilizer, or bulk spraying of pesticide. Not surprisingly, farmers give the system glowing reviews.
According to custom planter David Braga of Caruthers, California, AutoFarm not only helps with creating efficient rows but also makes the actual work much quicker. “I planted 200 acres in rolling hills in Yuba City this spring in 24 hours,” he told Western Farm Press. “Before GPS that would take four or five days.””
Population Change
“When compared to the rest of Europe, Sweden also happens to have relatively high fertility and low mortality.
After calculating various longevity scenarios using a type of model similar to that of the World Bank and other countries, Dr. Leonid Gavrilov and Dr. Natalia Gavrilova concluded that even if humans completely stopped aging and essentially became immortal, Sweden’s population would increase by only 22 percent over one hundred years. “Population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to dramatic life extension,” they wrote in a study published in the journal Rejuvenation Research. Without any life extension, Sweden’s population, which in 2005 was just over 9 million, is set to decline to around 6 million in one hundred years. The Gavrilovs did not calculate what the population increase would be if the Swedes merely extended their time by 70 years (to 150 years), but given that extending it indefinitely would cause only a 22 percent increase, it is safe to say that 70 years wouldn’t move the dial by much. One of the reasons that cutting death rates doesn’t affect population as much as we might think is that heavy population growth really comes from births, not from fewer deaths. In countries like Sweden, where the fertility rate in 2005 was 1.8, each pair of parents isn’t replacing themselves. And fertility rates are expected to continue their decline as countries continue to build wealth.
Indeed, while overall population is still growing, the rate at which it is growing is actually slowing down. Even though the UN population projection for the year 2050 is 9.2 billion, fertility rates are expected to decline from 2.55 children per woman today to 2.02 children per woman for all women in the world, including those in developing countries. Of course, that projection is based on what the world looks like today. Once we reach the point at which people realize that they will be living significantly longer themselves, the fertility rates may change.”
“University of Pennsylvania demography professor Samuel Preston goes so far as to say that “as a simple collection of mass, the human population has no environmental implications.” He notes that if a population of 5.6 billion humans stood together, they “would occupy a circle with a radius of less than 8 miles that extended an infinitesimal distance into the atmosphere.” That is, it is not just numbers of humans, but their activity that matters.”
“Norman Borlaug, plant breeder and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, is known for having reversed food shortages in India and Pakistan in the 1960s. He did this by helping to develop high-yield dwarf wheat, which has short stalks so that plants expend less energy on growing inedible stalks and more on growing grain. The result was hundreds of thousands of lives saved, perhaps even 1 billion.”
“The introduction of plants that grow with less water would free up much of that essential resource for other uses. As we might expect in a time of worry about water shortages, plant biologists are already tackling this problem. Plants that can grow in lower-quality water or salty water are one response. For instance, Dr. Eduardo Blumwald at the University of California, Davis created a tomato that is often considered the first truly salt-tolerant crop, meaning that it can be grown in saline conditions yet still tastes like a regular tomato.”
“LaMonica notes that “water systems even in developed countries like the U.S. are notoriously outdated, with faulty pipes — some of them still made of wood resulting in 25 percent to 45 percent lost water.””
“According to 2010 estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency, the gap between the world’s longest-lived coun try and shortest-lived country is a whopping 51 years — almost an entire lifetime. Angola, in south-central Africa, has the lowest life expectancy at 38.5 years, whereas Monaco, near southern France, has a life expectancy of 89.8 years. The United States ranks forty-ninth, with a life expectancy of 78.2 years.”
“A 2006 study by researchers at Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco found that Native American males in South Dakota had a life expectancy of fifty-eight years, compared with Asian American females in New Jersey, whose life expectancy was ninety-one years.”
““AIDS drugs were about $30,000 per patient per year 15 years ago, and they didn’t work very well,” Kurzweil points out. “Now they actually work pretty well, and they’re $100 per patient per year.””
“The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955.”
Family Life
“With an average life expectancy of 150 years, great age differences, say eighty or ninety years, between partners might occur. Nevertheless, the historical evidence suggests that such relationships probably won’t be common, regardless of the good health of the older partner. The last time humans significantly extended their life expectancy, the average age difference between partners didn’t change much.
Detailed research from Statistics Norway indicates that the total number of couples with large age differences between the partners did not significantly increase between 1906 and 2002. The basic age difference remained at around 3.5 years (men being slightly older), and this was common across the OECD. There were, however, some changes over time. For instance, in 1996, 6 percent of men were more than ten years older than their partners, and this increased to 12 percent in 2002. Across the same period, the percentage of women ten years older than their partners changed from 1 to 3 percent. In the United States, data for New Jersey in 2003 indicate that 10.1 percent of marriages involved a man ten years older than his spouse and only 2.3 percent of marriages involved a woman at least ten years older than her spouse.”
“Poor health causes a decline in productivity for the simple reason that it’s very difficult to work effectively when you’re in ill health, thereby increasing your chances of falling into poverty.
In their paper titled “The Health and Wealth of Nations,” Harvard economist David Bloom and Queen’s University economist David Canning explain that, based on the available research, if there are “two countries that are identical in all respects, except that one has a 5 year advantage in life expectancy,” then the “real income per capita in the healthier country will grow 0.3–0.5% per year faster than in its less healthy counterpart.” Although these percentages might look small, they are actually quite significant, especially when we consider that between 1965 and 1990 countries experienced an average per capita income growth of 2 percent per year. When countries only have an average growth of that amount, an advantage of 0.5 percent is quite the boost.
Now, those numbers are based on only a five-year longevity advantage. What if a country had a ten-, twenty-, or thirty-year advantage? The growth might not continue on a linear basis, but if the general rule holds a jump in life expectancy causes an increase in economic growth per capita — then having a longer-lived population would facilitate enormous differences in economic prosperity.
This helps to explain why there is a movement among some academics and activists to urge Congress to spend more on antiaging research in order to create what they call a “longevity dividend.””
Faith
“According to Pew, “About half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives” and people can change more than once. Over half of those who became unaffiliated say it is “because they think of religious people as hypocritical, judgmental or insincere, because they think that religious organizations focus too much on rules and not enough on spirituality, or that religious leaders are too focused on money and power rather than truth and spirituality.” Interestingly, very “few say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition.””
“A somewhat humorous example of this tendency was recounted by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof:
“It’s striking how faith is almost irrepressible. While I was living in China in the early 1990's, after religion had been suppressed for decades, drivers suddenly began dangling pictures of Chairman Mao from their rear-view mirrors. The word had spread that Mao’s spirit could protect them from car crashes or even bring them sons and wealth. It was a miracle: ordinary Chinese had transformed the great atheist into a god. How it is that humans manage to integrate religion into their lives, even in the most unlikely situations?”
“In the Jain religion monks and nuns typically “renounce” the world to purify their karma. There are many rules that renouncers adhere to, and for a long time none of them traveled by vehicle because it would have broken the vow of nonviolence (vehicles kill insects and other small forms of life). Renouncers therefore walked everywhere, but this left the international Jain community with limited access to these important individuals. To fix this problem, Sherry Fohr explains, the Jains created a new institution of lesser renouncers who were allowed to travel by vehicles.”
